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Bands and other fictives

Writer's picture: youngtobaccoyoungtobacco
Aija Puurtinen aka Kristina Bruuk, the tortured Finnish chanteuse who never lived.

Maybe it was obvious from the start? Kristina Bruuk does not exist. We have both fallen in love with an illusory muse. Our ultimate femme fatale is no more real than Venus on her half shell, or any of the other hundreds of figments of the imagination that artists have invented over the centuries to hang all their dreams on, when they can no longer hang them on the reality of the good woman back home.'


-Bill Drummond in 45 (2000).


Bands are fantasy football to the non-competitive. Soap operas of quitting members, members who got fired, other members who took their place. The one who went crazy. The one who went yacht rock, dubstep, mallcore. I can't look away. But I honestly couldn't win a trivia round about Taylor Swift or Post Malone. Once they get too far into the collective consciousness, they flatline to me.


In my previous post, I mentioned my urge to world-build. I want to do the same in music. Make up a bunch of bands, write their records and backstories and house them in fictitious scenes. Document all the bandmate swapping, infighting and spite spinoffs that never happened. Dream up the recording studios, record labels and other nerve centers of scenes that never existed. I might even release a field guide to this bizarro Ïndiana music scene that exists solely in my head.


I don't know why I want to do this exactly. There are plenty of great bands in Indiana, both now and in the past. Why does it need a pile of fake ones? It doesn't, but I seem to have never stopped having flashes of "what if there was a band like this?" race through my head at inopportune times. I think most music nerds do.


Only my problem is that I can't let go of any of it. I am a raging completist, itching to play Dungeon Master in the recording studio. Writing band drama as a Tolkien-esque literary oeuvre following a long tradition of musical hallucinations like The Archies. Spinal Tap. Gorillaz. Sex Bob-Omb. Citizen Dick. The Blues Brothers.


Sufjan Stevens started a still as-of-now unfinished 50-States project. This would be something similar in scope, except instead of one artist covering fifty states, this would be fifty "artists" from an alternate Indiana/Ïndiana that exists largely in my head like Gormenghast and the Fuckers and Kristina Bruuk. Character studies inhabiting an ephemeral Lapland music scene that never existed. Maybe not as cool, but that's not part of this equation.


We knew everything possible about these bands, says Drummond of the fictitious Kalevela roster. Their dates of birth, favourite foods, where they met, line-up changes, suicide attempts, drug habits, love lives, the lot. The fact was, none of these bands existed anywhere but in our imaginations. That’s where all great bands exist. Being in a band or into a band is all about building, living out and worshipping (or loathing) a myth.


Vanity, you say? Maybe. The ship has sailed for me to start a band and hit the road in search of chart placement and magazine covers. Mental health is more like it. An acceptance of not being cool enough to be in these bands in real life and a commitment to scratch an existential itch through routine creative discipline like the geode grotto in Jasper, IN, or the world's largest ball of paint.


Probably silly, but in the end a labor of love, nostalgia and an attempt at order from chaos.


Would you tune in?



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What I’m reading: Principia Discordia (Malaclypse the Younger)

What I'm listening to: Sleep (Max Richter)


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