“But suddenly at some station all climbed out, and it was already dark, although in the west there still hung a very long, very pink cloud, and farther along the track, with a soul-piercing light, the star of a lamp trembled through the slow smoke of the engine, and crickets chirped in the dark, and from somewhere there came the odor of jasmine and hay, my love.”
— Vladimir Nabokov, “Cloud, Castle, Lake”
When I first moved to New York, I felt everything but didn’t have much. (I still don’t.) I was living out of a suitcase, in the same ratty dresses I’d been wearing since June. I didn’t have any money (I still don’t), so I would plan extravagant, free adventures to help me stay out of the house and keep from going crazy.
A good friend asked me to accompany him on a trip to Dover Street Market. The store is about seven stories tall and the employees get nicer the higher up you go, in direct relation to the price of the objects on display. There’s more value in looking at an ugly $38,000 coat than there is in buying one, I think. On the first floor, with the ugly coat, the sales staff seemed convinced that we were going to turn and fart all over the racks at any moment. By the time we got to the top floor, which carried skateboards, we had employees coming over just to say hi and chat, to break up the day for a minute.
Somewhere in the middle I found a rack of solidly expensive dresses by the Irish designer Simone Rocha. Rendered in vivid red and mauve, she’d made midcentury-inspired frocks out of a strange gridded mesh, with bejeweled midsections. They were startlingly light for garments that showed their true structure on the hanger — I had a feeling that these dresses would wear me, were I to put them on. Even in their plaid woolen iterations, they were delicate. They seemed fundamentally impossible, like cocoons are impossible: how can something so light and fine carry so much weight?
I went home and found a video of the collection in action, set to a song so complicated and heavy and haunting that it managed to distract me from the dresses. I searched for the few lyrics I could make out, but it seemed the song didn’t exist. The combinations of words I could pull out of the mix were strange and returned no results: “A silhouette burned on your bright glazed eye”? “Pulling threads off your scented trail”? There was also, I think, something about sinking teeth into flesh, but I didn’t really trust my ears. The voice was genderless, as I imagine ghosts long dead may perhaps abandon their gender, driven to madness and spiraling.
I don’t remember what it took to figure out the band was Cloud Castle Lake, but my timing was perfect: they had a record coming out in the UK the very next day. The band is made up of three boys who, like Rocha, are from Ireland. There’s not much else you can find out about them online: their presence is minimal and their past almost nonexistent, what with Dandelion being their first EP.
Very minor acts of sleuthing will lead you to the short story by Vladimir Nabokov that gave them their name, the tale of one Vasili Ivanovich, lonely winner of a government-sponsored pleasure trip by train from Berlin to Russia. Largely unsatisfied with life but not quite knowing why and obviously toeing up to the void, Ivanovich finds himself tired and in transit, surrounded by strangers — until he arrives at a place where, outside a great black castle, he sees clouds reflected in the surface of the lake, and announces his desire to stay there rather than return to Berlin. The quiet strength of his conviction leads to him being savagely beaten by his fellow travelers.
Dandelion isn’t the story of Ivanovich so much as it is the soundtrack to the trip, where he tries to make sense of the objects he finds on the floor of the station, or attempts to intuit the futures of schoolboys waiting for a train. It’s a beautiful record, but not necessarily a hopeful one; it grows and adapts to the passing landscape. It isn’t entirely happy, though loud at points; and it isn’t sad at all, despite being deeply sad in many ways, as Vasili Ivanovich isn’t sad, per se, but is hoping for happiness. It’s a record that paints a picture of the uncontrollable space between departure and arrival, as leaving and staying are both fundamentally acts of strength, and of the delicate web woven in between, where much of your life is taken out of your hands and your choices are limited and you’re riding on a train, and you’re going somewhere.
The four songs on this record are long. Denouement isn’t common — instead, the songs build and build and build until it becomes unsustainable, then onto the next. “Sync” opens the album quietly and elegantly, and then begins to fold over onto itself, again and again, and that disintegrates into a tear-jerking horn section, which leads into “A Wolf Howling,” the song that stole my attention in the first place. The version on the record is different from the one in the video; the lyrics are sharper, but not much, and the vocals slightly higher in the mix. It loses some of its banshee gleam, but in a way that makes it different, not worse. Paired with Rocha’s pony-fur shoes, it glimmers like a match in darkness; here, on record, it quickly outgrows the room. In both cases, it is creepy and magnificent. It brings on the much-desired happiness that, to Vasili Ivanovich, “would have something in common with his childhood, and with the excitement aroused in him by Russian lyrical poetry, and with some evening sky line once seen in a dream.” It is a sheer falsetto over a grid of drums that throb and horns that bottom out in an ecstatic melting gesture. It is the dress — delicate, but fundamentally strong.
I play this record for people and I tell them these things and they love it and none of them ever seem to have heard it, or heard of it, and that leaves me unsettled. So this is the web I would like to weave, that could possibly carry me: I can’t help but wonder how it would look if we gathered up everyone on the planet who loves this record and put us all in the same room, or on the same train. To know the places from where we’ve departed, and the particulars of our arrival, and know that we will be allowed to stay. I want to know how other people hear Cloud Castle Lake, what they dress like and smell like. I need to know: “Who would they be, these drowsy beings, drowsy as seem all creatures still unknown to us?”
