Pitchfork

Photo by Rupert A. Thompson

One of 2005's great unsung gems, Kelley Polar's Love Songs of the Hanging Gardens found the viola-toting Juilliard-escapee hand-crafting a lush, sensual, orchestral disco record for Morgan Geist's respected Environ imprint.

Polar-- born Michael Kelley, and still active under his given name in the classical world's Apple Hill Chamber Players-- returns later this year with the Hanging Gardens follow-up, an as-yet-untitled 11-track affair featuring guest vocalist Claire de Lune and members of the Kelley Polar Quartet, who've released several EPs on Environ.

A tour is in the works-- but before all that, Kelley has a "Chrysanthemum" set to bloom this March. Environ will release said tune as the first single from the LP, backed with another album cut, "Rosenband", and alongside an instrumental version of each tune.

Kelley disclosed the apocalyptic inspiration behind "Chrysanthemum" in a recent e-mail to Pitchfork. The tale begins "one day in sixth grade" and includes "a reasonable expectation that the world was going to end in a giant ball of radioactive fire," as well as "fountains of blood from severed head[s]" and "horny teenagers going at it in the back-seat of a car." My oh my! Check out the complete story after the jump.

Kelley Polar on "Chrysanthemum":

One day in sixth grade, the teachers sent home with each student a single hot-pink mimeographed sheet of paper. It said that there would be a show on network television that week that would attempt to realistically portray the onset of a global nuclear cataclysm, and while usefully educational it was expected that this would result in a high probability of emotional trauma to most children. This was one of the only times I can remember mention of the potential psychic toll of growing up with a reasonable expectation that the world was going to end in a giant ball of radioactive fire.

Last summer I was writing a classical piece using text from comic books as generative material, and reread all the Lone Wolf and Cub comic books. Page after page there is the juxtaposition of beautiful floral patterns and symbols with literal fountains of blood from severed head after severed head, black-and-white kimonos and black-and-white geysers from decapitated
spines, fashion and violence both useless and essential, beautiful and forbiddingly horrible.

Finally I read a lot of not-very-good science fiction. There is a particular chapter in one that I was reading while beginning the album that involved an over-sexed couple of hyper-evolved humans able to travel through time and space to swap their bodies into a couple of horny teenagers going at it in the back-seat of a car, while mushroom clouds appear on the horizon, timing the eventual obliteration of everything perfectly, piggybacking their jaded anciently alien minds on those of the two innocents.

So, there you have it!

"Chrysanthemum":

01 Chrysanthemum
02 Chrysanthemum (Instrumental)
03 Rosenband
04 Rosenband (Extended Instrumental Dance Mix)