Eating Flowers :: God Was A White-Tailed Deer (Reckno)

Eating Flowers makes much of simple elements; psycho-active, formed, crystal-like, from different conditions—of temperature, composition and elevation; through suggestive color fields, skirting melancholy on the way to wide-sky high.

‘I am fascinated with deer. I grew up in Virginia and you can find them pretty much everywhere. They just live alongside everyone else. […] they’ll stop and stare back at you and just stay like that for minutes on end, not moving at all. There’s something so powerful and gripping about that moment—how still everything is, the recognition. What are they thinking? Probably nothing. But the mystery is there.’

Greg Dutcher is Eating Flowers and God Was A White​-​Tailed Deer is a set of audacity-fuelled sound sketches on self-styled ‘frontierless abstract’ label, Reckno, that reclaims terms like ‘experimental’ and ‘lo fi’ from tag-fixated sub-genre self-consciousness for the ear-fresh enthusiast. Greg Dutcher is just that–an enthusiast. Not just for deer. Dearly held too is, evidently, ’00s tape culture—echoes of the recent past. Remember those Skies, Marble and Pale Blue? The likes of Arbor (2006-2011), and its Infinite Body and Treetops; Ekhein (2007-2012), and its transient gems like Migrations in Rust and the more enduring Taiga Remains. Dutcher an admirer: ‘the compulsion to make music like that. Cassettes, pitifully small editions, obscurity. Who were these people? Why did they do this? I wanted to do the same, any way I could. And I guess that’s where Eating Flowers comes from.’ (interview fragment here)

On the origins of Eating Flowers: ‘I started taking things I’d heard and liked, rich textures, videogame music, field recordings I’d taken, and started playing around with them in Audacity and whatever else was at hand, doing it any way I could. I didn’t know what I was doing and still don’t. But my process involves taking objects or symbols of beauty and ingesting them, somehow, no matter how wrong-headed the process is. In this way I am “eating flowers”.’ (musing here). On the twee-est of tracks, “Naturalistic Fallacy,” he comes on like some benign alien–or a wide-eyed ingénue, intoning poems, berries and molecules, over prolix organ noodling. There’s more musical heft about it, though, albeit with a disarming levity, as in the sprawl of “Under The Sun They Presented Smiles To The World; Under The Moon, They Were Lost In Thought: So They Had Quietly Passed The Years.” Eating Flowers makes much of simple elements; psycho-active, formed, crystal-like, from different conditions—of temperature, composition and elevation; through suggestive color fields, skirting melancholy on the way to wide-sky high.

There is no grand gesture in God Was A White​-​Tailed Deer. No over-egging of the pudding. Rather, a great notion—sometimes, after one inspiration, ‘just one really nice chord and some field recordings and some other noises…sometimes those elements are all that’s necessary,’ sometimes, in the spirit of another, ‘sounds like watching clouds drift past a full moon on a very cold night.’ (here again)

God Was A White​-​Tailed Deer is available on Reckno.