#THE ROAD TO NOWHERE RADICAL FACE SKIN#
“And when I woke he was gone and I was wrapped in blankets on the lawn the sky was blue and my skin matched the hue and I could hear mother crying in your room. When the next track, ‘The Moon is Down’, jumps to follow a lifelong but silent admirer of Victoria, the switch is not jarring in the slightest, because Severus and Stone are also Abigail, are also Victoria, are also Ben Cooper himself. Stone, the narrator of the track, only reappears three or four times, and Severus less than that, but their inclusion doesn’t feel like some deviation from the main story. The titular characters are the twin sons of Abigail Northcote, herself the daughter of Victoria, the sister from ‘Family Portrait’. Not only are there a million details to explore but there are solid reasons to do so, each tiny part of the machine as important and beautiful when its time comes to be examined. The result is a wonderful combination of artistic and emotional depth. In an encyclopaedic, door-stop novel, a thousand characters might be more like a thousand caricatures, or 995 caricatures and a handful of substantial people, but Cooper’s evocative sound means each person feels relevant and real, however fleeting their appearance.
From here, characters appear and vanish, only to reappear later for a song or two, but always feel fully-realised. William and his father are the first signs of a Northcote trait, being over-emotional and quick to anger, while Victoria is the primary source of the more fantastical elements – strange abilities and witch-like dispositions.
‘Family Portrait’ feels like a cornerstone, a song narrated by William Northcote describing how his mother died, his father lost control and his sister, Victoria, became the matriarchal figure of the family. Released in 2011, The Roots opens the trilogy, throwing us straight into the tangle of the Northcote family and opening our eyes to just how complex and detailed the project will be. In accompaniment, as if to show how far his vision will stretch, Cooper has created an interactive map of the songs which goes some way to revealing the interconnectedness of the albums, helping the adventurous listener follow specific characters through time as their genes tumble downwards. The Family Tree trilogy was born, an ambitions, complex trilogy of albums telling the story of The Northcotes, a fictitious 19th Century family graced with paranormal abilities (seeing spirits, reanimating dead animals etc.). After losing two novels to a hard-drive crash, he decided to tell a story through his Radical Face project instead. It’s not a complete answer, nowhere near, but if we assemble enough information and spread it over the floor then we might just find ourselves, collage-like, staring back.īen Cooper’s latest, albeit fictitious, project is one alternative. The skeleton of the colonial organism from which we descend. Selected truths, half-truths, downright lies. Glimpses of a past flattened, simplified, made official or bureaucratic. The process of unearthing fundamental things about ourselves, human things, through official records and photographs.
0 kommentar(er)
