Soil

Lily-white-male himself, AN said this after years in the indie scene — first as the rhythm section of Purple Ivy Shadows and later in B3ND3R. It wasn’t a rejection of the audience so much as a verdict on the music. By the late ’90s indie-rock had been divided and conquered — so distilled you could predict the band and the crowd before walking in the door.

Then Nimmo disappeared to San Francisco for eight years.

He reappeared in 2005 with new travels, new politics, and Fela Kuti on his mind. With a few sparse loops he hammered out the structure for Soil on a Wurlitzer and laptop. For the next few hours we exorcized something — two live takes, his narrative snare-hi-hat polyrhythms, wah guitar, fretless dub bass, and room left in the chorus for Fela-inspired tenor sax. The music Benny Goodman and Led Zeppelin appropriated from never went away. It just went underground. Soil is about digging back down to it.

Nimmo’s original sketch vocals couldn’t be rescued technically, but his lyrics survived. The chant below is a rewrite in my own voice of what he laid down that day.

..dig down get down, put your hands in the
ground where rivers flowed beneath cold streets…
unlock the sounds of life below

rivers flowed as your dreams did roam
under daylight and the streams…
of conscious nights now built above
the blood upstream in sight

habits deep under the moon
in tune to the dark and light before…
we were the first born there were waters

you’ve got to move you’ve got to:
strike the walls that surround your prohibitions

you’ve got to stand you got to:
dance the steps the sky and mother taught you

you’ve got to fly you’ve got to:
strike the urgency of burning

you’ve got to move you’ve got to:
will the branches bend the family tree