Wow & Flutter 013 | just a beast that needed killing
moth eater aka emily price (all lowercase) on Women of Noise Fest, post-flood community, the life of an Appalachian poet
I don’t remember how emily (with a preference for lowercase) ended up on my radar, but I know emily feels familiar, maybe even a friend in a past life or generation. I found it interesting emily aka moth eater resides where my grandmother grew up in the valleys of Tennessee. The literature professor and Appalachian poet dances between the atmospheres of the woods and the noise compositions brought to life in dive bars. A first work committed to tape, just a beast that needed killing was released a few weeks ago and quickly sold out. The community builder is focused on flood relief and leaves us with a poem and some wisdom for a shifting autumn.
Wow & Flutter: You just returned from Women of Noise Fest, VOL 1 in Chattanooga, how did it go?
emily price: The festival was completely transformative. Being in a space with so many noisemakers, all so distinct and unique and southern, was wildly powerful. I can't imagine a better way to spend a weekend than immersed in noise. The most at home I ever feel is at a noise show--I can surrender myself to it, move through the sets with peace and joy. Being a listener is hard to describe: I let go of myself and sit with it completely, so the festival was sort of a great ego death. In contrast, though, folks responded to my own work so positively and that level of support was totally unexpected. What a community in Chattanooga!
W&F: Something that made me smile as someone who spent summers in college being a trail guide in Southern Appalachia is your appreciation for Waffle House while traveling—what's in your order?
ep: If I'm going hard, which I usually am, I want a sausage, egg, and cheese biscuit (my papaw's order which is always the move), hash browns smothered and covered, and a chocolate chip waffle. Coffee and water to drink. I put a ton of cream in my coffee always.
W&F: Am I right to contextualize you as an Appalachian poet? Where did you grow up?
ep: You're extremely right about that. My mom's family is from Greeneville so I grew up spending all my weekends, summers, and school breaks on their small tobacco and cattle farm where I helped insofar as I was able as a child. My granny and papaw grew most of the food I ate for the first part of my life. My parents were located in Knoxville by that time but I never felt very at home there— struggled to make friends, felt alienated often. I was only home in the mountains. I also grew up hiking and backpacking a lot, so my relationship to those mountains is ingrained in me in many, many ways.
W&F: How did you arrive at the name moth eater?
ep: It's predominantly a reference to my favorite book, Popisho by Leone Ross! I did actually contact her to be sure she was okay with my borrowing of the term and she was wildly gracious in her response. The novel, which is magical realism, contains this allegory for substances in consumption of butterflies and moths. Butterflies are like alcohol, and moths are like a more aggressive substance, often referred to in the text as poison. Thus, the moth eaters are intentionally ingesting poison. This idea sticks with me because I've leaned into a lot of self destruction in my life, been surrounded by a lot of addiction, and just poisoned myself with pain, with substance, with darkness. Yet, rather than vilifying that aspect of myself, this novel allowed me to recontextualize those darknesses instead as something to accept and learn to sit with. It's part of the range of experience, you know? I never really know how to summarize what this means to me but I've got the book on hand so I'll quote from it.
"The [moth] eaters I have known describe it as a kind of unrelenting sea in the mind. The sea cannot be controlled, you must fall again eventually. The indigent...we know. We stay close to an eater. We accept ghosts, we accept the rot, we accept the death smell, we hang the moth until it is ready!" This quote says a lot to me about the surrender of it all, which is something I've always felt even as just a listener of noise. We accept it all! We fall into it without control! Isn't that nice?
"Tell me why the indigent eat poison." "Same reason we do everything else. To show the land we love it. Accept all of it."
Especially this quote sticks with me in this post-hurricane space. The land has been with me in all my darkness. I will be with it through its darkness.
W&F: Your work contains elements of harsh noise, drone, and spoken word poetry-- on your tape just a beast that needed killing, I felt a sincere Southern Gothic element. In my mind I see hedge witches battling vengeful ghosts on mountain ridges, questionable Bible salesmen and tool sheds. What are you seeing when you compose these scenes?
ep: I love this reading. My mind is always in the mountains and the rivers. Bodies of water and backroads. Think decomposing sheds, think graffiti on boulders on backwoods trails. I'm the moth traveling through all these spaces, all momentary and fleeting. Sometimes I'm a fish, sometimes I'm a stone. I've been writing poems for years before making noise so the language is very conceptually central to me.
W&F: Beasts can be anything. Personal demons, livestock, fiction, pop cultural content celebrities— what is the beast, emily?
ep: The title actually comes from the poem I wove into the first two tracks, about a weird experience I had on the NYC subway this summer. The full line is "I leave myself behind: two blocks strewn with nostalgia, just a beast that needed killing." The whole album is sort of dancing through that theme: the poems wander around my own lapses in memory, trying to hold space for the totality of experience and avoid the over-romanticization that I've tended towards when viewing my life in retrospect. I don't fear sentiment, but I do fear losing the complete range of experience.
W&F: Was your album recorded in a short period of time, or is it collected over a duration? How do you like to work when you put a collection together? Do you start with a theme, or new tools?
ep: I recorded this album all summer, starting in May and finishing in September. I did it all on a little Zoom recorder in my old apartment (that I literally just moved out of last week— a lot of chapters are closing). The poems were composed over the last couple years, and I've been working with them all in my live sets for that whole time. This is the first time I've collected my sounds but I approached like I work with my poems— the collection is from a space in time, a period of my life, and those periods often find me mulling over the same themes. So, there's a definite thematic coherence to it like I talked about in the previous question, but that's just because I've been thinking through a lot of conjunctive concepts rather than an intentional thematic choice. I'm always telling my students (I'm a literature/composition professor) that all things are circling around each other so it's barely a coincidence and more a product of the way I think.
W&F: What synths are you using? What goes into a live setup for you?
ep: My live setup is kind of comically simple. I have a dirt-cheap Mackie mixer into which I run a Korg Monotron Delay and a mic. I run a distortion and delay pedal into the auxiliary channel which allows me to modify the synth and vocals. That's it! I get imposter syndrome sometimes looking at people's gorgeous, elaborate setups when I've got the cheapest stuff available and decade-old pedals I borrowed from a friend, but frankly I think it helps me to push my own boundaries to create variety through simplicity and that resonates a lot with me. There's complexity to be found in the minimal and I love to dig for it. I'm always finding something new.
W&F: Are we allowed to read some of your poetry lines? I was very stunned by the ending of the track "other side of town". I believe you are chanting "grief psalm, another leaving, grief psalm, another leaving." I found myself tearing up. Is it fictitious or a departure in your life that left a wound?
ep: It's so funny that you ask this because that's the only track I've ever improvised so I actually don't have documentation for what I was saying! I think you're right about the chanting line though. I do clearly remember the day I recorded that song. I was feeling some sort of loss very hard, and though I can't recall the particular situation anymore, I remember the moment. I was in the midst of a long recording session and felt words come to me in a way they don't usually, so I just sort of let them pour out. I think you can probably tell that I'm crying in the track. Noise always feels vulnerable and raw to me, like I'm letting out parts of myself that can't escape in any other way, so I embraced that and let myself feel it all. The answer to your original question, then, is that it's all the wounds.
W&F: Does your family attend your harsh noise shows? I always feel like this is the genre family avoids watching.
ep: Oh, absolutely not. My mom is very supportive of the idea of it because she can tell it means a lot to me, but I can't imagine that any of them will ever make it to a show which I don't mind at all. It's enough to just know that my family respects what I'm doing and my relationship to my art.
W&F: Leave us with a new short poem for autumn if you have capacity. Thank you for chatting with us, emily!
ep: This will probably appear in a track on a flood relief compilation soon. I think this one will go to Beyond Death Recordings, a local noise label run by a dear friend of mine. I know this probably isn't what you were thinking when you requested an autumn poem but this is what autumn looks like now. *editors note, that compilation has since been released and may be found here.
the myth of precedent
'this,' he says 'has happened before. we just weren't around to remember it' & there's a kind of sick comfort in the lie. my river is brutal. in the summer, i dragged myself over & over across a bridge that's gone now, up the trail where these days lies a canyon, coursing rapids. landscape wholly new, i find myself unable to believe the myth of precedent. all that's left is us: we hold each other through all this pain, change. and the mountains still stand, still light up in flame-tones, still shed & rustle, still loom over us all, hold us like we hold each other.
We’d like to take a moment to support emily’s community after experiencing devastating flooding post Helene. Below are some links and contexts provided by emily for mutual aid in Tennessee:
Tricities Mutual Aid Venmo: @allixTCMAN (so, so much on the ground work)
Probably the hardest hit county in TN, lots of my students here still in dire straits: Erwin County Tennessee
My dear friend lost her aunt who was made to work the day of the flood at a factory called Impact Plastics: Support Monica's Family
A general org supporting the area: United Way of East Tennessee Highlands
Support and connect with moth eater via Bandcamp and Instagram.