In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Geoffrey D. Morrison’s novel The Coffin of Honey is imaginatively speculative and marvelously thought-provoking.
Publishers Weekly wrote of the book:
“This dense and poetic novel of first contact from Morrison (Falling Hour) submerges readers in a future that is both collective and fractured… [Readers] will be rewarded with much food for thought.'”
In his own words, here is Geoffrey D. Morrison’s Book Notes music playlist for his novel The Coffin of Honey:
If we were in a very fast elevator – perhaps plummeting fatally to earth on account of improper maintenance – and I had almost no time to describe The Coffin of Honey to you, I would call it “a Marxist Close Encounters of the Third Kind.” If our descent was happily arrested before impact, I would also be sure to tell you it had debts to Roberto Bolaño, Ursula K. Le Guin, Pliny’s Naturalis Historia, Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh, and a 1968 pamphlet about flying saucers by the Argentinean Trotskyist J. Posadas.
The book takes place at the end of our century, in a world where a half-successful global proletarian revolution managed to hold back the worst effects of climate change but could not completely unseat the capitalist powers from their increasingly paranoid and death-driven perches. It is into this fraught geopolitical arrangement that the UFOs arrive – because of course they do – and begin to offer select individuals the chance to travel to other worlds, have life-changing encounters with the sublime, and then go home again. Central characters include Varughese, a minor Marxist politician from Kerala; Forough, a poet and biodiesel engine mechanic from the Greater South Caspian Collective; and a man with a redacted name who spies for ATNA, a nasty garrison state patched together from all the most reactionary tendencies of the Anglosphere.
Music and song play key narrative roles in this book. Multiple characters are moved to sing or play instruments by their transit to new worlds, and they do so in ways that either draw from their own traditions or create strange new syntheses. Of special thematic importance to me were West and South Asian Sufi devotional forms like the ghazal and qawwali which emphasize the intoxicating love of the divine.
I sometimes listened to music as I wrote, but I listened even more while riding the bus, doing chores, going for walks, getting wistful late at night – moments when I tried to conjure up the emotional states and aesthetic sensibilities that would be so essential to the writing I did later. The songs on this playlist all helped me to do that in one way or another. Some of them are also explicitly mentioned in the book.
The Coffin of Honey has an internationalist point of view, and this playlist inevitably reflects that. But despite the eclecticism, there’s an emotional tenor many of these songs have in common: rapture, catharsis, yearning, the desire for transcendence or union. Some of them also speak to my book’s interest in cross-cultural contact and polyglotism. A higher-than-average number of them have the power to move me to tears.
Écoute-moi camarade
Mazouni
This song comes first simply because of how fully it evokes another time and place, with such irrepressible attitude, a swagger undercut by self-mocking melancholy. I don’t know if it’s possible for any book – let alone mine – to truly feel how this song sounds, but in my moments of wildest ambition I hoped it might.
Mazouni was an Algerian singer who spent a decade in France making music for fellow immigrant workers. The title of this compilation album, Un Dandy En Exil – Algérie / France – 1969/1982, is almost a poem in itself.
Come Down to Us
Burial
My friend Matt says this might be the best song of the 2010s. Adam Curtis used it to spellbinding effect in the opening of his 2015 Afghanistan documentary Bitter Lake. Curtis has spoken about the song as representing the new Romanticism of the lost post-2008 generation, aching for transcendence and a reenchanted world. I listened to it often during the years I was working on this book. The Lana Wachowski sample – “this world that we imagine in this room might be used to gain access to other rooms, to other worlds previously unimaginable” – must have subconsciously informed my decision to have my characters keep cryptically telling each other, “It’s in the other room.”
Many of the other samples have a science fiction or ufology flair, coming from sources like the Whitley Strieber movie Communion, the classic RTS StarCraft 2, an interview with NASA Earth scientist Melissa Dawson, and a 1982 film called Liquid Sky, in which a UFO comes to Earth to feed off of human endorphins released by partying New Wavers during sexual climax. I’d never heard of the film until I began doing research for this playlist, but I’m struck by its similarity to my own, perhaps gentler premise about alien beings symbiotically drawn to the human experience of the sublime.
Milonga de Manuel Flores
Written by Jorge Luis Borges
Performed by Eduardo Darnauchans
The rioplatense milonga, strongly rooted in traditional African rhythms, was a precursor to the tango. Like the Mexican corrido or the estadounidense cowboy song, it sometimes told of young men coming to quick deaths in knife fights on the plains. This one has the distinction of being written by none other than Jorge Luis Borges. You can tell: “Miro en el alba mis manos, /
miro en las manos las venas; / con extrañeza las miro, / como si fueran ajenas.” (“I look at my hands in the dawn, / I look at the veins in my hands; / I view them with astonishment, / as if they were another’s.”)
Darnauchans’ version interests me because it doesn’t sound like a milonga at all. I first heard it on the Uruguayan literary podcast Oír con los ojos, and was shocked by how much the opening bars almost reminded me of an Irish or Scottish air.
With Tomorrow
By Gene Clark
Performed by This Mortal Coil
We’re still firmly in Adam Curtis territory here. He used this one (which I had no idea was a Gene Clark cover until now!) for his 2021 documentary Can’t Get You Out of My Head, most memorably to accompany footage of a Chinese revolutionary ballet. I started work on The Coffin of Honey not long after watching the documentary, and while I sometimes find Curtis’s politics a bit wishy-washy I think it is hard to deny what an artistic and curatorial achievement his films are. I always come away from them feeling imaginatively replenished.
Mohammed’s Radio
Warren Zevon
I listened to this a lot on the bus home from one of my several jobs, teaching English to immigrants at a night school. I would look around me at tired-looking people from all over the world, hauling their all-too-costly groceries in their worn reusable bags, and feel like the lyrics hadn’t aged a day: “Everybody’s desperate trying to make ends meet / Work all day, still can’t pay the price of gasoline and meat.”
We don’t know who Mohammed is or why he has a radio (or a lamp for that matter), and that is part of the magic. The song is populated by generals, aides-de-camp, and village idiots whose faces are glowing with wonder, and that is magical too. Warren Zevon songs are outward-looking in a way that’s unusual for Americans – even when he’s stuck in Echo Park, his heart is in Ensenada. Partly why I like him so much.
Biological Speculation
Funkadelic
We don’t know what we’re vibrating about. I love how this song is both grounded and metaphysical at the same time – one of the great hallmarks of George Clinton’s writing. It provided the perfect soundtrack to my attempts to grapple with concepts like bubble universes and braneworlds in my research for the book. I of course also loved and listened to Clinton’s even more emphatically UFO-oriented project, Parliament’s Mothership Connection, but I decided it would be too on the nose for this list.
Lorelei
Cocteau Twins
Maybe Scotland’s greatest-ever alternative act, which is saying something. Listening to Cocteau Twins makes me feel like I am floating in a warm, peach-coloured ether. The famous incomprehensibility of the lyrics is actually a part of this. Meaning is always receding just around the corner, which means that the song is inexhaustible and will last forever.
She Wears a Hemispherical Skullcap
Craig Leon
The earliest stages of the reading, writing, and thinking that would eventually become The Coffin of Honey were often accompanied by Craig Leon’s remarkable electronic music albums Anthology of Interplanetary Folk Music Vol. 1 and Vol. 2. They are ideal for embarking on a science fiction-adjacent project like mine was, and the song titles are marvelously evocative: “She Wears a Hemispherical Skullcap,” “Standing Crosswise In The Square,” “Four Eyes To See The Afterlife,” etc. And this is the man who produced or co-produced the self-titled debuts of The Ramones, Blondie, and Suicide!
I had half a mind to put this song first, but I loved the transition to this from “Lorelei” too much.
Every Grain of Palestinian Sand
Muslimgauze
Muslimgauze was really the UK-based producer Bryn Jones, who until his untimely death in 1998 made albums of experimental electronic music expressing strong sympathies with the Palestinian people. “Muslimgauze” is of course a pun on “muslin gauze.” It always makes me think about how the etymology of “gauze” has long been thought to come from “Gaza,” and that in the Middle Ages Gaza was an important and prosperous city of trade and textile production.
While many of the songs on this list were the kind that would inspire me to write later, rather than the kind I would listen to while writing, I think Muslimgauze’s work is genuinely good music to write to. The insistent, seeking intensity of the rhythm locks you in.
Ser Magu
Shahrem Nazeri, Keykhosrow Pournazeri
On this recording, the tanbur player Kaykhosro Pournazeri accompanies the singer Shahrem Nazeri, who has long been interested in expressing Sufi themes and poetry in his music.
The tanbur is a lute-like instrument which exists in various forms across Central Asia, Iran, and beyond. I sometimes listened to tanbur playlists while writing to try to evoke the feeling of the rainy hills of Northwestern Iran, which in the book is the location of the Hyrcania Kolkhoz where Forough lives. Part of the reason I was interested in this specific part of the world is that, like my home city of Vancouver, its biome is temperate rainforest. I once visited a local botanical garden with my mother and noted how well the trees from northern Iran were doing in this likewise rainy and overcast region. The nearby Caspian seaport of Anzali genuinely was briefly the epicentre of a Soviet-aligned Persian Socialist Soviet Republic from 1920 to 1921.
Ay Carmela
Coro Popular Jabalón
If you are the kind of teenager who quotes Spanish anarcho-syndicalist Buenaventura Durruti in your high school yearbook (and, yes, I really did) then it is inevitable that you will become acquainted with the many rousing left-wing anthems of the Spanish Civil War. In imagining the culture of the Communards in The Coffin of Honey, I figured they would be a little bit like that too, paying homage to the working-class revolutionary movements that came before them. They keep time with the French Republic calendar, use Russian terms like “soyuz” and “kolkhoz,” and sing songs like “The East is Red” and “Ay, Carmela.” However, as an international movement, they do so in ways that also reflect their local traditions, and so I had the Communards of the Hyrcania Kolkhoz listen to a tanbur player who slips “Ay Carmela” in among more traditional material.
Listening to this Spanish song now in between “Ser Magu” and “Tinariwen,” I’m struck by what it has in common with them: the dark, communal ambience of low voices chanting along to a melody played by a stringed instrument in something like a Phrygian mode. I don’t think it’s an accident. Spain was al-Andalus, once, and its former place in the Islamic world is reflected in everything from architecture to music to basic vocabulary. Even the beloved Mexican football chant (“A la bio, a la bao, a la bim bom ba”) may ultimately have an Arabic origin.
Tinariwen
Group Anmataff
An infectious bop. I listened to it often on my way to work in the summer of 2024.
Group Anmataff’s “Tinariwen” is not to be confused with the famous Tuareg rock group of the same name. In the Tuareg language of Tamasheq, the word “tinariwen” literally means “deserts.” The song was included on the influential 2011 compilation album Music from Saharan Cellphones, notable for being most non-Saharan audiences’ first chance to listen to the phenomenal Nigerien guitarist Mdou Moctar.
Paduka Saigal Padoo
Umbayee
Umbayee, who hails from Kerala, is a pioneering figure of the Malayalam ghazal. The ghazal form is a short, richly ambiguous love-lyric based around couplets, often set to music. What makes the form so compelling to me is that, just like George Clinton’s lyrics in a totally different context, ghazals are grounded and metaphysical at the same time. When ghazals tell of intoxication or love, they can be understood either physically or spiritually. Ghazals originated in Arabic but moved eastward to Persian-speaking and Urdu-speaking lands, and then onwards to South Asia more broadly. Umbayee played a key role in popularizing the form in the south of India, having fallen in love with it while working as an apprentice electrician and part-time smuggler in Mumbai.
I felt that Varughese would be a fan of Umbayee and see him as a kindred spirit. A working-class man with left-wing sympathies who grew up in the multicultural environment of Kochi, Umbayee wrote sensitively in his autobiography of his battles with alcoholism, poverty, and crime. His voice has a tenderness which I felt Varughese’s would have too.
Yaadon Ki Baaraat, Pt. 1
Kishore Kumar, Mohammed Rafi
This song comes at a pivotal moment in the 1973 Bollywood smash hit Yaadon ki Baraat (“Procession of Memories”), as it brings together three brothers who were separated in childhood. I first learned about the film and its soundtrack in a somewhat roundabout way, while reading about the deep love many people in Romania feel for Bollywood movies. When Yaadon ki Baraat was shown on Romanian TV in 2003, more people watched it than Big Brother. Romania and India had good relations during the Cold War, and at a certain point in my book I have a character reflect on this in a highly associative way (call it a procession of memories!).
I also made this song the “interval signal” for one of the numbers stations used by the spy from ATNA. There’s more on numbers stations in the entry for the “Tyrolean Music Station” below.
Donald and Lydia
John Prine
Two lonely working-class people have sex via astral projection. Like all the best Prines it’s sweet, funny, tender, and sort of makes me want to cry: “But dreaming just comes natural / Like the first breath from a baby” (!!!)
Albeit in a non-sexual way, two characters in my book, Forough and Varughese, are also cosmically linked via dreams, premonitions, and uncanny coincidences.
Spud Infinity
Big Thief
This album was a favourite on bus rides home during some of my critical writing phases. Many of the songs that urge me onwards creatively do so with a few lines that seem to express my own project even better than I could. In this case it was the lines, “When I say celestial / I mean extra-terrestrial / I mean accepting the alien you’ve rejected in your own heart.”
Tyrolean Music Station
Broadcast by the French intelligence agency SDECE
Archived by the Conet Project
This requires a little explanation. Also, I’m sorry.
I’ve been fascinated by shortwave radio numbers stations since I was like 18 years old. They are used by many of the world’s intelligence agencies as a very secure way to send coded messages to field agents. The numbers they broadcast are meant to be decoded via a one-time pad, a cryptographic method that is technically unbreakable if you do it properly. They also tend to have an “interval signal” indicating the beginning and end of the transmission, usually a piece of music or a sound effect.
Numbers stations give me a spooky, lonesome, Cold War-hauntological, end of the world kind of feeling. Imagine being a random home shortwave enthusiast staying up late at night and finding one of these stations by accident. More to the point, imagine being a spy, holed up in some bug-ridden safehouse with curtains drawn, listening with pencil and paper at the ready for a message that might literally be a matter of life and death. I did! And then I put something like that in the book. Technically all of the redacted journal entries by the man from ATNA are being sent to his handlers this way.
I find the Tyrolean Music Station alternately hilarious, maddening, and eerie as hell. A perfect work of postmodern pastiche. The French Service de documentation extérieure et de contre-espionnage chose German-language music, numbers, and names to throw off the scent. They added a music box playing the opening bars of “The Internationale” to make it seem like the transmission was coming from a Warsaw Pact country like East Germany. And they probably chose yodelling thinking it would be too awful for anyone to want to listen all the way to the end. I especially love how the percussion in the first part sounds like explosions.
Yeh Jo Halka Halka
Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan
Yes, this version is over twenty-three minutes long. Yes, periodically there are guys clearing their throats loudly on mic. No, it could be no other way. This recording – at the Digbeth Civic Centre in Birmingham in 1983 – is the version for me, maybe because it’s the first thing of NFAK’s I ever heard. I watched the video of this performance (it’s easily found on Youtube) and was profoundly moved.
If you’re getting bored, just promise me you’ll stick it out until the percussion comes in.
An audience member shrieks in delight nearing the 14 minute mark, and then again at 15. My editor, Pasha Malla, told me his dad was at an NFAK concert in Toronto where someone fell from a balcony out of sheer ecstasy.
Jeff Buckley, a Nusrat superfan, once said, “He’s my Elvis. I know everything about him.” He described his idol’s voice as being like “velvet fire.”
L’Internationale
Words by Eugène Pottier
Music by Pierre Degreyter
Performed by The Eyo’nlé Brass Band ft. Francesca Solleville
I knew I had to include this song because it stirs me and because it plays a crucial role in my book (Varughese sings it to the UFO that comes down to him on Kerala’s Golden Beach, among other things I’d prefer you find out for yourself), but I had a hell of a time choosing which version.
Some of the big orchestral arrangements get too self-serious and lugubrious, but the versions recorded by solo vocalists tend to lose the uplifting might of the chorus. The original French lyrics don’t always translate or even scan well in other languages (poor Portuguese! poor English!), but most France-French arrangements are a little too uptight for my taste. I nearly went with a jaunty Catalan rendering, because you are meeting me at a very Catalan time in my life, but I decided it was too jaunty for this playlist.
Enter Benin’s Eyo’nlé Brass Band.
The perfect recording of this song does not exist, because at heart it is not meant to be recorded. It is meant to be sung out in the street with many other people. But this recording, for an album made to mark the 150th anniversary of the Paris Commune, comes very close. You can easily imagine parading down the avenues and singing with a band like this. Francesca Solleville, who recites verses near the end, also sang on the album commemorating the Commune’s 100th anniversary. If we eat our vegetables and stay out of plummeting elevators then perhaps we will live to celebrate the 200th anniversary, with any luck in a world that has come a little further along towards realizing the promise in the words of this song.
Geoffrey D. Morrison is a language teacher and trade unionist who lives on unceded Squamish, Musqueam, and Tsleil-Waututh territory. His debut novel, Falling Hour (Coach House Books, 2023), was longlisted for the Dublin Literary Award and a finalist for the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize. The Coffin of Honey is his second novel.