Departure Songs
“But, uh, we’re not there yet...”
With this pronouncement William Burroughs’ voice fades and “Challenger Part 1 – Flight” begins in earnest, six minutes into the track. It makes for a poignant introduction to the penultimate entry of We Lost the Sea’s 2015 album Departure Songs.
The quote also well describes my initial reaction to the album.
I came to post-rock as background music for writing prose. I can’t listen to music with lyrics as I write, and the interludes of spoken samples so pervasive in the genre similarly broke into my flow. I found them to be annoying interruptions to the music and my writing alike.
When I first heard the album, I found it enjoyable but not immensely so. I was put off by the tuneless stretch of water sounds at the beginning of “The Last Dive of David Shaw” and particularly by the lengthy Burroughs monologue that opened “Flight.” I distinctly recall describing the album as “great” but this six-minute sampling as “totally unnecessary.”
My softening on “Flight” and my broader shift toward appreciating post-rock as more than background music coincided with my listening to it while I wrote code. The sung or spoken word was not so great an impediment to writing programs as to writing stories. I could listen. I could listen properly.
Prior to Departure Songs, We Lost the Sea had a vocalist and a distinctly heavier metal sound. In 2013 vocalist Chris Torpy committed suicide. The concept album that formed in the wake of his suicide was inspired by his loss and woven through with other departures, quests that began in hope and glory and ended in ash. The stories contained in each song are conveyed by the titles, but it was the knowledge of Torpy’s death that brought the album together for me. My background music, inconveniently punctuated by that six-minute Burroughs recording, was a memorial for a lost friend. Now I began to hear that memorial. The track names that had previously blurred into irrelevance sharpened into definition.
“A Gallant Gentleman” opens the album as an ode to Lawrence Oates. On Robert Falcon Scott’s ill-fated 1912 South Pole expedition, Oates walked out of his tent and into a blizzard. He hoped his two companions would travel faster and be able to survive without him and his frostbitten feet slowing them down. His body has never been found, but six months later a search party erected a grave near where he was thought to have died. The inscription on the cross marking that grave reads, in part, “Hereabouts died a very gallant gentleman.”
The track is distinguished by the accompanying choir, which stands out especially at the end. The energy of the main part of the song, accompanied by the usual guitars and drums, fades slowly into wordless vocals that fade away in their turn. The listener can almost see Oates slipping from his tent into the deadly white world outside. The voices might be those of angels, hailing him as the hypothermia sets in.
The notes do not quite resolve but leave behind a lingering unease, a longing, something left unsaid or undone.
This song and its story thematically establish the album; Oates’s sacrifice was brave but fruitless. His companions died all the same.
“Bogatyri” takes its name from knightlike figures in Eastern Slavic folklore, but the track’s story is significantly more modern.
After the initial explosion of Reactor 4 at the Chernobyl nuclear plant in April of 1986, molten reactor fuel seeped through the floor and risked coming into contact with a large pool of water in reserve for cooling the reactors. To prevent a resultant steam explosion that would have dwarfed the initial blast, three divers were sent on a lethal mission into the radioactive water to drain the pool. These three men were dead of radiation poisoning within days, but they had saved the entirety of Europe from becoming an irradiated wasteland.
So a common telling of the story goes.*
“Bogatyri” conjures those tunnels under Chernobyl with impressive force. The harsh industrial surrounding conjured by heavy cymbal and guitar licks stands in sharp contrast to the fading choir of “A Gallant Gentleman.” It is easy to close your eyes and imagine descending into black water, groping through narrow flooded passageways, feeling the walls closing in. There is something in the water with you. There is something in the air. You couldn’t see it even if your path was flooded with light. You never see ionizing radiation at all. You hardly feel it until it’s made a billiard table of your innards.
The divers, the water, the dark—all this also presages the album’s centerpiece.
You can watch David Shaw’s last dive on YouTube.
The footage isn’t very interesting. He’s wearing the camera; he isn’t in the shot. With the restricted light and the water it is difficult to make out much of anything. It’s easy to get distracted and click elsewhere on the internet and leave the sounds of water as background noise, forgetting that the origin of these pixels and soundwaves, so many years and miles distant, was a person drowning.
The watery sounds that open the footage open too “The Last Dive of David Shaw,” the first track of the album that truly entranced me. I was a software developer fresh out of college at my first job, with Spotify serving me post-rock on demand. I had heard Departure Songs before, but now I was really listening. The monologue that opens “Flight” still put me off that track, but “The Last Dive” has no such baggage. It was easier to fall into.
David Shaw was a record-setting technical diver who, on a previous dive, had discovered the body of Deon Dreyer deep in Bushman’s Hole, South Africa. This unassuming pool opens underwater into a massive cavern about a thousand feet deep and popular with scuba divers. Looking at a picture of the entry point’s sheltered position, overshadowed by cliffs, it is only too easy to imagine how quickly all light fades under the surface. The slow beginning of “The Last Dive” evokes that: the sound of the water, the vanishing light, the slow descent.
After discovering Dreyer’s body, Shaw returned to Bushman’s Hole on January 8th, 2005, to attempt to retrieve it. But despite the preparations and planning that went into the dive, and as spoiled by the name of the song, things went awry. Reaching the body, making that descent through the dark, was easy enough; going down is not usually the treacherous part of technical diving. But Shaw was unusually encumbered with a camera on his helmet and a bag for the body. He hoped to make a film out of the recovery.
Shaw dove using a rebreather, an apparatus that recycles and supplements oxygen from the user’s exhalations. But if the user is exerting themselves, breathing faster than the system can filter out carbon dioxide, that recycled breath becomes a recurring nightmare. Without sufficient oxygen, the diver suffocates.
You can hear in the song the shift that occurs as Shaw reaches the bottom of that blue-black hole and finds Deon Dreyer’s body where he last saw it, as he sets up his lights and begins the work of maneuvering the body into the bag he brought for that purpose.
You can hear, too, as things go wrong: Shaw is tangled in the wires of the lights. The body, contrary to his expectations, floats. The work becomes a struggle and then the struggle to get the body into the bag becomes a struggle for Shaw to extricate himself from the wires. The steady pulse of the music might well be his heart, beating just that bit faster and faster. You can hear the crush of the water and the dark. You can hear the fight to survive, and when he starts to lose.
The heavy climax gives way to a gentle piano. It might be rays of sun near the surface. The other divers ascend. Shaw does not.
Shaw and his team intended to make a documentary out of the recovery of Dreyer’s body, but the camera ended up recording something else entirely. Dave Not Coming Back, released in 2020, recounts the story of the dive through footage, recreations, and interviews. Don Shirley, Shaw’s longtime friend and diving partner, explains his decision to release an overdubbed version of the footage of the dive in order to explain what happened and to shield the sounds of Shaw’s final moments. Shaw’s family and friends speak of the media circus in the aftermath of his death. What to them was a personal tragedy became something to be talked about, dissected, analyzed. People continue to make YouTube videos breaking down “the truth behind David Shaw’s death.”
It feels ghoulish.
“The Last Dive of David Shaw” is a beautiful song. But it isn’t an ode to an ill-fated expedition a hundred years ago, or to the failure of a space shuttle in 1986, or to the cleanup crew of the Chernobyl explosion only three months later. It is the most recent and most private of the album’s stories. It seems probable that the success of Departure Songs led to more awareness of Shaw’s death, more theorizing, more analyzing, more digging up a watery grave. It’s certainly the only reason I’ve heard of him, and here I am, continuing that cycle. I can’t help but wonder if those who loved Shaw would rather the album had left him out.
In the end, Shaw accomplished his mission. Three days after the dive, his body was found floating near the surface of Bushman’s Hole, still tangled in the lines. With him was Dreyer, retrieved from the depths after all.
The listener floats up too, from the water to the air.
The following track, “Challenger Part 1 – Flight,” has become my favorite of the album.
It is a challenging (ha, ha) song. The opening six-minute Burroughs monologue is an irritant to anyone seeking wordless background music. The twenty-four minute runtime is quite long even by post-rock standards, though the song falls into natural subsections. But these features define a song more evocative than any of its fellows on the album.
One of the most-upvoted comments on a YouTube upload of the song says it best: “I went to space for 23 minutes.”
“Flight” opens with a haze of disparate and distorted guitar sounds. Beat author, artist, and wife-manslaughterer William Burroughs begins to deliver a monologue that echoes through a vast distant space. The recording is a sampling of a talk given by Burroughs at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics on August 11, 1980. The subject of the sample is dreams.
It can be difficult to make out what Burroughs is saying, but snippets bleed through the ambient sound.
“To me, one of the most important new facts about dreams is that they are a biologic necessity...which means that they must serve a very important function...
“...Now, if the human body is much too dense for space conditions, we have a model to hand and that is less dense, in fact almost weightless, and that would be the astral or dream body. So the function of dreams may be to prepare us for space, and that is why they are a biologic necessity.”
Burroughs’s talk was given five and a half years before the Challenger shuttle would break apart midflight, killing the seven people onboard when the crew compartment crashed into the sea. One of the seven was Christa McAuliffe, a teacher selected from more than eleven thousand applicants to join the crew as part of NASA’s Teacher in Space project. McAuliffe’s inclusion in particular renders the tragedy more visceral. Here was a process, going to space, that had become so routine that civilians could join in. Here were her students, gathered around the television, witnessing a spectacle of a different kind than they expected. Here was her family, her husband and children and parents, watching from a rooftop near the launchpad.
When Burroughs draws a mystical connection between dreams and space travel, he is referring to dreams in the biological sense. But another meaning of the word asserts itself behind the echoes of his voice and the dissonant music. We dreamed we had mastered the final frontier. We dreamed the shuttle would best the cold. We dreamed we wouldn’t fail.
But, as the last words Burroughs speaks in the opening remind us, we’re not there yet.
This opening section lasts about six minutes, already longer than a standard pop song. But if you have the time to devote to listening to it properly, to listen to it with the context of the title in mind, it feels brief.
Indeed, this happens to me not infrequently in post-rock. At first a track’s runtime beggars belief. The first few listens may reinforce the impression of song as Sisyphean listening task. But as it becomes familiar, becomes liked, becomes loved, that time passes all too quickly. Great scads of seconds and minutes are swept downstream in a river of time and sound. I emerge drenched from the water and press repeat, unwilling to come up just yet.
The next part of the song is my favorite. The sample of Burroughs’s talk gives way to a plaintive guitar and a beat carried by drumstick clicks. This section and the following one, where the driving beat yields to a sprawling landscape where the guitar can wander, invoke for me a sort of preemptive mourning. The shuttle has not yet taken flight, but its end is inevitable. The worst has not yet happened, but it certainly will. The pieces are in place and nothing can be done to redirect their motion. Here is the culmination of the album, of three journeys already gone wrong and a doomed fourth looming.
And then the elegiac music gives way to another recording, this time of the countdown for Challenger’s launch. The vastness narrows to the launchpad. The radio-garbled voice reporting from Mission Control Houston counts down from ten. To a nation assembled to watch the latest in a series of successful spaceflights, it is a countdown like the thrillingly slow climb up the steep hill of a roller coaster. To a modern listening audience it is the countdown of a time bomb.
The shuttle is aloft; all seems well. A cymbal marks the beat. Through the repeated notes a melody emerges, and under the insistent guitars, like the roar of the engines, the announcements continue: “Good roll program confirmed”; “Challenger now heading downrange”; “Engines at 65%” . . .
Listening to this section invariably speeds my heart rate. The tension winds tighter and tighter. There is nothing to be done now but listen. Even forty years ago, there was nothing to be done. The uncertain future annealed into terrible certainty as soon as the shuttle launched.
As the drums join in, for a few brief moments all the instruments sing together in their tightly choreographed harmony, like the machinery of the shuttle executing as expected. But slowly they diverge. The tight syncopation loosens and the desperate melody rises over all of them. There are no more recordings. There is only the music and then the distortion as the song and the Challenger break apart.
In the aftermath, under the squeal of the guitar, the sample returns. Mission Control delivers a grim message. But now there are the voices of onlookers too, shocked and confused.
A single voice rises over the rest. “They were here and now they’re gone,” a woman says. She sounds tearful.
Mission Control has the last word, devoid of comfort as it is. They have no answers, but will provide information as it becomes available. And over the following days and months and years, more information will become available, tales of O-rings and record low temperatures and last-minute teleconferences.
But just then there is no information. There is a blue sky filled with white fingers of smoke and the terrible unmoored feeling of something born in triumph and ended in disaster.*
From my favorite track to my least favorite. “Challenger Part 2 – A Swan Song” is the sole note of hope lingering among the chords of despair struck by the rest of the album. This might well be much of why I dislike it; I tend to prefer melancholic songs.
But it isn’t quite right to call “A Swan Song” happy, either. It’s more uplifting than its companions, but as eulogy and memorial rather than celebration. Its sounds beat upward like wings against that still-blue sky, like faces raised in defiance of death.
Perhaps “A Swan Song” fails to resonate with me because it feels hollow. It is the album’s second-shortest track, and after the preceding hour-long journey through the extremities of cold and heat and depth and height, its uplift does not quite register. It is as though, journeying through a long dark tunnel, the listener spots what they take to be the glow of the sun, only to find just a lightbulb flickering on the wall. Light is light, but the tunnel looms dark outside of that little spot.
Quite possibly this is deliberate. But as a capstone to the album, it feels unsatisfying.
As the last of the music ebbs, though, there is a final sampling, snippets of the address President Ronald Reagan gave in the evening on the day of the Challenger disaster.
“We’ve grown used to wonders in this century. It’s hard to dazzle us. We've grown used to the idea of space, and perhaps we forget that we've only just begun.
“We will never forget them, nor the last time we saw them, this morning, as they prepared for their journey and waved goodbye and slipped the surly bonds of Earth to touch the face of God.”
The address was written by Margaret Noonan, Reagan’s primary speechwriter. It seems almost to echo the sentiments of Burroughs; the desolation of “we’re not there yet” morphing into the hopeful “we’ve only just begun.” But the last line of the speech itself embeds phrases from a famous World War II poem, “High Flight,” written by John Gillespie Magee.
Magee’s ghost shimmers eerily through the words of his 1941 sonnet resurrected in a 1986 speech in a 2015 song. He fits in well among the album’s other figures. The outbreak of World War II impelled him to join the Royal Canadian Air Force, but only a few months after he wrote the sonnet, he died in a training accident.
Here, again, is the pioneer setting out, the doomed adventure starting, the outstretched hand reaching for the sky. And here, again, is the journey started in hope and ended in despair.
“High Flight” is a beautiful poem, freewheeling and joyful. Its words are resonant at the end of Reagan’s speech and at the end of the album.
But, for me, it is Burroughs whose words echo in the quiet after the music dies. I linger on the tragedy, not the heroism, in that gap between the dream and the reality, between building the tower to touch the face of God and being struck down for believing that such a thing could be possible.
* One of the men did die, in 2005, of a heart attack. And while a subsequent steam explosion would have spread more fallout, its potential impact has been grossly exaggerated; the whole continent would hardly have become uninhabitable. Moreover, the potential radiation risk to the men wasn’t clear to them at the time. They were brave men doing an admirable job under horrible conditions, but they were not a suicide squad setting out to sacrifice their own lives.
The more sensational account of the story appears to be the one that inspired the song. Matt Harvey, a guitarist in the band, also does its artwork, and it is that version that captions his Bogatyri piece. That aside, I urge you to look at his gallery. In addition to the album cover, each song has an accompanying piece, and each is exquisite.
*Triumph & Disaster is also the title of We Lost the Sea’s next studio album, released in 2019. It follows similar themes but, in my opinion, less remarkably.