A Review of Country-Mouse Synth Music
A lifter whose name you’ve never learned has just replied, ‘Happy New Year’s, Brother!’ at the gym’s front doors. His existence, despite the exoticism of twenty tattoos, suggests you’re ‘skinny fat.’ Moments later, a week after the year’s darkest day, you are on a walk radiating out from your county seat in Kentucky towards somewhere unspecified but dimly known, far down some country road.
As though you’re recalling a custom, you search for ‘country-mouse synth’ on YouTube—no perfect matches, but close enough: the synth artist Tiny Mouse. You have not always been country and/or mouse enough. You have been, regardless of location, merely small town, which is to say, for instance, that you have a complex about being able to say that the music on the channels these albums are on often has ambient and minimalist elements—but in these mouse cases feels about as sophisticated as anthropomorphic country mice who disdain minimalism just as much as they dislike ‘country’—in large part because it’s simply not their scurrying culture—and isn’t ‘comfy synth’ enough.
If you can parse what feels like full-sun Boards of Canada tracks backing Reading Rainbow read-throughs (or a secret show that was like Reading Rainbow but ten times as long), you will understand that country mice long ago began to wield lo-fi radio up in sycamore/oak/beech/hackberry bowers. A relevant pair of mice protagonists had diligent yet effusive mice pups in a yellowed, twinkling, alternate lost decade of homemade, high-collared outfits and canned beans and tomatoes, who would be raised in part by this trilling, droning music beaming in fuzzily past a mudroom to a green shag-carpet den.
Certain mice apparently produce tinny synth albums about their ways between odd jobs, evoking their bucolic condition with simple tracks of one to three ‘instruments.’ Such albums are about a restful evening under a drowsing vault. Some mice brew beer and can tolerate it. A high, languid toodling that doesn’t stray too many notes in any direction is a mouse at speed.
The mice know at least one owl who has opened a successful woodland school in a house on stilts, but their children attended a public schoolhouse run by theorist scholar mice. Marble busts of ancients. Educational toys: foam, puzzles, counting beads, individual rugs.
The mouse husband is perhaps even a yeomouse vibrating within a timestream that exists for a mouse vanguard—’as the future was supposed to be.’
Despite Saint Thomas Aquinas’s insistence that other animals are absent from the afterlife, the Bible is silent on this topic, as a priest not long prior to your walk told me in confession, as though to say some of them do get to Heaven. On some plane, the ‘country-mouse synth’ mouse may subsist spiritually in intersection with the grey-skied area you are traversing, out past subdivision streets lined with spindly pines and cracked pears, out past the hellfire Baptist church, past the main chrome grain elevators and the other grain elevators and pickups associated with grain elevators and seed engineering, past discarded corn husks, but maybe not past stone walls and barbed-wire fences containing cattle pastures that winter into a yellow-brown corruption of green; this mouse skitters on silent feet, scavenging nuts, kernels, or even red winter wheat planted after complications to Ukrainian agriculture.
As you chuck-chuck nibble peanuts near the turnaround for twelve miles, dogs spot you, too simple to be construed as vicious.
Barks trail you.
You are in a quiet microseason and neighborhood where hawks, falcons, extraterrestrials, foxes, coyotes, and perhaps even mice are not quite immobilized but humans find it to be too much. This cold is a stratum beyond phones, (un)sullied by music; the murmurating winter starlings are clinkarinkaclicking.
Someone fuzzy scampering from another truth amidst a secret twinkle is maybe revealed in photos of more than two megabytes each.
Profanely closer to town on the way back, holiday wishes can be called in or texted to many, perhaps even to a she/her or so.
Sometimes a 4.5-hour walk materializes abruptly. If you could feel in any way upset towards the end of one, you would be afeard of your life’s trajectory.
(Everyone reading this is a supergenius—especially the mice and other country people.)
About the artist
Stephan Crown-Weber is a writer/translator from Central Kentucky. He is at work on a novel about a widespread Kentucky mummy crisis. Website: www.crownweber.com.
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