My Canon: Summary by BARR

I'm thinking, today, about BARR. Has anybody been able to discover BARR in the past decade-and-a-half? Beatrix Fowler's website is down, her record label, the great 5 Rue Christine, hasn't been active since 2007, around when she released her incredible album Summary. That record got a condescending and off-base 5.1 review score from Pitchfork when Pitchfork could still elevate or bury an artist's profile. Her Wikipedia page is outdated (she transitioned between its last update and now) and on BARR's Apple Music profile, her work shares space with two different rappers called BARR and a Swedish acid folk band named Barr. I'm not sure how easy it is to even associate Fowler with her one-woman band, but BARR was and is Beatrix Fowler. She's still creating other things, but if I wanted to hear her music, which she stopped releasing publicly for a while, I'd need to live in Los Angeles and go to a show. I was actually supposed to see her live in Seattle in 2008, but a different band took the stage, explaining BARR had a personal issue to deal with and needed to drop off the bill. A year later, she was moving through parts of the art world I can't really access and it seemed I'd missed my chance to see her perform.

This happens, and plenty of people waited a lot longer for new Mark Hollis music than I've waited for BARR's, but I still listen to Summary and wish, perhaps jealously, there was more BARR art accessible to me. She's started to resume performing. Maybe it'll happen.

BARR was part of the scene around The Smell at a time when that venue hosted some of the most interesting music in the country. HEALTH thanked BARR in the liner notes of their first album, Dean Spunt from No Age put a BARR single out on his record label and BARR performed on the Live At The Smell DVD. It was nice to follow these projects around because none of them sounded alike but most of them sounded good. There isn't a ton sonically connecting The Mae Shi to Books on Tape to High Places to Abe Vigoda, but they performed together and shouted each other out enough that a person like me, on the outside, could hear a new name, go buy a record and at least expect something worth considering. I have a lot of time for communities like that.

I ordered BARR's Summary on CD through Cellophane Square, a great music store that, along with nearby Zanadu Comics and Thai 65, kept me alive the two years I lived in Seattle. Cellophane Square and Zanadu have died; I know exactly which of my CDs and comics came from each, and I probably would have bought Summary or Jason's I Killed Adolf Hitler or whatever from a different store, but I bought them from Cellophane Square and Zanadu, so I love and will always love those places.

The other BARR music is very good, but it's Summary that still hits hardest. Opening with a song called "First" and ending with a song called "Context Ender," Summary is 31 minutes of singing and monologuing over mostly minimal musical accompaniment (almost entirely played on drums, piano and bass). It is, true to those song titles, its own self-contained universe, but Fowler also recognizes it as a chunk of her life, referencing the last record, an old tour, this album art vs that album art, and plenty of things more elusive to an outsider like, namely, an "armageddon break-up."

When Fowler first mentions it, she says

"I had just gone through the break-up,
armageddon break-up,
the timing was bad,
but there's never good times for bad things to happen,
maybe better than worse,
but bad is at all always bad is bad enough
unequipped,
it was a blessing of space,
but that and the prior six months had left my body crashed"

and that's how Summary works– a flood of emotion from an artist who knows how to write and edit beautifully, so the rest of us are hearing a ton of thoughts without actually hearing every single thought she has. The title is "Summary," not "Omnibus," but the way Fowler uses language and "talks all over this record," as she later says, immerses me in the work. And this is a summary. It isn't a play-by-play of the past few years, it isn't a Knausgaard, Fowler isn't reading damning personal emails. It's nine songs over half an hour. I know these aren't the only feelings she experienced for the year or so of time the album covers, but the intensity of the writing immediately puts me in a specific place, where you're unable to experience much of anything outside the few emotions so big they invade every innocuous episode of TV you watch and every meal you eat.

I love the way that little lyrical snippet I posted quantifies pain, which happens a lot on Summary; there are plenty of moments on the album where Fowler makes a declaration, literally says "wait" and then rephrases it. But, again, this isn't totally improvised, which means the original declaration is there for a reason. She said it because that's how she felt, and even if we're going to admit to the impossibility of a good time for bad things to happen, we also have to admit to initially thinking about how this specific timing is especially terrible.

Even just in breaking that down, she's asking questions she sincerely doesn't have the answer to, rather than setting up a scenario and leading the listener straight to a conclusion that will wind up seeming like the right thing. What a relief. We aren't hearing from old, wizened BARR who's had time to graft a storyline onto her life, we're hearing from the BARR who is, at furthest, a little removed from a big emotional upheaval.

This self-questioning can remind me of Laurie Anderson describing the song she's making as she sings it. The emotional honesty can remind me of Jamie Stewart yelling "This is the worst vacation ever, I am going to cut open your forehead with a roofing shingle" in the middle of "I Broke Up" or "Your own true self has become a true ridiculous dumbass" in "Clowne Towne," presenting things as dramatically as they feel, rather than pretending the default, even in the midst of Big Events, was measured eloquence.

That "big feelings pushing through" moment peaks beautifully in "The Song is the Single," when Fowler stops the song's momentum cold and repeats "I just want to hold someone" seven times. That's how you express an emotion.

Throughout the album, BARR refers to to the relationship between a map, a record and a body. When the album opens with "First," she says "a map to a record is a record as a map." When it closes with "Context Ender," she talks about how a "map to a record is a body and a record as a map." I don't fully know what this means, but it reminds me of one of my favorite book titles, John Porcellino's King Cat collection Map of My Heart. That book, like most of Porcellino's work, is autobiographical, connecting memories from across his life and across the emotional spectrum. I love the idea of self-portraits that aren't traditional paintings or photos or sculptures, the idea that Map of My Heart is literally what it says on the cover, meaning it's stories about suffering from illnesses and relishing in the joy of hikes with friends, but it's also lessons from meditation teachers, lists of rediscovered albums and times the cat peed in a place she shouldn't have. I kind of don't give a shit about art that isn't a map of its maker's heart. I take the map, record and body of BARR's Summary to refer to the relationship between Fowler's intentions with the album (the map), the album as it exists (the record) and Fowler's reality (the body).

I thought about removing the "kind of" in the second-to-last sentence, but kept it in to honor how often Fowler contradicts and questions herself in Summary. At the record's onset, she tells herself:

"And you repeat everything, so that until it's clear and clear completely, now and forever."

She compares this to covering things in enamel. Once the record is turned in to the label, that's it, it's frozen forever. And then she adds (and these are the last lines of the introductory song):

"And this is all happening in the midst of a time that's fully challenging
but what about the fact that the challenges give the plan a point
And also it's kind of maybe darker and meaner,
I think you can tell because the title's colder."

That's so much of how Summary feels: This is what I want to say, but even if I outright tell you that, even if I explain what the album title and cover art and instrumental choices are meant to convey, you're going to have your own takeaway. It is so hard to communicate anything, much less intentions this sincere. As David Berman sang, "More will be seen than will be understood."

Back to the record, the body and the map: I love the lines in "Complete Consumption of Us Both" where Fowler asks"

"What is the saddest thing I can say?
Words aren't sad enough,
music isn't sad enough.
How could it bear to be? It doesn't need to be, because life is there to do it for real."

In Summary, there are the attempts to communicate as best as possible, which I think BARR usually equates with attempts to communicate as truthfully as possible, and there are also admissions and/or worries that the form itself is unable (or shouldn't!) carry all of the weight of the kind of communication she's attempting here.

And all throughout, there is repetition. The repetition doesn't only serve as attempts at clarification. One of the last lines of the album, incidentally something I think about a lot:

"And I say the same things over and over because I only think about the same things over and over in circles."

I don't think that preempts criticism from the listener, I think it answers Fowler's self-criticism. Summary is many things, including self-critique, and I don't want everything to be a form of self-flagellation but, again, I'm kind of uninterested in art that doesn't have some form of self-critique.

Right before that "I only think about the same things over and over" line, Fowler starts to draw the album to a close with one last memory:

"Our bodies look so different to ourselves in just different clothes.
These baby giraffe knees knocking together,
I got new pants and sewed them, I'm sorry,
fully only you and I would see, I'm sorry,
my gangly body traveling in space,
I think about how I look in a video I saw of a show,
my body awkward in space is what I have,
this body traveling through space"

In some ways, that performance is Summary's future. Fowler's going to hear this album again at some point, is going to perform it live, and be confronted with an outsider's perspective on her own thoughts. And excuse me while I disappear completely up my own ass, but the "I'm sorrys" are almost this record's version of Ulysses' "yeses," this overwhelming feeling, only here it's a sort of shame and maybe acceptance. "This body awkward in space is what I have." However it will be taken, this is the context.