Happy Birthday Florist (pt.1), thoughts on ephemera and iph0nes, a love letter to listeners
"O foolish writer. Now moves. Even in storytime, dreamtime, once-upon-a-time, now isn't then." - Ursula K. Le Guin
10 years is not a very long time. At the same time, 10 years is well beyond the lifespan of many earthly things. Back on the other hand, there are trees more than a few thousand years old. I wonder what they know.
Why do we conceptualize a decade as some weird milestone?
Please enjoy another quote here, from Carlo Rovelli, a very emotionally minded physicist who I am a fan of:
“This is time for us. Memory. A nostalgia. The pain of absence. But it isn't absence that causes sorrow. It is affection and love. Without affection, without love, such absences would cause us no pain. For this reason, even the pain caused by absence is in the end something good and even beautiful. Because it feeds on that which gives meaning to life.”
I think if we experience a lot in any given stretch of time, especially those experiences that profoundly alter us, we have a pretty impactful sense of the memories as random trail markers, through a land with no beginning or end. They form us, and we catalogue them. When we experience this alongside love, it seems there is never truly nothing in the spaces that time leaves.
In my rummage through drawers and dusty sheds in search of early Florist memorabilia, I realized something that has been on my mind ever since. The things that have survived this first chapter of our little band, largely, are physical objects. Tangible music formats, random ephemera, polaroid pictures. I got a smart phone years after I started writing my own music, but it was right around the time that Florist became a thing. During the first few years of all this, the portable “keep in touch” technology was mostly arbitrary. I still carried around my instant camera and we DIY’d a lot with our hands, so there is record of it. No apps, no g8gle maps. Then there is a void of 6 or so years in the middle, when I cycled through a few different smartphones and never bothered to transfer the photos, never owned an archival digital hard drive, or simply just did not realize this was something I should care about. When I went back into my childhood home searching through random boxes that made it back in between transplants, still packed away not to be moved to my next apartment, I realized that there are very large chunks of my own history missing due to this lack of preparedness, lack of foresight, whatever you want to call it. The ghostly and forgotten nature of our digital stories. Luckily, I am able to piece things together, and I think there is still some cool stuff to see. It does give me an urgent sense to put more of an emphasis on physical (and digital backup) archiving. I don’t want to lose more in the next 10 years, when it might be fun to look back again.
By the way, of course, it all becomes dust. There is no meaning, no reason, and probably even no actual objective reality we can trust in. I guess maybe I find this all kind of interesting, sometimes fun, and I have some minutes of my life to spare for it. After all, if nothing else this life is ultimately a search for finite joy in an everlasting void.
Ok, Florist history.
Lots of publications have written about this, and almost all of them have gotten it wrong in one way or another. I don’t think anyone has ever gotten it completely correct. So, in the spirit of things being documented, here it is from my brain.
In 2010 I am still in high school. Rick Spataro (Florist bassist, keyboardist, recording engineer, extraordinary guy) graduated from the same high school a few years before. We are both from Catskill, New York. He moved up to Albany for college (the nearest city outside of our rural snowmobile infested area), and one night while smoking pot in my friend’s basement (you got the weed in the funeral home parking lot next to the cemetery just out their back yard), Rick texts me : “Hey. Uke collaboration?”. It maybe was the best actual moment of my life. The backstory here is that I had somewhat recently published my first song to MYSPACE. It was ~1:30 long, ukulele and voice. Rick heard it there, and probably got my number from a friend of a friend. He was known to me as the really cool guy with sideburns who carried a calculus textbook, played a thin-line Telecaster, and listened to weird music.
My dad drove me up to Rick’s apartment where, in an unusually small room used for band rehearsals and recording, he had a Tascam 424 tape machine and somewhere nearby a copy of “Tearing Down the Wall of Sound“. Rick (still today fascinated by serial killers and analog recording) told me he wanted to eventually have a studio and make records for people.
This song was our inspiration for the session.
The end result was 4 or 5 tracks, of which were among the first real batch of songs that I had ever written. I recorded a few more times with Rick, later at his family home in an old backhouse-turned-storage-barn (where we still have Florist practice to this day). Making music with him always felt easy and exciting. Rick was playing in a band called The Red Lions at the time and he showed the rest of the members some of our tracks at practice. Jonnie Baker (guitar, synths, saxophone, sampling, psychonautic energy force) played in that band. I’m sure Jonnie has his own telling of how this all went down, but from what I understand he wanted to be a part of our ecosystem.
Jonnie was summoned into this timeline by Eric, front-person of The Red Lions, when a couple years earlier Jonnie allegedly came to him in a dream singing “Imagine” by John Lennon something like 12 octaves above the normal pitch. Them two went to high school together 5 or some odd years earlier, not really friends, not really not. Freaks of serendipity and fearless nihilism find each other. The rest is Everything Everywhere All at Once style realities, miraculously forming.
Jonnie, Rick and I had an immediate understanding. We were very fond each other’s company, and talking about dying.
In 2013 Rick, Jonnie and myself had now been performing together, working on recordings, and generally bonding over analog synthesizers and psilocybin for a couple of years. In the Spring of 2013, Florist was finally given it’s name. The story of the name isn’t particularly interesting (depending on how many details I give up), but still I want to keep that private for now. For me it has come to represent the multifaceted identity of a flower arranger. Beautifying, preserving, composing, killing, and commercializing a natural and emotional thing which we probably know too little about yet encounter very often.
There was one significant catalyst that led to the band solidification, though, and this occurrence remains today to be one of my most holy memories.
Throughout the end of the 00’s and very early 2010’s I was playing open mic nights, random local bar gigs, and excited to take pretty much any music opportunity that came my way. Someone that I had played with once or twice at a local coffee shop/bookstore offered me a show in New York City. As a teenage fan of Bob Dylan and Joan Baez, Lou Reed and Patti Smith, the idea of playing in the city, even for an “Upstate New Yorker”, felt like a big deal.
The venue was hole in the wall Lower East Side dive bar on Delancey street called “The Delancey”. I drove my barley running, $700 1985 Volkswagen Rabbit down I-87 with a fire in my heart and a tear in my eye. Upon arrival I was greeted by the smell of old beer mixed with dirty water and one large man asking for my ID. I was born in 1994 so, underage at the time, and not allowed to be inside the establishment. Except for the 25 minutes that I was performing my set. Victory.
At the end of those awkward but life-giving 25 minutes, I met Marc and Cory of (now disbanded) Lizard Kisses. They had by pure random chaos also been on this bill. After performing Marc quickly asked me for my contact information, and with a bouncer over my shoulder I lit up my i$hone, added Marc’s number, then proceeded out the door to walk around Manhattan in the early night. Half searching for my car, half searching for a place to never come back from.
Marc and I connected quickly. He is an easy person to know. I visited him in Brooklyn not very long after our Delancey show. He pointed out all the best restaurants and food trucks. We went to Chuck-E-Cheese at Barclay’s Center, record bin digging at some of his usual haunts, and walked across more concrete than I had ever before in my life. For dinner he made (from scratch) macaroni and cheese with bacon and carrots, then pulled down the projector screen and put on 2/3 of The Teenage Apocalypse Trilogy. I wasn’t scared at all. He talked about screen-printing t shirts, booking basement tours down through the south, and cutting 7” records on a homemade lathe machine. I felt for the first in my life I had found a flow, like a piece of algae in the East Australian Current. I thought maybe this could take me to the place I had so far only imagined inside my head, but desperately wanted to go. Some kind of shadowed chasm full of fire and diamonds.
Marc had a tour in the works, with friends Mutual Benefit (their bandcamp design is the same now as it was then, as is ours), and asked me if I wanted to join. I sat in my parent’s living room before riding my electric scooter up the road to work, and listened to “The Cowboy’s Prayer” with eyes full of crying atoms. Jordan’s music was, is, and always will be among my favorite sounds to ever float through our universe. I wrote back to Marc, instantly agreed to do the tour. I mentioned to him that it would have to be with my new band, called Florist. Then Rick, Jon, and myself immediately started working on the first Florist release. We saved one track for a special 7” split with Lizard Kisses that we handmade together that May as a tour exclusive.
So we had a real reason to start recording something official. The tracks are a selection of songs we had been playing live a bit, and some improvised instrumentals (see we really have been doing that from the beginning). Instrumental 1 is all 3 of us playing a harmonium simultaneously. We recorded and mixed the tape ourselves in a shed at my childhood home around the Catskill area. We listened to the rough mixes in Jonnie’s mini van in the driveway and “mastered” it ourselves. Not much has changed. We have been this way forever.
That tour was the first that Rick, Jonnie, or myself had ever been on. There’s a lot to say about it, a lot of anecdotes I could drop or places I could reference. But it’s another piece of pie I would like to leave inside our brains for now. The important thing in this written recollection is that it was most likely the single event that set us on our course, gave us a feeling of being, and also pain, but mainly an experience that finally made the meaningless choreography of life make some kind of comedic sense. It was something, I think, we decided to never let go of.
When I started writing this post, when I had the idea for it, things seemed much simpler and with a smaller economy of words. I was happy and excited to write about it, and sitting here now I realize things have gotten a bit long winded. So I think this is going to serve for now as a “Pt. 1”. It is the most early history, anyway.
Please enjoy some more scans and images of early Florist objects which have been collecting dust.
Of all the many lives I have floated in and out of, Florist is my family. It is more than an art project, and it grounds me. All of you are a part of it, and it’s energy is meant to be shared.
If you’ve made it this far, thank you! I hope this was somewhat enjoyable. I can’t thank everyone enough for all the love and support we have gotten these last 10 years on all stages of this journey. Here’s to 10 more.
Now time for some quick business.
We have some shows coming up in Europe and America! Please see the dates below.
EUROPE:
16/06 YES, Manchester, UK
17/06 Beyond the Pale, IE
18/06 Maifield Derby, DE
19/06 Frannz Club, Berlin, DE
20/06 Malešice Botanical Garden, Prague, CZ
21/06 Pension Schmidt, Munster, DE
22/06 Paard, the Hague, NL
23/06 Doornroosje, Nijmegen, NL
24/06 Aéronef, Lille, FR
27/06 Landmark, Bergen, NO
29/06 Roskilde Festival, DK
AMERICA (more TBA):
June 10th Storm King Art Center, New Windsor, NY
July 23rd Pitchfork Festival, Chicago, IL
August 3rd Pickathon Festival, Happy Valley, OR
See you soon :)
Love,
Emily
have you ever thought about writing a memoir?
Thanks Emily for sharing the History behind this little universe you guys created with songs. I discovered Florist only 6 months ago but somehow it felt like it was the only band i was waiting for... Your coming show in Lille, France, will be a gift ! See you there, and thanks a lot for all the emotions you bring through music.