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THE FALL OF SAIGON
ONE OF THE MOST IMPORTANT BANDS OF
THIS CENTURY SO FAR- YOU JUST DON‘T KNOW IT YET

 By MIKE ARMSTRONG

 Chapter 1

 The day was sunny.

-The Fall of Saigon

When I say, “I’ll Tell You a Story About You,”

I mean I’ll tell you one about me.

Obsession is a son of a bitch. It compounds you. It makes you. It wants to eat at you. It wants you to die. But the pleasure is so real! So intense! So rewarding that there can be little to no substitute for it. There can be no comparison, no heaven, no plentiful life-after-death scenario, no holy promise, no Sadeh, Naw-Rúz, no shadow nor Paryushana, no Christian, no Matsuri, no Buddha, no swirling, no light — no temple sage, no feast, no wine — there is just Obsession. It is both death and joy. It destroys families, it pulls tongues, it eats its cake. It is openness in all its glory, it is valleys, it is squander, it is peaks, and it is bliss. — It’s a son of a bitch.
I would know — I have my obsession — with music. It’s so consuming it’s affecting my relationship with my children. My wife looks down every time I bring up the subject. But despite this, I continue. I move forward. As I write this now, in the darkness of my room, my small son is next to me on the bed, the cold light of the computer screen drawing the color out of his sleeping face. His last words before he fell asleep: “Dad, you’re always sitting on the computer with your music. I miss you.” Obsession is a dirty son of a bitch.

 Chapter 2

I was in Elsewhere. 

I left your brother there. 

He was sawing logs stiff like cacti.
-The Fall of Saigon

“Practice Makes You Perfect They Say.” “Oh, I Just Thought You Were a Genius.”

 The Fall of Saigon, comprising only one person, has made to date over 856 songs consisting of roughly 100 albums within the last three years.

And it’s not a pissing contest. His albums, despite the speed of their release, have been eerily coherent throughout and so meticulously positioned and spaced they’re comparable to someone who’s obsessively made just one.
Everything has its place. The timing and output are so striking that after you’ve scrolled down four albums worth of penetrating and well-crafted music, you see that you’re still in the first month of his latest work. Before you finish listening, he most likely has a new demo up.
The sheer volume of his work makes it hard to get an overall picture, but it is clear that — even from the early first albums that hint towards the more technically sophisticated production that we find on his later albums — the musical thread, the lyrics, the artwork — are there.
The melodies, the mix-matching of electric and acoustic guitar, the interludes, the leitmotif, the repetition of songs over multiple albums with subtle variation chosen, it seems, specifically to advance the greater whole of the story — everything is there from the beginning.
I assume he’s playing the Disorder version of The Seahorses on RoomRock because of the way he’s strumming — because of the way he’s strumming!
And it’s from these earlier albums that an overall narrative structure is slowly being developed. And it is through this obsession for storytelling and writing combined with the intense, almost manic pace of production that a densely packed description of life is told over many albums. And what is music suddenly feels literary.

CHAPTER 3

At night sometimes I want to let go of everything.

But in the morning, I thresh the grain again.
Articulate, Recompose
Choose your words. Make them ring.
Tell yourself no. Restart.
And finally, sort it out.

-The Fall of Saigon

I READ BOOKS TOO YA KNOW

When I listen back from The Fall Of Saigon‘s newest album to his earlier albums and think about them later on, I am reminded more of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle series, or Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past series, or Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita more than I am reminded of any other piece of music. I read books too, and this is the first time I’ve ever listened to music and afterward felt the same way I do when I finish a book.
I don’t know what this means. But I imagine the shift from recording studios to home studios, into the intimacy of the personal space, lends itself to this concept of a recorded diary of sorts. Not explicitly true to life but close enough to capture the fleeting moments of your own personality, capture its moods and the unintentional sounds, the everyday machinations of home that find themselves into the recording. This makes a project like The Fall of Saigon possible. This allows the creative process of making and recording music to inch closer to the act of pure writing. The burden of production is removed.
It will be interesting to see how this evolves in video AI technology where now the intensive labor and demanding skill set of visual media is removed — the playing field is level. How will this change storytelling?
 

When I say, “I’ll Tell You a Story About You,”
I mean I’ll tell you one about me - Demo-version-2

I have a track where there’s a creak in the floor the moment my wife comes into the room late at night to tell me I’m playing too loud (it happens often). And every time I listen to that moment in the song I reflexively turn to look if she’s at the door no matter where I am. Imagine the power of that. Imagine the beauty of that moment archived for your future self. Is that not already Swann’s Way? Or the ability to have immediate access to your emotions after a fight, or my example of my youngest son being quite ill and me singing “If I Could Take Your Pain Away” as he lay in the next room. Is that not James Joyce? An argument my wife is having with the children recorded from a distant room. Is that not My Struggle? Technology has democratised the music-making process. You can now record a studio-quality album from home at your convenience as easily as you can put pen to paper, changing the way we’re able to tell stories through music. 

Chapter 4

The road to elsewhere must be traveled
Be cautious there unless you're double
Though you can hide amongst the maples
It will be better to ride a marble

-The Fall of Saigon

'Will you be performing tonight?'

'Sorry, no. I've been sober for years.'

To make music for many is an act of recording, not necessarily playing. It’s about the tracks and the mix and combining the instruments to make a complete sound. I run into the issue quite often when talking to musicians about RoomRock, ‘Is it a problem I don’t play live?’

These are not musicians that you’ll see busking on the street corner. And I’m continuously amazed how many ‘bands’ are just one person — The SpukSchreibMaschine comes to mind. But to think of them in the singular seems ridiculous. He’s not in a band — he is band.
So, with this shift into the private space and the technical ability to make endless home recordings, we have an artist like The Fall of Saigon — the right band, at the right moment in time, with an obsession and drive that takes this new way of storytelling and elevates it to something sublime, something truly special and, in my small understanding of the world, something not only important but critical to music in the new century.
The album is novel.

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