I recently read that Jeff Tweedy collects instruments previously used by musicians he respects. Not because he wishes to emulate them, but because there is something really intriguing about how he could use them himself, or hand them to someone else and the results would be completely different from what their previous owners have created with them.
We took a word, Respite, and tried the same thing. The results were similar, but there is a thread that ties them all together. We found that the best representation of that thread is Sisyphus.
Sisyphus toiling endlessly to roll a boulder up a hill as punishment for cleverly avoiding death, even journeying back from the underworld to continue living after having died once.
We are less interested in his life and more so with his punishment.
Life is a struggle, there are nearly always problems and hardship, but there are also moments of reprieve. Some come like the calm before a storm, others we must snatch for ourselves.
We took a piece by Camus that our Illustrator and Printer found, focusing on that moment when the boulder escapes Sisyphus and rolls back to the bottom of the hill. Then and there, as he turns back, he makes a choice to return to his task, you might say this is the moment when his burden is eased, you might say it the toughest moment he faces. Sisyphus cannot leave the underworld until he can perch the boulder at the top of the hill. And likewise the work of the living is never done. If it isn’t work for the resources we need, it’s chores and upkeep of the things we have.
Yet there are always, for all of us, those moments of truce.
Through our writings and folks’ submissions, there were various interpretations of RESPITE. Mental, physical or spiritual pause. When is it most important for us to take a fucking break?
Get a beer, get some weed or shed your clothes and lay on grass. Enjoy.
