Fishing for Hereafter
Hearts of Palm UK's Erica Reels Us In To Throw Us Out
She is a no rest woman: Erica Elektra, lead singer of the LA all-girl band Hearts of Palm UK, whose new album, For Life, comes out October 14th on Hypenote, works her sleep and dreams our future. As the band’s main songwriter, she was gracious enough to provide psychoPEDIA with a footprint of her former profession, astrologist and psychic, but cast in a dream that states our course.The Dream:
So, in my dream, it was a given fact that we'd all turn into fish someday…kind of how in real life we know that we are all going to die someday, it's just something that's known. In the dream, everyone just went about their regular life, and really had no idea when their time would come to turn into a fish. And it wasn't something that seemed to bother anyone really.
But it was quite disconcerting for me. I remember feeling uneasy… like how is it that we're supposed to go on living our lives, when at any moment we could turn into a fish!!! And I was talking about this to a friend, and just philosophizing about it… and telling him how weirded out it made me. And I remember out of the corner of my eye seeing it happen (people transform into fish) just right there out the window, on the street, wherever…And it wasn't regular fish that people were turning into. They were like weird gingerbread fish with painted on smiles… they looked more like cookies. And some people turned into fish that looked like toys. Or fish that looked like candy. But the gingerbread/icing fish were the most clear in my head. Once you turned into a fish, you were lifeless… until someone was able to throw you into some water, at which point you'd come alive and swim away.
The Analysis:
Erica is a no-nonsense knower, who constructs with a centered finality her prognostication of humankind’s designated future, an outcome, not necessarily wholesome unless one is abetted by the mysterious life enabler referenced at dream’s end. However, there is nothing cryptic about the dream’s narrative, structured to unfold with its first word, “So,” the result of an unstated preamble, a continuum, now formed to a proclamation, moving to the not debatable, “a given fact we’d all turn into fish someday,” a backdoor acknowledgement that from the landed fish humans evolved.
Life’s enter and exit signs have fuzzy, seemingly contradictory placement settings for our guide’s orchestrated scenario, but rendered in cozy lettering – all that gingerbread fish stuff – to mitigate, yet paradoxically further, our disorientation. Erica has the hand wipes to clean the slate when she chooses to, and she does.
She sees what does not “bother anyone,” and everyone should be troubled, she implies: turning into fish, not knowing when, an act analogous to dying, but not. Nevertheless, this occurrence, happening “someday,” so dated for its inherently unregulated capacity to fit all, be it fish life or no life, known as death, straddles well an astrologer’s predilection for the undeclared specificity.She is a sensitive foreteller, flipping disconcertion on its gill, heading us to that back door, relabeled entry – the beginnings of life – perceived with a soothsayer’s nonchalance and rapidity, a prowess untainted, “seeing it happen.” The lead singer is an artist, of course, who can counter death with a pool-girl’s play: life’s end is a configured fake out. The beginning is the finish, a baroque climatic. She is totality’s exactitude, a front and back: the fish-people variants look like this and that, “candy” et al, but hang in pre-k simile limbo. The unadorned component is designated as “fish,” now “alive,” to “swim away,” a maturated immediacy catapulted by the unnamed “someone.”
Modest and efficient Erica switches creation and reinvigorates a retired resume entry with a buttressed self-advertisement at a most opportune time. Her dream is For Life.
~Alan Nadler
