thy springs & valves

The four founding members of the Alaskan post-progressive math-rock ensemble known publicly as Locomotive In Winter, the name lifted from the Whitman poem, sit stone-cold in the rented minivan — transportation for a weekend gig in Iowa — with Val, the band’s founder and lead vocalist and also driver (it was voted upon in the rent-a-car waiting room), the only man recognizable to gawking passerby, not for his rock and roll fame but as a person in wreckage, the four musicians blood-caked in their seats of broken glass, skin and teeth and bone, dead without question, pin cushions for many rounds of lead, not even the drums or basses stacked in the back intact.

Prior to being dead and in Des Moines, Val had grown up in Leningrad and, due at first to boredom, and not ingenuity, had many ideas as a boy, mostly musical ideas, which grew in cube shapes and rectangles, tessellating right angles, Val a boy with ideas the shape of Soviet architecture. He later described his style as Bauhaus and cough-rough in between vodka sips at the dark bar where I once interviewed him, for the first and only time, in 1986. And waterlogged with vodka, too, re: his style, I hypothesized, after watching his easy gulping endure for hours.

‘Let me toss ball you,’ the words a moist and serious ghost that haunts in a vodka-thick tang. ‘You read Whitman?’

I could tell by the way he kept his coat on indoors, a green overcoat heavy with seasons of hardened ice-snow, that he would make one day like the great composer Rachmaninoff and die in the U.S. a musician. And I could tell by his cabbage-soft verbiage that he didn’t read Whitman but translations of Whitman, of which there couldn’t be many accessible, not at that time yet, and so I knew that Val was serious about him, serious about the arts, serious about his ideas, and the way his brown and blue hands just looked invincible, somewhere between the best of a pianist and boxer, that only a machine could kill this man.