Each Tuesday, FADER editor Matthew Schnipper highlights an underappreciated recent release he thinks we need to know about. This week it’s Gang Gang Dance’s Rawwar EP. Buy the mp3s for four dollars total and read Schnipper’s thoughts on it after the jump.

You know what you don’t need to do if you are bummed out? Listen to music about the Holocaust. In 1988, a 52-year-old Steve Reich wrote Different Trains, a string quartet with vocal samples, comparing his train trips in the late thirties and early forties in the US as a small Jewish boy to those that his small Jewish boy peers in Europe were taking from their homes to concentration camps. It is split into three parts—”America—Before the War,” “Europe—During the War,” “After the War.” Reich recorded the voices of a train worker, his caretaker who took the train with him between his divorced parents on both coasts and from Yale’s library took recordings on Holocaust survivors. He clipped their orations to small phrases and noted their speech. When a man speaks, he is doubled by a cello, when a woman speaks, she is doubled by a viola. The piece is accented with sounds of train whistles and alarms. “He said, Black crows invaded our country many years ago. And he pointed right at me,” “On my birthday,” “1941 I guess it must have been,” “And he said don’t breathe,” “They shaved us,” “The war is over.” So there’s that.

What do you do with that? In my case, you don’t leave the house until ten o’clock the next night and read about Steve Reich. Because if you are not going to leave the house you can’t also read about the Holocaust. You also take a break to watch Millionaire Matchmaker. Fuck it. You also look to buy the original vinyl for Different Trains and find out there is only one copy available on the internet and it costs 130 euros. So then you pull out your other Steve Reich records because there is a limit to how bad you want to make yourself feel because you can stop it sometimes so you might as well. When was the last time you listened to Violin Phase as played by Paul Zukofsky? I promise you the other versions you can find are not as good.

In discussing Reich’s early rejection of the static dissonance of 12-tone music, Reich says in this documentary, “This is not Europe, this is America. John Coltrane’s playing at the Jazz Workshop. There are hamburgers being sold. There’s Motown on the radio. How can you pretend in a world like that that you’re living in the dark brown angst at the turn of the century? Or even that you’re living in a bombed out Cologne in 1945. It’s just not true.” Then he talks about how much he loves John Coltrane. These men changed things! Things were going in one direction and they branched that direction, curved it like a potted plant in the sun. When Reich speaks later about writing Different Trains he doesn’t do it with any abject sadness but with absolute honesty of having the idea tumble from nowhere. It was not that he needed so resolutely to mourn those dead, but not that he ignored them, either. Simply the Holocaust had happened, his parallel life had happened. What do we do now? He made something moving. It moved me. The way the man says “1945” is pretty catchy. Sometimes I sing along.

So what of all the people dying now, in 2009. Did you hear about the kid in Boston who killed three of his sisters with a knife and then himself? I read about their funeral where photos of all the siblings as small children were shown. One of the surviving sisters referred to him, if not fondly certainly unharshly, as the only brother she had. In Seattle a man killed his children and then himself, purportedly because his wife was leaving him. In Birmingham an immigrant killed other immigrants at the center for immigration. Someone told me that after coming back from Korea he was struck by how diverse New York seemed. In Korea, everyone was Korean. In bleak times this is not helping anything blossom. In Italy, there was a thoroughly deadly earthquake. Maybe Steve Reich thinks it is time for awful music about now. How do you celebrate the dead if they keep dying?
The first time I heard of Gang Gang Dance was when one of their members, Nathan Maddox, died in 2002. He was struck by lightning while watching a storm on a roof in Manhattan. Since then much of Gang Gang Dance seems to be dedicated to celebrating his life, but this EP, Rawwar, has his face on the cover and his voice on a song. “This is the sphinx, abu Al-hol, the father of terror the Arabs call it. Always gazing eastward. Looking at what?” he says to introduce “The Earthquake That Frees Prisoners,” his voice lifted from a film. Later, “Mohammed got me stoned.” I bet he was a good person.

To be honest, I don’t want to talk about that song. It’s so personal. Listening now it feels like an eavesdropping. Maybe it isn’t and I am missing the point. How do you mourn someone else’s loss? I don’t know how to hear to his voice.

A few years ago NPR’s Story Core recorded my grandmother telling stories about her father dying, after they had all left Turkey and come to the US, another about eating five pounds of hidden pistachios. She’s still alive. She’s had a hard life but she’s survived. This doesn’t even sound like her. The tape is fast. But it’s the sound of her voice that is so striking. Or maybe just the inflection. It’s familiar. I don’t want to be close to the dead but that’s selfish and not my decision.

To be honest, “The Earthquake That Frees Prisoners” is not the best song on Rawwar. “Nicoman” is. What the fuck does that mean? RIP everyone. I don’t want anyone to feel bad anymore.