'The Name of the Sun is Slowly Spoken' / Papaphilia [Interview]
Papaphilia evokes visceral, emotional intensity in her lamenting, yet fast-paced dance track “The True Name of the Sun is Slowly Spoken”.
Fjorn Butler, Naarm-based queer sound and visual artist, explorative dance icon, critical academic and the creative mind behind Papaphilia has struck me to my core with “The Name of the Sun is Slowly Spoken”, the first single off her forthcoming album Remembrance of Things to Come set to release on October 18th via Heavy Machinery Records.
Verve had the chance to speak to Papaphilia about her track and its unique ability to exhort heart pangs, guttural longing and euphoric dance bliss in collision with industrial sounds, emblematic samples and intricate vocals. Read the interview below.
We enter the track with a strong bass line of continuous hard kicks, it feels like awakening, like anticipation, either something is beginning or we have arrived at a significant moment. As complex, warbling, mutated vocals weave through fast-paced industrial patterns we are lifted up into Papahilia’s ether, taken along her journey as this momentum increases.
The echoing of a deep lamentation accompanied by a bhangra sample repeats itself through the track, which pays homage to Papahilia’s South Asian heritage. Dark acid oscillations ascend and descend as we are moved through the sounds, continuing to return to the consistent hard kicks, the strong foundation where we began.
It feels big, as though we are witnessing something important. I felt some sort of aching in my chest, an almost restless energy in my legs. As we approach the end of the track, we are greeted by a sample of When Love Takes Over Kelly Rowland, an iconic 2000s dance track expertly entwined with dark, deep lamenting moans. Without even realising the journey we have been on, we are brought to a moment of moving through on blissful waves of industrial beats, ethereal crooning and the ever present bassline.
I was so grateful to sit down with Papaphilia, and learn about her process when putting together this track, her upcoming album and her creative worlds. It was amazing to learn that what I had felt while listening to it correlated almost exactly with a lot of the intention behind the sound. Music is a form of communication that is able to transcend the many barriers to expressing in a way that grasps the nuance and intangible nature of emotion. To witness Papaphilia do this with grace, vulnerability and thoughtfulness is incredible, and almost humbling. I can’t wait to continue the narrative she creates in her upcoming album Remembrance of Things to Come.
In the press release for your new single “The Name of the Sun is Slowly Spoken” you describe it as a ‘high-intensity dance track mapping the experience of guiding spirit through its journey out of one plane of existence to another’ which is beautiful.
I’d love to know more about what that means for you.
It’s funny because I’ve written a few songs about this, but the way that this unfolded it also replicates the feeling of the journey that I experienced. And it was something I was talking to my friend about as well, she was like ‘It sounds like you’re going up a mountain and there’s some darkness there’.
And I was like, of course this is still a song about that.
So at the start of last year, I think January, my grandmother passed. And she was the last matriarch of her generation and for me the only matriarch in that part of my family that I had a strong relationship with. Out of all my grandparents I’ve been there for their passings and I always play a pretty strong role in their funerals and in putting together the… sort of... grieving part of seeing someone off. But I just happened to be in Sri Lanka at the time when it happened and I was really upset because I wanted to be where her body was. But I was talking to my aunty and she said it’s really important that you’re there because I was really close to where she was born and raised.
It was quite funny because I was like aw this fucking sucks, but then that night I saw all this fireflies and they weren’t really supposed to be here. So I realised that she was here, and I was supposed to be here which was fabulous. But it meant taking my holiday completely off track and dragging my partner all the way to the centre of Sri Lanka to Dambulla region to see her off.
I knew we needed to go to the Dambulla caves because it’s a very beautiful, spiritual place. And it was a fucking journey and a half. There were all these bus rides where we were going to vomit because everyone drives off chops there. And this whole time I’ve got this intensity of grief in my body as well, and it was just another thing to contend with. When we got to our motel in Dambulla it was kind of like a mini-Ibiza, because there were so many tourists there. It was a lot, especially while grieving and I had so much anger and intensity in me.
So the next day we walk up the mountain… and it was a beautiful process of getting through intensity and finally seeing her off and letting her go. It’s totally dark and there’s ancient paintings and all you can hear is this beautiful dripping sound. So we went in there and said our prayers and did all the things we thought we needed to do to see her off and then left… and there was this beautiful cathartic moment. The drive of the song really echoes back to the intense ride there, and to the feelings of wanting to express anger and sadness.
“The drive of the song really echoes back to the intense ride there [to the Dambulla caves in Sri Lanka], and to the feelings of wanting to express anger and sadness [due to grief]”.
Yeah, I was actually going to ask about this. Particularly at the start of the song, it kind of felt like a waking up and I was curious about what it was for you.
What is your process when you’re trying to create something that can depict the intensity of the emotions you’re feeling?
It’s a hard one because I never go in to making something knowing what it’s going to end up as. I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that I’m not that technically skilled with composition and making music. But I guess generally my process is to gather a lot of things together so they start to form a relationship with one another. You go into making work with whatever you’re carrying and it does start to come out as you go. For example I’ve got all this vocal samples just sitting there, but there’s a reason why I’m picking them, and I don’t always know why until I start to see them in relation to each other. So it all sort of come together and then by the end of it I’m like… Oooh, this song is depicting this experience.
The song was originally quite long, and this is the case for all the tracks I pulled together. I think there was like 7-8 tracks and they’re all normally around 10-15 minutes long because I love to tell a really long story. It was the work of my producers to cut it down into something that can fit on an album. I gave this song to Kuya Neil and he just managed to take the elements that were important and highlight them and make them work with the composition. There are definitely bits lost, taking a track from 15 to 5 minutes is going to cut out some content, but he kept the intensity.
What’s it like? You’ve told a long story and then giving it to someone when it isn’t their story to cut it down? There must be a lot of trust there.
Yeah that’s the thing. The two people I worked with are people I’ve worked with for a long time. Not through my own music but I’ve worked with them on so many different things. Neil is always a go-to person. Bringing him into projects I know that he is the sound person I will normally use because he has a delicate approach, he gives a shit about people and I know that. I knew I wanted to bring him in because I knew that he will ask questions and think deeply about what he had been given and try to unpack it, but he’d also bring his knowledge into it which I trust.
And initially it feels gross giving your work to someone and saying ‘take this and see what you can do!’ But this track was the first one he bounced back to me and I didn’t want to change it at all. I was deeply happy. He just got it straight away.
I’ve worked in music for like 15 years, and it’s taken a long time to get to a place where you can intuitively know if a person will work well with you. It can be hard to find people who get you. That’s been a big focus of my music is crewing a world of people who really understand me in a core sense.
It sounds like a lot of your process is very intuitive, how did you get to this point?
The good and the bad thing about my process is that while I trust it and I always get there, I come from an experimental, improvisational background and I’m not classically trained anymore. I’ve played in a lot of improvisational groups where it’s just mainly jamming to get to a place of making something. I really trust in that process now. I do the same with writing or painting, just allowing things to speak and unfold. I don’t think I would know how to go about it any other way. It took a long time to be able to trust that. I’ve been tutoring a lot, and working with people that find that they don’t bounce with the strategic, linear fashion of writing and all of a sudden they’re writers. It’s like their not stupid, they just have a very different way of doing things.
So with the sample of When Love Takes Over, and the repetition of ‘over’ as we move towards the end of the track. It’s gorgeous, what’s the intention behind it?
I think it’s like relief that this is finally put to bed. Because my nan passed at the start of 2020, so, as a lot of people did, I went through doing a lot of shadow work. So when you try to process things through a creative piece you kind of get to this point where you’re like, oh my god I’ve processed it, and you can move through. So it was pretty important to have her (Kelly Rowland) singing that there too. The way that she sings it in the original song is ecstatic, but the way we’ve used it is like a sort of finishing.
Looking more bigger picture, you’re a person who has a lot of different facets of their life - how do they all come together. How does your work as a researcher and a community organiser interact with your music?
It’s a big one because it’s a question that’s been chasing me for a long time. How do all these disparate worlds come together? When I first started making music I was mostly a painter. I was like, why do the two things work but they're so completely different? That revealed itself a lot later; it was about collaging and bringing together significations of the world and trying to find a way to make them work together.
But with music it’s been a long history of playing music and trying to be engaged in the community. In my early twenties the community was very racialized and very sexist, so there’s always been politics involved in trying to navigate that world whilst just also just trying to make some fucking music. I made a lot of noise music early on, mostly because I needed to find a vehicle to make music because I had a lot to get out and harshness was the only way to deliver it. Being in that world, that was the way the message had to be delivered because people just need a slap in the face. And that’s the way the collective imaginary felt around me as well, people just needed a fucking slap in the face! It felt like a world where you needed to scream to be heard.
Going into research which happened shortly after I started playing music in that way, I was working for Wurundjeri Tribe and was quite embedded in that space for a long time and it changed my focus from going into research about politics and aesthetics to thinking about it through decolonisation. Working for Wurundjeri I felt that there was something about the connection between a people who felt they had to scream to be heard, to people who are also well-meaning but want to extract from culture rather than actually support. That resonated so much with my thoughts around politics and race and what was going on in the music community.
But I just had to learn more and more, it was the biggest learning curve of my life. Research started to inform my frameworks for music. You’re not always at the front and centre, you’re not always the main voice, sometimes you just have to find other ways to be heard and sometimes delivering messages needs to be more nuanced. So I went from making more harsh noise, to sort of ambient sounds, to what I’m making now.
“I made a lot of noise music early on, mostly because I needed to find a vehicle to make music because I had a lot to get out and harshness was the only way to deliver it. Being in that world, that was the way the message had to be delivered because people just need a slap in the face. It felt like a world where you needed to scream to be heard”.
How does decolonisation inform your work and your upcoming album?
For me it’s been about being more mindful of the process and what I put in there. I think about using sound sources that relate more to me than anything else. So one of the biggest aspects of starting to think about your place in the world, as a person within the colony. I’m a settler-migrant invader on both sides of my family as well, so a lot of my thinking about music comes back to thinking about what I’m going to use in there. It has to come from somewhere that’s deeply introspective. I think about how I can use the rhythms that are there in a way that’s really honest. That’s been my journey with decolonising my practice, is making something honest regardless of whether it’s palatable or not. Finding a way to feel that this is music that you can know is mine.
And did you arrive at a conclusion on how to use those drum patterns and rhythms that come from a culture that’s not yours?
It’s an evolving process of using rhythm as feeling. So if I’ve got a pattern or sequence of a rhythm that I really like, I unpack why and think about it quite deeply. So it might make me feel a certain way, or move a certain way, it might resonate with certain ideas and where it sits within myself. It really is an evolving process. I always need to remind myself I’m from a particular class, a particular strata of society that has a colonial place. Being honest about all that stuff in the music is also really important. And sometimes it feels like a privilege to make music, but it’s not because creativity is so important.
Can you tell me about the name you’ve chosen for the album?
It’s funny, I pulled all this work together and then was like, what am I calling it? And I remembered back in 2018 I had already written it down and I went back to look at it and it was still the right name. Remembrance of Things to Come is a reference to a Chris Marker film, he did La Jetee, Sans Soleil. He’s a French guy that was a film essayist and bumped with the New Wave crew from France, but wasn’t a weenie like some of them. He’s definitely my favourite because he’s also a collagist, he brings things together. This film was about a photographer Denise Bellon, she was photographing between WWI and WWII and she captures this moment between the two wars that shows the devastation of WWI. He pulls in this question of ‘why didn’t we see the second world war coming’, and ‘why was it so devastating’ when there was so much for us to learn from the first WWI. So while it was my favourite film, it also represented the idea that there are so many moments that we don’t learn from because we have this idea of time being so linear. But it is really cyclical and we keep repeating these patterns of not learning from things and not being able to deal with the consequences. And even before these world wars there was colonisation, which was also a space we could have learned from. So it’s kind of this lamentation of the fact that we never fucking learn.
And what does the True Name of the Sun is Slowly Spoken mean?
So that’s an Ursula Le Guin reference. I was reading her Earthsea trilogy while I was in Sri Lanka, and it’s this book that I don’t think is very popular or considered quite profound but I really considered it very profound. She talks about language and how there is magic in language and that magic is about knowing the true spirit of things. Things will reveal their true name to you if they trust you, objects, animals, people. And it’s about the fact that this magic has been lost, when you think about it in the colonial context it’s the idea that things are objectifiable and there’s no spirit in things that are our relatives like trees, plants and animals. It was this beautiful analogy for thinking about that disrespect and that loss. It’s a political message as well for these times when we’re thinking about the true names of states and countries and also thinking about indigenous language.
Those are names that come from relationships to things that were severed, and it comes back to the colonial violence that caused us to lose that beautiful connection to things through words. In the book she makes this point that the stars and the sun are these ancient beings and so their names are so long that it would take so long to say it. I thought it was a beautiful message, especially for a song that was about spirit and guiding it.
Stay engaged with Papaphilia on Facebook, Instagram and Bandcamp
Words by Ria Pillai @b(@brown.suga.princess)
Cover Design by Alexandre Dubois
Stencil and Font Design by Mohini Sharma
Photography by Lekhena Porter
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