Fugitive Traces is a sound album released in both digital and CD editions* with an accompanying PDF booklet that collages Sackstedster’s voiceover commentary from over a dozen Werner Herzog films with electronic, chamber, and rock music to both pay homage to one of the world’s most visionary filmmakers and critique an artistic practice rooted in contradiction and frequent disaster.
You know the stories. Werner Herzog exploited native workers to clear a swath of rainforest and pull a steamship up a mountain in Peru. Werner Herzog climbed an active volcano on an evacuated island, and then claimed embarrassment that the volcano had not erupted. Werner Herzog brought about the deaths of 10,000 tame rats he’d smuggled into the Netherlands for the filming of Nosferatu.
The album’s accompanying “lyrics” comprise an essay that explores the consequences of being seduced by Herzog’s unique brand of recklessness, documenting a disaster on the set of young filmmaker Sacksteder’s Silo.
Tracks from Fugitive Traces previously appeared on Sleepingfish, The Collagist, Textsound, Quarterly West, and Queen Vic Knives. The Young Vish is joined on this album by Chris Westhoff (guitar), Mark Dickson / Nests (guitar, mandolin), Hannah Robbins (cello), and Brian DiBlassio (piano).
*CD no longer available.
See a video version of Trace 17, “Vapid Babble” (an audio-visual collage in collaboration with Veronika Spalajkovic):
About the Author
The Young Vish is Joe Sacksteder is a Midwesterner, originally. So he was totally unprepared for the earthquake that struck the Osa Peninsula as he sat outside a hostel reading Werner Herzog’s Conquest of the Useless. Even less prepared to turn back to his reading and encounter the sentence that had been interrupted: “Lord Almighty, send us an earthquake.”
He’s the author of the story collection Make/Shift (Sarabande Books) and the novel Driftless Quintet (Schaffner Press). Recent publications include The Offing, DIAGRAM, Michigan Quarterly Review, and West Branch. He has his PhD from the University of Utah and teaches at Sweet Briar College in Virginia.
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