Art Schop
O Friends
Alternative/experimental artist Art Schop, aka Martin Walker, releases his new album, O Friends, a musical contemplation on the idea of friendship, its impact, and all it entails.
O Friends is a meditation on friendship, and specifically five friends who have helped shape my life. Improvising on the Prophet 5 synth and then layering guitars, piano and drums, the tracks flow between passages. Sometimes the music and lyrics emerge from a subconscious well of feeling, sometimes from specific memories of events now past, or yet to come. — Art Schop
Intensely intimate, the album finds Schop plunging into profound personal thoughts and feelings, surveying and probing into the meaning of “friend,” an idea many take for granted and never examine in detail.
Oxford-educated, Walker was the Information Services Director for the international law firm Debevoise & Plimpton. He has published fiction, as well as a book of philosophy exploring the meaning of life. His previous album, The Fifth Hammer, revolved around and was inspired by Daniel Heller-Roazen’s book, The Fifth Hammer: Pythagoras and the Disharmony of the World.
Of the five tracks that make up the album, highlights include “Billy,” a drifting dreamscape of a song riding a slowish mid-tempo beat. A darkly sparkling piano and a Doors-like lysergic guitar give the melody a nomadic motion. Schop’s chant-like vibrato-laced vocals imbue the lyrics with textures bordering on the ghostly.
Talking about “Billy,” Schop says, “Meditating on my friendship with Billy, I realized that there had always been something important and mysterious in the distance between us, something I didn’t understand.”
In the end, Schop came to understand. “And I now know why he held back something of himself in our friendship. Survival. He was so different from the heterogenous norm of our small hometown and therefore such a target for abuse and ridicule that he needed to excel and defy expectations, he needed to protect himself, to keep something of himself entirely private, even from his friends.”
“Neil” flows forth on chiming textures atop a slow, crunching rhythm. Half-sung, half-spoken vocals give the lyrics mysterious, puppet-like suggestions. There’s an edge to Schop’s dreamy vocal section, like a psychedelic nightmare.
Regarding “Neil,” Schop shares, “One of the things I appreciate and draw on about Neil is his ability to sit with uncertainty and ambivalence, to see both sides, to know that life is lived mostly in the gray areas, but that this grayness doesn’t exclude light and dark.”
“Jimi,” the last track on the album, reveals a folk-laced melody full of weight. When the harmonics shift, the melody takes on discordant tones, shaking and wavering, akin to someone with Parkinson’s entering the conversation. Sadly, Jimi passed away. Yet Schop continues to remember him.
“I’ll miss you when the doorbell rings / And you’re not there / Purple shoes / Jokes about the snow / And your frizzy hair.”
Experimental yet strangely captivating, O Friends summons up wonderfully sensitive feelings of the essence of friendship.
