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Fool Season

by Jacob Nico

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1.
My hands are bleeding again I don’t know how it happened Drifting gently into outer space Watching them stain the sheets My face is twitching again Words won’t come out my mouth It is shameful to be like this Silent in your arms And I am horrified to be alive I am horrified to be
2.
The person that tried to love you Was doomed to grow in bodily lie The way that I live is killing me But why does it have to kill me quite so slowly? I can’t wait Told an ex I’m not a man anymore They said “wait, what? I didn’t think you were one before” “You are you, you are a goo and that’s all anyone can ask” “We’re all just trying to figure this out in the last building burning” But I don’t understand Why I’m so ashamed of my body No I don’t understand Why I’m so deeply ashamed I just want to know What the hell my problem is Vessels fold and I have received so much empathy I hope that one day I will feel I have deserved Shadows bloom and I have received so much empathy I hope that one day I will feel I can return I drift into shallow psychosis listening to the air conditioning unit Taken by the soft hum of the fan as I sit waiting in the clinic I look at the chair and try to discern patterns, try to ground myself But I look too deep and fall straight through the floor And you talk and all the while cosmic shrapnel comes out your mouth And you talk and all the while I become dumb And you talk and all the while cosmic shrapnel comes out your mouth And you talk and all the while my brain goes numb
3.
Trespassers 07:12
Nothing induces anxiety like focusing on the breath The way it shortens and catches in the throat The way it hides when seen Finding the ways that bodies move so unnerving, so disgusting So terrifying, total meatpunk forever Hands beneath hot water, running until it scalds Skin slowly picked at, so just the top layer comes off Beer in open wounds, begrudgingly licked away A pair of scissors hidden, scrawny shoulders covered The most common grounding technique is to try to focus enough to find: Five things you can see; Four things you can hear; Three things you can touch; Two things you can smell; And one thing you can taste Imagine making it through all of that Without being filled with dread at the way everything interconnects So out of joint, so overwhelming and intensified A trespass in a territory we have no way of navigating A move out of a haze, a quiescent cloud Falling off of the branch And into the waiting and compliant brambles There’s a hole in your leg, I taste the rain on my tongue These days I keep saying let’s go to the beach A dissolving cube, a devil in the kitchen Put my headphones on and walk straight off the path To a point just behind the treeline Out of sight and hopefully out of mind Where I can’t see or hear anything Something like sensory deprivation Deterritorial Away from the rest of the world I don’t think I want I don’t want to have a body at all When I think about you I don’t feel much of anything I remember your shoulder Feeling so uncomfortable The back of your neck And your ribs through your side Like the thing in my bathroom Both real and not real If I leave enough spaces Leave enough holes in my head They will be inked in By confusion and otherwise A stray cat’s corpse, the centre of a football pitch Absent friends, moments changed and misremembered Absent friends, moments changed Moments changed and misremembered
4.
I don’t know how to love this body I don’t know how to love any body The intersection of the two, In the field near your parents’ house Or the shrinking and cracking Of my own in the grass alone If I could change it What would I want it to be? A book, thumbed through but never read The dregs of your morning coffee A tree, swollen branches cut If I fell through the world as I am Or fell as the other option Both would still be parallax And in the angle where they meet And all the empathy that spills out There is no balance No stillness I don’t know how to love this body In the hills a woman smiles at the landscape A boy stares in his parents’ mirror Neither of them exist Except in the angle where they meet And all the empathy that spills out I don’t know how to love this body Across the sound And my shattered knee Tooth on vibrating metal With performative terror A hand on pallid face Sappho in the water Smearing aloe vera on fractured palms I have a hospital appointment tomorrow Blooming beneath the flesh Basking in the overwhelming everything You are mapping some part of me Or just mapping something for me I wait on the shore: The lighthouse, you are the pelican Orchid blooms beneath the chest Basking in the overwhelming everything I was born a boy convinced they were special Now I am something, content to be nothing Just one of the weeds And so happy with that I don’t know why I’m still alive But I’m glad I know you now Maybe the universe decided I should stay I guess it wanted us to be friends In every hand something is lost In every hand something remains In every hand something is lost I am scared, and I am ashamed
5.
The Tower 07:58
You had a dream of a pond on fire When you woke up you were sick in the sink I am so lonely I could die All my friends are so far away Dealer won’t you please give me something Flame crawl out of my window Wax moon, you dissolve on me Mistakes still stain my skin I am so repulsed by The thought that anyone could want me Trapped in a tower that disgusts me I look in the mirror and throw up in the sink Cosmic body horror Abstracting the self Please don’t ever touch me Please don’t do anything at all A sinkhole, on the inside of your elbow I disappear, briefly in your arms Hidden driver, tape warps and melts We both lie there, drunk in the sun
6.

about

Is the fool foolish because they are a blank slate, or are they just foolish to think they can really start again? In the wake of total destruction and change, do we get to be something completely new? It is, of course, never that simple.

Created following a protracted brush with death and the development of a series of hallucinatory disorders, Fool Season is a brutal exploration of how to live when normality becomes impossible. Further, after crashing out of daily life, Jacob discovered that they’re both autistic and trans. The body, brain and world are in constant dialogue for us to exist, but when these lines of communication break down new ways of being have to be found, else we simply float in a partially-imagined void.

Like Xiu Xiu on diazepam, like mid-period Mount Eerie playing in your childhood bedroom, like Felicia Atkinson fronting a shoegaze band, Fool Season is by turns searing, sprawling, intimate and tender, often at the same time. Building on the alienated Kranky-isms of previous record Outer Mongolia, Fool Season adds glitch, goth, emo and even ASMR colours to the canvas. Layers of droning guitars and organs mix with bird sounds, orchestral layers and mangled noise textures. At the centre of all this, Jacob’s voice leads us through the chaos and detritus, alternating between singing with newfound clarity, and whispering with frantic terror.

Elements of other, failed songs are shifted and stretched to fit, bits of an older, doomed life repurposed and brought into the new. We cannot start completely from scratch, and our old lives will always haunt us, but we can draw on them to strengthen ourselves going forwards. Old stones on new foundations. Final track ‘To Love This Body’ subscribes to this completely. Inspired by Alex Zhang Hungtai’s Divine Weight, parts of unfinished tracks are heavily manipulated and re-arranged into a sprawling, 26 minute drone monolith. The track captures the experience of a seizure in full, from a pervasive sense of wrongness to an all-consuming loss of control that disintegrates into abstraction, and finally the lingering sense of shame in the aftermath.

Amid all the bleakness, the confusion and the cosmic body horror, however, are moments of relief and beauty in the kindness of our friends. Almost-pop shoegazer ‘Cosmic Shrapnel, Air Conditioning’ encapsulates this most keenly, with Jacob thanking friends for all the empathy they’ve shown, before the track explodes in a wall of pure bliss. The comedown is quick and harsh, but for that brief time there is true joy. This is how we can go forward through the detritus and chaos of our lives and the world at large, by savouring every moment of happiness, and using them to drive us forward through the rest of the struggle. There are no easy answers, no quick endings, but with patience and sympathy we can get there.

credits

released August 28, 2020

Written, performed and recorded by Jacob Nico
Mastered by Kris Ilic

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Jacob Nico Cambridge, UK

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