The Eerie in Dirty Three’s “Some Summers They Drop Like Flies”

“The sensation of the eerie occurs either when there is something present where there should be nothing, or there is nothing present when there should be something.” Mark Fisher, The Weird and the Eerie

The opening track of Whatever You Love, You Are, the fifth studio album by the Australian band Dirty Three, is the song “Some Summers They Drop Like Flies”:

The song starts with plucked arpeggios on the violin by Warren Ellis, who is joined immediately by drummer Jim White playing a shadowy rhythm. Guitarist Mick Turner enters soon enough, and he provides the song’s foundational chord progression. Ellis pauses for a moment to allow Turner and White to solidify, before beginning to play the main melody that sounds like the loneliest tune in recorded history. This central theme sounds as though it could be Spanish or Greek. Though summoned from the darkest corners of Ellis’s subsconscious, the melody provokes an atavistic feeling of despair so deep that it could have been played a thousand years before this recording.

Ellis and the rest of the band play the main melody through a second time. The song recalls the 2003 film The Saddest Music in the World, directed by Guy Maddin, in which the owner of a Canadian beer company launches a contest to find the saddest music in the world as a promotion on the eve of the ending of Prohibition in the United States. The movie features Jerome Kern’s “The Song Is You” throughout, suggesting that its melody, played over and over in various styles, is the rightful designation of the movie’s title:

While melancholy and wistful, “The Song Is You” has nothing on the central melody of “Some Summers They Drop Like Flies” for profound sadness.  

After the conclusion of the second time through the main theme, a bridge is introduced at 2:44. “Bridge” may be the correct musical term for this passage, but “incantation” is a more accurate description. Ellis repeats the same series of notes over and over again in double time. As the bridge progresses, Ellis overdubs another violin, playing harmonies over the previous part. And then another violin is introduced over those two and then yet another. The tone of the song shifts from forlorn and anguished to something darker. It has a haunting feel as if from a horror movie, but not the typical jump-scare Hollywood product, but rather something subterranean and more ominously ancient. 

At 3:25, the bridge ends and Dirty Three return to the central sad melody again. This section is louder than the opening as Turner’s strumming is more intense and White adds more percussion for emphasis and build. Ellis overdubs a few plucked notes on his violin in a high register to provide counterpoint to the central melody. 

At 4:44, the band moves back to the bridge again, sounding even more like a haunted bridge. The overdubbing returns as Ellis is playing perhaps eight different violin parts at once, but the sound is so overwhelming that it could be as many as 800. Some are simply doubling the original theme of the bridge, whereas some harmonize on that theme. The magnitude and tension of this section intensifies, culminating at a peak of such fervor that it feels as if every door in one’s house is opening at will and something unexpected has entered through a breached entry. The fervor and tone of the sound is phantasmagorical, producing apprehension, anxiety, and even fear. Suddenly, the band slows down and hardly plays anything. The passage and song ends with relief. Yet, something has been left in the listener, a hint or a mark that’s always there and never goes away.

“Some Summers They Drop Like Flies” is the first track in Dirty Three’s discography that features Ellis overdubbing violin tracks. The technique occurs at other moments throughout Whatever You Love, You Are, creating different shadings and emotions appropriate for those particular songs, but nothing with the haunted and hallucinatory sound of the bridge of “Some Summers They Drop Like Flies.”

When Dirty Three began performing the song in concert, Ellis would introduce it by saying, “A song about coming home and finding out that a load of people you know have dropped dead.” Knowing this context about the inspiration for this haunted song connects it to the introductory quote by Mark Fisher and his theories about the eerie in art. Expounding on that previous quote about uncalled presence and unnecessary absence, Fisher writes in The Weird and the Eerie:

“The eerie concerns the most fundamental metaphysical questions one could post, questions to do with existence and non-existence. Why is there something here when there should be nothing? Why is there nothing here when there should be something? The unseeing eyes of the dead, the bewildered eyes of an amnesiac — these provoke a sense of the erie, just as surely as an abandoned village or a stone circle do.”

In “Some Summers They Drop Like Flies,” Dirty Three create a sense of both existence and non-existence. The latter is felt in the inspiration for the song itself, namely the absence of friends who have died and are no longer there. Ellis channels this feeling of loss into the song itself. The tremendous sense of melancholy accompanied by a deep longing is fundamental to the piece and is felt by every listener, even when not knowing Ellis’s motivation for writing the song. 

For Fisher’s notion of “something present where there should be nothing,” this can be heard in the act of overdubbing of Ellis’ violin. Each new violin added to the bridge in “Some Summers They Drop Like Flies” stands in for another friend who has died. Each violin part that enters the song stands for a presence of someone who wasn’t there before. It’s an act of summoning on Dirty Three’s part that suddenly creates a staggering array of otherworldly beings during the bridge. Though Ellis’s intention is to mark their memories, the appearance of so many lost souls all at once is purposefully overwhelming. There’s too much ghostly presence.

This song by Dirty Three brings to mind the work of the American photographer Francesca Woodman. Her black and white photographs usually featured herself or other solitary women inside rooms that, according to the Tate UK, are often “disintegrating empty rooms, with cracked and broken masonry, dust, flaking paint or peeling wallpaper scattered with damaged fixtures and fittings.” Woodman used long exposure times which resulted in a blurring of the photograph’s subject. This gives the impression that the woman in the picture fuses into the walls of the room around her, and she becomes a permanent and ongoing fixture of that space. Geoff Dyer wrote about Woodman in The Ongoing Moment, his extraordinary book on photography:

“In Francesca Woodman’s photographs, the empty door frames are just as substantial as the walls, the walls through which her naked figure is constantly on the brink of emerging or disappearing. The walls themselves become doors. To look at the pictures she made in Providence, Rhode Island, the mid-1970s is to pass through a doorway into another world, a world of Woodman’s dreams. Often she appears from behind the peeling wallpaper, as if she had somehow ended up between the paper and the brickwork and got caught there for about fifty years. It’s as if, when scraping away at the walls you exhume each of the previous occupants — except there’s only one and it’s always her. Everyone who has ever lived in this house has been reincarnated as a teenage girl. A girl who can pass through walls. You pass through a door which might as well be a mirror because the room you end up in is exactly the same as the one you’ve left behind. There’s no telling whether the house in Rhode Island is undergoing extensive renovation or falling into terminal decay. There is no difference between a builder and an archaeologist or, for that matter, between a door and a mirror. The door leaves its post and floats into the middle of the room. There are things known and things unknown and beyond both there is a door.”

Dyer’s wonderful description places Woodman’s work within Fisher’s realm of the eerie. The photographs depict that fleeting sense of presence when there shouldn’t be anyone there that is essential for the eerie. Imagine a gallery of Woodman’s work with the Dirty Three song as a soundtrack playing through speakers. The only ones staying in the gallery would be those willing to be engulfed by waves of creepiness and sadness. 

Both “Some Summers They Drop Like Flies” and Woodman’s photographs feel like house hauntings with an unanticipated presence occupying internal spaces. This is not usually the case with the eerie, according to Fisher:

“We find the eerie more readily in landscapes partially emptied of the human. What happened to produce these ruins, this disappearance? What kind of entity was involved? What kind of thing was it that emitted such an eerie cry? As we can see from these examples, the eerie is fundamentally tied up with questions of agency. What kind of agent is acting here? Is there an agent at all?”

This description of the eerie within a landscape recalls the work by the Australian band The Necks. Near contemporaries of Dirty Three and both bands sharing the same nationality of origin, The Necks create instrumental music for the unknown. In concert, every 40-some minute set by The Necks is improvised as they never play songs that listeners may know from their extensive catalog. In the studio, The Necks also operate in long-form as most of their tracks run anywhere from 20 minutes in length to more than an hour. Reflecting on the idea of landscape and the eerie evokes the album/song Aether by The Necks, released in 2001, a year after Dirty Three’s recording of “Some Summers They Drop Like Flies”:

The Necks create a central theme for “Aether” and they modify the frequency with which the theme is played, pausing at various lengths between each instance. The pauses between the theme are sometimes filled with pulses or what sound like sonar pings, but also are sometimes completely silent and empty. These pauses vary in length and conjure the feeling of absence. Songs by The Necks feel like landscapes, evoking the sensation of moving through the world and responding to the surroundings. The Necks’ recordings could be referred to as songlines rather than actual songs. (Read this previous Recliner Notes post on songlines as a metaphor for musical experimentation.)

As “Aether” progresses, any slight variation is noted by the listener because of the minimal nature of the instrumentation. Though it hardly seems that the music within “Aether” is changing, if one were to skip ahead from the beginning of the track to the end, the song would sound utterly transformed, the same a if fast-forwarding to the end of a movie and being bewildered by the story’s resolution. The Necks’ collective act of taking away and adding to the song’s theme and reconstructing it along the way makes each of their long songs a sort of musical “Ship of Theseus.”

The minimalism within “Aether” is a prevailing mode for The Necks throughout their career, though they also produce fuller, more lavish recordings such as “Bloom” from 2020’s Three. The pauses between the playing of the central theme in “Aether” imbues the song with the eerie feeling that Fisher writes about, the idea that something is missing or removed within a landscape. Furthermore, Fisher writes:

“The serenity that is often associated with the eerie — think of the phrase eerie calm — has to do with detachment from the urgencies of the everyday. The perspective of the eerie can give us access to the forces which govern mundane reality but which are ordinarily obsessed, just as it can give us access to spaces beyond mundane reality altogether. It is this release from the mundane, this escape from the confines of what is ordinarily taken for reality, which goes some way to account for the peculiar appeal that the eerie possesses.”

Though Fisher is not writing about the music of The Necks in this paragraph, he certainly could have been. The Necks call for close listening, but their music can also remove the sensibility that one is actually listening to music. It acts in such a way that the listener wanders away from the “mundane reality.” The Necks’ music is an act of detachment, allowing for the release “from the urgencies of the everyday” and into a landscape infused with the eerie. 

It is at this point that The Necks intersect with Dirty Three. The music of both bands creates the sensation of a departure from the familiar home to another place. For The Necks in “Aether,” the listener moves through a seemingly serene landscape as an alien turbulence gradually occupies and permeates the world. From a distance, this new peculiar world feels the same as before, but it is obscurely transformed. “Some Summers They Drop Like Flies” creates the same response in the listener as “Aether” but does so in an entirely different way. Dirty Three summon the feeling of a room that has mutated through the presence of others, a haunted interior of lost friends. In both songs, The Necks and Dirty Three fully realize Fisher’s vision for the eerie. 

Image: Daniel Rueda, Tiempo, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons.