The High Llamas Hawaii

Hawaii is ethnographic indie pop; a post-colonialist concept album that explores ideas of culture, community, identity and property through stories of weekend anthropologists, local theatre companies, and frustrated book editors. The stature this album holds in my memory is rare—along with but a handful of others, I have very distinct and very positive recollections of it. I discovered the record right before I left college—a show on Bloomington’s community radio station WFHB piqued my interest by merely mentioning the words “High Llamas” (as a sidenote, the bonus disc that came with the CD led to my completely accidental discovery of Nick Drake via the cover of “At the Chime of a City Clock”). The first song to grab my attention was “Campers in Control” (mp3), which takes a resident’s perspective of an annual seasonal land-grab in some highly sought-after locale—the viewers take a seat and hope for a “race well-run”. The langourous instrumentation and multilayered “aaaahhhhh”s sketch a picture of a man and woman sitting on their patio, sipping lemonade from sweaty glasses while wearing broad-brimmed straw hats and oversized sunglasses, just cracking up at an out-of-town father, clad in sandals with black socks, exiting the family RV and wiping his brow in exhaustion.

A few months later after graduation, I had the opportunity to jump with both feet into the strange and incredibly daunting world of broadcast documentary production. We were doing work mostly for the Discovery Networks, and the company was run by two ex-newsmen—a producer and anchor. That meant was lots of travel and small crews—shooters often edited our own footage. The 46 minute/5-segment programs we produced covered topics ranging from demolition derbies to Roswell weirdos to Army sniper training, and though I hated the 80-hour weeks, retrospectively it was easily the most interesting and second-most rewarding experience of my life, aside from teaching. Re-enactments were the biggest bitch of all to shoot: they required the longest set-ups, and required dealing with historically accurate “actors,” which was an exercise in patience, to say the least. I frequently found myself humming the refrain from “Nomads” (mp3), mostly because it’s so appropriate, but also because it was so soothing. The combination of trombone and guitar lend the vividly described scene the feel of a langorous circus, which would have been nice.