Alabaster DePlume, Photograph by Alexander Massek
Alabaster DePlume wants you to know that he thinks you are doing good. And by you, he does mean you, whoever you are. Over the course of a wide-ranging 40 minute chat, he returns a number of times to the person who he imagines is reading these words, a figure that he knows in some ways, and also doesn’t know at all.
“I feel connected to you,” he says. “I love this feeling of considering you, and knowing you are someone, somewhere. I love that this is a moment in my life. This is the substance of my life, as I sit here, and a helicopter flies past, and someone very dear to me makes a noise with a bag in the room next door.”
DePlume speaks with a sort of staccato rhythm, pausing and reflecting, emphasising unexpected words. In this way, his voice resembles the stop-start and beautifully unfinished saxophone music on which he has made his name. On his newest album, A Blade Because A Blade Is Whole, things happen, and then, even more remarkably, they stop happening. The abruptness of these endings, the way solos change and spoken word poetry cuts in, has a swell and power all of its own – his music is always the thing that is about to be, or has just been.
“Please tell everybody that I think they’re doing very well,” he says. “It’s tricky, living – it’s tricky sometimes. We are the perfect people for the world in this time, because we are the people who are in this time.”
DePlume’s way of thinking means that every question is answered in this way. One might call his brain’s function “sloganistic”. His sentences are neat, poetic, dense. “Every time I say ‘I’, I am talking about a different person,” he says. “In this life, especially as an artist, but in general, nothing is promised but everything is possible.”
As we talk, I realise it is hard to imagine him saying something casual like “the kettle’s on” or “I’ve got to go in a minute.” At one point, in response to a question that gets lost as soon as it is asked, he says, “You get nothing in your life but your time.”
Another thing DePlume wants is for me to include myself in this article. In a way, that’s unavoidable. Not just because the observer, the interviewer, always ends up in the stew, but because DePlume keeps asking me about myself. “What arises between us – you, Joe, and I – is a resonance,” he says. “It is a character.”
He tells me that he has just been reading about my recently published novel, Painting Portraits of Everyone I’ve Ever Dated. It’s my debut, and I’m somewhat embarrassed about it being discussed because it feels like arrogance almost every time I say its name. So I apologise for it.
“You can let go of sorry,” he says. “You said, ‘I am sorry you have to start your day reading about my bloody book.’ I don’t have to. I choose to. There are people who your novel is for. There are eight billion people in the world – don’t tell me that your novel is so special that nobody is going to be saved by it.”
I wonder if DePlume always thought and spoke this way. It would be unfair to describe it as an affectation, because it seems so genuine, but it does appear so in line with his music that it’s hard not to consider it a project in itself. But I do not need to ask DePlume when this all started, because he tells me. He mentions the way he stays in communication with the people he used to be, people who he says he has “killed off,” but still honours in the form of a tattoo on his hand, depicting his past selves.
“I like to talk to him now and then, this child who I was,” he says. “This child who decided secretly – he would not have told anyone – that he was gonna say some mystic things. He thought, ‘I am gonna figure out some really good things to say.’ Because when I was a kid, I was in a very busy house, where everyone had lots of things to say. And when I was a child, I chose my words very carefully. I thought then, ‘I am going to make secret little sayings.’ So I reach back to him, that child, to tell him that you make a good choice there: to aspire to do this.”
Such secret little sayings have their own power, in a world where so much is said casually. I describe it as a world that’s suffering, but DePlume disagrees, and describes as a world awakening.
“What is true wants to come through,” he says. “Especially in this time now, with the genocide in Palestine, and the fascist governments in Europe, and the cruelty between people. We need you, whoever who you are, whoever is reading. We need you exactly as you are.”
From the genocide, DePlume briefly turns to a discussion of Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke, who recently released a statement ostensibly decrying violence on “both sides” – the “both sides” argument being the last refuge of someone who doesn’t want to call an atrocity what it is.
“[Yorke] says that our lives tick along like normal, while the suffering is happening,” DePlume says. “And that actually clashes with my experience. I don’t find my life ticking along like normal. And that clashes until I wonder who he means when he says ‘us.’ Because there will be some people who can describe this time as ticking along as normal. He means a certain kind of person. And that tells us who he is writing to.”
So, given the horrors unfurling, I want to know, where do we find peace? Retreating to the personal feels cowardly and self-indulgent, given the wide-ranging nature of pain in the world. But DePlume doesn’t seem to believe there is such a thing as the personal. At least, there’s nothing that is not shared.
“Picture one person playing sock puppets that talk to each other. But it’s just one person talking to themselves. That’s what the Universe is. We are just playing at this game of individuals.”
And as to the way to shape the loneliness, the anxiety, the fear – DePlume has a suggestion for that too. “I enjoy looking at the difference between scary and exciting,” he says. “I feel like they are very similar. But the main difference for me is that I fear the thing that is happening to me, but I am excited by the thing I am doing. And so if I can find some slight volition of my own in the thing that I fear, then it can become excitement. And possibly the way from being scared to excited is curiosity; if I can find any curiosity in myself for the thing that I fear.”
The things that I fear: pain, change, loneliness. The things that Alabaster DePlume fears: I get the sense that it might be miscommunication, of the most profound sort, given that a mentor once told him that all behaviour is communication. The things that you, reading this, fear? I’m not sure. But if we are merely playing at the game of individuals, speak it aloud to yourself and I’ll hear you. Alabaster DePlume will too.
Alabaster DePlume performed at Dark Mofo on Saturday 14 June.
