"THE SHADWO OF THE GUEST" By Blonde Redhead

Blonde Redhead’s Kazu Makino has spent over two decades weaving songs inspired by horses, using the human–animal bond to explore vulnerability, endurance, and loss. Her band’s 2004 album Misery Is a Butterfly, shaped by a devastating riding accident that left her unable to sing, reflects on survival and the fragile space where human and non-human experiences collide. (Rock)

Death is a fragile thing. When you are around animals you start to feel that death is going to happen no what. This kind of relationship with animals can make your life better.. When it ends it hurts very deeply. This pain is hard for people to understand. It can help you express your feelings in a honest way. For, than 20 years Blonde Redheads Kazu Makino has been writing songs about horses. The band came out with their album on 4AD in 2004 it was called Misery is a Butterfly. This album is about a thing that happened to Makino. She had a riding accident. It was very serious. She got hurt badly and her jaw was broken. This made it hard for her to sing.

The title of the album Misery is a Butterfly might sound really sad. The album is actually about dealing with tough things. The last song on the album Misery is a Butterfly is called "Equus". It is a fun song to dance to. The name "Equus" is also the name of a play, from the 1970s. This play is about a boy who loves horses a lot he is even obsessed with them. On stage the animals are the ones who get hurt. The boy loves them in a way that's not normal and it is very wrong. He does things to the animals because he wants to keep them close to him. The boy does this because he does not understand them. This makes us think about what happens when people and animals do not understand each other. The animals and the boy are very different. This causes problems. The boys love for the animals is, like a problem that hurts them. When people and animals interact things can get. It can be hard to understand each other. The animals and people are just too different.

Makinos dreams of being a rider never went away. The music she made with Blonde Redhead is full of stories about her horse, Harry. She was very sad when Harry died. She wrote a song called "Rest of Her Life" about it. This song is on the album Sit Down for Dinner that came out in 2023. Makino said that when she was writing this song she had a picture in her mind. She imagined herself standing on a mountain, screaming and singing. Then she heard her voice coming back, to her. It sounded different like someone else was singing. She said about the song in an interview with Tone Glow that it is singing back something that she did not sing. She wanted this to happen to her. The Brooklyn Youth Chorus is now part of the song, with Makino and her bandmates, the brothers Amedeo and Simone Pace who play the guitar and vocals and the drums. They are singing the song again in a way that makes what Makino wanted to happen really happen. The Brooklyn Youth Chorus joins Makino and the twin brothers Amedeo and Simone Pace on this version of the song. The collaboration starts with the half of The Shadow of the Guest. This collection is like an update to Sit Down for Dinner. The Shadow of the Guest also has some ASMR tracks that were made for an Isabel Marant runway show. The Shadow of the Guest even has two versions of For the Damaged Coda. For the Damaged Coda was a hit, by accident and it was used in a Rick & Morty episode.

Blonde Redhead has been doing this kind of revision for their whole career. If you look at their music you will see that they have a lot of EPs and singles with tracks that make their old songs sound new again. For example they took some songs from Melody of Certain Damaged Lemons. Wrote new lyrics, in French and Italian. They also had David Sylvian sing a version of the song "Messenger" from the album Butterfly. Blonde Redhead likes to take their songs and make them sound brand new like they are hearing them for the first time, which is really cool. Hell they made a version of the song Fake Can Be Just as Good it was called "Futurism vs. Passéism" and it was on the next album In an Expression of the Inexpressible. This time they added some singing to Fake Can Be Just as Good, the producer of the album, Guy Picciotto from Fugazi was the one singing on Fake Can Be Just as Good. He was talking about ideas in French, on Fake Can Be Just as Good.

On Shadow the choir versions are like explorations of how Sit Down for Dinner can be. The Brooklyn Youth Chorus sings loudly and softly with Makinos songs. The harmonies sound nice and messy at the time on "Before". The young voices make "Via Savona" sound really full. When you listen carefully you can tell that the vocals were added to the tracks and it takes away, from the songs, especially on "Savona" and "Coda". It is just not worth it. How more can we get from a bonus track that is twenty five years old?. Yet it comes back again as "Oda a Coda" where the band is not there at all. Instead we have mariachi players who bring a happy sadness to the bonus track. The bonus track still sounds good after all these years.

Call them curators, if that suits you, but it doesn’t make their sweeping cultural production any less real. In “Extreme Realism,” the affect theorist Brian Massumi offers in his many definitions of the real that it is “an enactive speculation on its own production, as a complete proposition.” Blonde Redhead is a relational project. Their music is a threshold that can be crossed variously and sometimes leads to new rooms that didn’t previously exist.

Morgan Mason