Alyssa: Over the three decades preceding his 2006 death in protest of the Iraq War, Malachi Ritscher recorded several thousand jazz and experimental shows in Chicago. Before sets, he asked musicians for their permission to record; after, he gave them copies. At least in part, Ritscher saw his recordings as a way to give something back to artists he admired, to “further their process.” Ritscher’s recordings are housed in the Creative Audio Archive at the Experimental Sound Studio, in Chicago’s Edgewater neighborhood. In addition to his carefully labelled recordings, Ritscher left a composition book of recording notes, mailing addresses, travel plans, and more. As part of my residency at the Experimental Sound Studio, I transcribed writings from Ritscher’s notebook, including the journal entry reproduced after this note.
Below, Malachi Ritscher. Click here to read Marc Fischer's 2014 pamphlet essay on Ritscher's life, activism, and work, written on the occasion of Public Collectors' exhibit about Ritscher at the 2014 Whitney Biennial. Fischer’s essay is the source of all biographical information that appears here.
On September 26, 2004, Ritscher recorded the band Xiu Xiu’s set at the Empty Bottle in Chicago’s Ukrainian Village. On April 23, 2023, I attended Xiu Xiu’s show at the Beachland Ballroom in Cleveland’s Waterloo District with my friends Zach Peckham and Meghan Gallagher. As an exercise in approaching Ritscher’s practice, I recorded the show. I used a cell phone, alternately in pocket and hand. Ritscher used handheld DAT recorders, mics clipped to stage curtains, sometimes additional equipment. Both recordings appear with set lists at Fence’s website. Thank you to Jamie Stewart of Xiu Xiu for openhearted agreement to sharing these recordings; thank you to James Wetzel of the Creative Audio Archive for suggesting we ask.
Xiu Xiu's web site. Xiu Xiu is on tour now in 2024.
I wrote the poem “Xiu Xiu at Beachland Ballroom” over the course of the concert and in the hours and weeks after. The text incorporates, often without delineation, lyrics and overheard speech from the concert, as well as Malachi Ritscher’s writings. The title follows Ritscher’s convention for labeling his recordings.
Two nights after the concert I attended, Xiu Xiu returned to the Empty Bottle, where Ritscher had recorded them in 2004. On November 3, 2006, Ritscher filmed his self-immolation in protest of the Iraq War at the base of the Flame of the Millenium sculpture, next to a Kennedy Expressway on-ramp during Friday morning traffic. For some time, the identity of the deceased was not publicly known; once it was, debates over media coverage and his act’s signification followed. The recording was not circulated, as Ritscher seems to have intended, and the protest did not galvanize the wider anti-war movement that he had hoped for.
Xiu Xiu’s music registers and responds to the difficult, the unassimilable: depression, addiction, abuse, and death, including the murders of Iraqi civilians and Jamie Stewart’s father’s suicide in 2002. In the notes for the 2023 album Ignore Grief, Xiu Xiu describe their music as attempts at “knowing and living with what has happened.” In their terms, the question is “how to process, to be empathetic towards, to disobey and reorganize horror.”
From Malachi Ritscher’s Notebook:
November 22, 1997
There is something about the quality of light on a Sunday afternoon late in November, let’s say November 22 at 4:35 PM, at 48 ’ (?) latitude, or at any rate walking home from the Patio Theater in Chicago. The blue is that sort of hyper blue, a surreal robin’s egg, with the wispy clouds, stretched pink in the east but more orange in the west. A fluorescent sky, with unseen jets roaring, a Maxfield Parrish unreality. I am walking funny because I’ve sat sloughed slouched in the sagging movie seat for two hours and I have to pee real bad.
It occurs to me that I’m not all there, which is to say here, because I’m out in it, it’s all around and blowing up my ass, and I’m thinking can I get to my camera in time, what film is loaded, if it would come true in video, but even if the colors were perfect, it still wouldn’t look real, but instead of just living it, I’m looking for a way to cling to it, to remember it later, when I’m old, or different, or someplace else. That’s when it occurs to me that I am already someplace else, because I’m not all here, which is to say there.
I don’t know how to explain it, but that same thing is what prevents me from writing. I am trying always for a different now, and that is the one that I am going to write about. I will have it all figured out then, or at least will be able to articulate the deficiencies which in this now are overwhelming. Vagueness, hesitation, what
Xiu Xiu at Beachland Ballroom
November 22, 1998
To further some process one shows up to a show
a band Malachi Ritscher listened to twenty years before
recorded the show now two screens six phones before my own
now would it come true in video hit record
now would be the drummer’s same age near seventy
isn’t this ambient docu feeling this no curtains all curtaining
the ratatatatatatat ratatatatatatat twice over intone six pastoral frescos
one for each phone
one hundred true love of mine familiar solo
kisses cymbal embedded high up gym crescendo
carved as so
familiar ballad I don’t know
Values of time moment to moment by moment I wait in
Values of silence with occasional comment outside they seem to be waiting
Blue card handwritten “falcon sounds” yellow post-it
one can listen the sleigh bells the bodied whack “so hard at it”
of the tarantula tattoo brass “awake unto me arise arise
awake unto me arise arise”
Between songs “I know but it’s like”
So that you don’t feel like arise arise
Peckham saw Xiu Xiu three years after cafeteria school
came through a couple of times in town or I wasn’t listened to forget
a year computer animated work vigil caffeinated
heart monitored by one window
yellow chair by wall of one window
crumbling as yellow as rainbow as resolute as crocus
nerves bad brick apart brick what was it railroad
and lived there with someone
who isn’t doomed
Born January 13, 1954 Died November 3, 2006 I Dreamt That I
“Oh that it were a dream” dreamt that you were dreaming
Acrossing plane Marisa Anderson new electric expanse I am
field recording but phone noting
phone noting but listening “Listen” wrote Ritscher “Listen
at one time I was a part of something
and there was a place to be
to be with me to be with
it was enough to be and listen” to come here
to be and listen almost alone then it was enough
called Zach and Meghan had a stupid day
pick me up on the way
If you say “keep playing” Stewart says they’ve stopped playing
All then as one as Angela Seo Jamie Stewart David Kendrick
Sometimes tonight listening the figure of Malachi Ritscher falls in
listening not trying to be maudlin the figure falls in
this song he also heard it in 2004 this song a cliff after a father’s
falling in the audience also a parent called himself Malachi after his child
living who lives one is after one is responsible one makes
a belief in another they’ll endure the work
and survival the work that all that you left you left for
and Meghan’s laugh here
Left and then you can come back moment by moment
Come back as to be beyond definition
Listen “hey Mike can I get less of the keyboard thank you”
Twin Peaks theme falling hey “how will I fit in
all my business” bottle the sky is still blue where to put it
Alyssa Perry’s (Cleveland, OH) poems appear in Annulet, The Canary, Fence, Mercury Firs, River Styx, and elsewhere. Perry is an editor at Rescue Press and Cleveland Review of Books. Her book Oily Doily will be published by Bench Editions in fall 2024.
Instagram: @lysperry
