Kurt Rongey

That Was Propaganda

That Was Propaganda was conceived during the Russian coup of August 1991. The first notes of the first track were inspired a little later when news came across of the decision to change the name of the historical old city from the terrible, dark oppression of "Leningrad" back to the historical "St. Petersburg." Although perhaps imperialism didn't serve old Russia any better than communism did in the 20th century, this change of identity, this attempted erasure of a legacy too horrible to live with, seemed like a rebirth. The healing of the territories of the former Soviet Union will, as we have seen, take a long time. Their disease, collectivism, can only be cured when every individual human recognizes and learns to live by the requirements of his autonomous identity. This is the subject of That Was Propaganda.

Release Date: May 10, 2000 from Mellow Records.  

 

 

1. St. Petersburg

 

A. St. Petersburg

"...when the doom of the gods had entangled her, so that she must submit..." - Homer

For acid lifeline works
the straight
and marrow filled in
barricade of
torrents warm
in every line of mine
presuming this is not a drill
We will
navigate our ways around
the buildings
that our fathers found
An entourage of sliding walls
She calls
aloud to them
and lays the wreath beneath

Rough skin
Telling it like a blasting furnace
Crying for her
We were

In this wide world
You are the hate untied
You are the grave inside

End this cold world
Running again
We're standing alone
Looking outside ourselves

In this dead light
Wandering, we're afraid
Wondering why we stayed
In this hard night
Tie us together
All into one
Make us forget ourselves

Rough skin
Telling it like a blasting furnace
Crying for her
We were

B. Petrograd

"...strong Hatred, defender of peoples..."
- Homer

Hand high
flag low
Swollen ground
If you know why
the world turns round
gravity fails
us
now

Show us new way
Harder day

I have
a friend
who does not know me.

Long life
Tired eyes.
My friend: enemy.

Hold my head
in your hands
hell to open.

Tearing every nerve apart
Our cracking hands
have drawn the chart
We drive the ladder
deep into the ground
Laughing as the tallest trees
fall down.

We stack them up.
We set the flame.
We plunder all
that fueled their fame.

The stories we were told unfold
around our heads
and we're defenseless.

C. Leningrad

"...the destructive doom of levelling death has fastened..."
- Homer

D. St. Petersburg

"...when the young Dawn showed again with her rosy fingers..."
- Homer

With shackles
on the frozen waste
I give myself another taste of
Love that comes from deep within the mind
I ask you all
to leave the past behind.

A refuge in the world within
O let the river here begin
The falling shards of hate begone
And perish all the words
that still destroy.

.

2. Some things
should not be expressed
in words and music

"And he who sings not with us today
is against
us!"
- Mayakovsky

Some things should not be expressed in words and music

Like the anger after the fact
Stories that I sometimes tell
to myself

That you were mine
and I was yours
and we had saved our souls
The thought I banish
And I hate myself
for being wrong
and being selfless.

Like the silence inside my head
After I questioned why
And you're always around
And contact is closer
than flesh to flesh

cold caress that still hurts me.

Like the hatred
you could not stop.

Still hanging on to self-denial
Taking every blow
Compassion that could kill
All they could do
with words and notes
was beat you senseless.

Some things should not be expressed in words and music.

Like the things
we say we want back
Fool am I.
How can I part with myself?

.

3. In the know

"Therefore in governing the people, the sage empties their minds but fills their bellies, weakens their wills but strengthens their bones. He always keeps them innocent of knowledge and free from desire, and ensures that the clever never dare to act."
-Lao Tzu

.

4. Valutnaya

"now it sparkles in bright hoarfrost,
is glimpsed in the somnolence of wallflowers...
but truly and secretly
it leads away
from joy and from peace."
-Akhmatova

Marked with cruelty
Throwing flares
To cars and carnivorous men

Empty bottle
Open context
There's nothing left to defend

Lurid as the purest drug
Arrayed and racing
Flock of worry
Grinning angel
Walk of fury
Smiling angel
Shades of eros
Naked aching
Body shaking
Shoulders arch
And money is the cure

I am your guide
Come with me
Ride with me
Nothing can change my way
Gravity serves me.

Racing illness
Sheltered in a maze
of perpetual love

Wordless passion
Hope and glory
All she can give is enough

Looking close at living color
Border guards are
Braving rapids
Grazing sheep
And giving to the smiling angel
Shades of Eros
Naked aching
Body shaking
They have never seen
a drug so pure

Whore.

You were with me
Black curtains fell away
You were here
By my side
While we watched
Hoping

Fragment
Give me a chance
Searching my deepest, darkest secret place
Can a puzzle solve itself?
My old self
Dragging me back to the time when I lost you
Missing piece I cannot find

Maze of motion
Fault is open
Finding the medicine man

Walking causeless
Just like home
She climbs in as far as she can

Slipping slow
and sleeping through
the steepest stillness
Lying here the deep depression calmly shakes us
Sleeping in a scathing sleep
While chiming choppers
Ringing butchers
Listen calmly
Nothing is for sure

She is lifted while she lies
In pleasure
Dreaming of
Dreaming of
Dreaming of
Sleeping

.

5. Palach

"It would seem that if only that kind of shout had been raised, all the stage sets would have collapsed, the plaster masks would have fallen off, the Producer would have fled down the backstairs, and the prompters would have sneaked off into their ratholes."
-Solzhenitsyn

.

6. Kira

"...and should you die without reaching full sunlight, you will die on a level touched by its rays..."
- Rand

Night that pales me
This cold is mine
When I dreamed of
That wondrous line
Brave as heroes
I wrote this tale

Gate that opens
When I see you
Gate that opens
Inside myself

Opened wide
The lasting smile
I feel them
Shining life
That lasts beyond
I'm holding tight
I scream at dead light

Hear me.

.

7. Terror is the cure

"The basic concept, I hope, is clear...openly to set forth a statute which is both principled and politically truthful (and not just juridically narrow) to supply the motivation for the essence and the justification of terror, its necessity, its limits.

"The court must not exclude terror. It would be self-deception or deceit to promise this, and in order to provide it with a foundation and to legalize it in a principled way, clearly and without hypocrisy and without embellishment, it is necessary to formulate it as broadly as possible, for only revolutionary righteousness and a revolutionary conscience will provide the conditions for applying it more or less broadly in practice."
- Lenin

Microbe
We're each a microbe
And when we come together
When I tie myself to you
And you and you
And every single one of you
Everybody knows what we are
And everybody knows the cure

Flames outside my frigid cradle
Slow, quiet long strokes
Bathing me in carnal hate
Sliding walls
Circling around each other
Stepping to sides

An ocean of singing
The questioning song we don't often hear
Mother's overhead with

A gun. Mine.

I can kill myself without touching
And I can join hand in hand with you again
And kill myself without touching.

Mine. A gun.

.

8. The Interrogation

"Indeed, the actual boundaries of human equilibrium are very narrow, and it is not really necessary to use a rack or hot coals to drive the average human being out of his mind.

"Let us try to list some of the simplest methods which break the will and the character of the prisoner without leaving marks on his body."
- Solzhenitsyn

.

9. Desperation

"That waiting has no end - the unborn profiteers of that wholesale sacrificial slaughter will never be born -the sacrificial animals will merely breed new hordes of sacrificial animals - as the history of all tyrannies has demonstrated - while the unfocused eyes of a collectivized brain will stare on, undeterred, and speak of a vision of service to mankind, mixing interchangably the corpses of the present with the ghosts of the future, but seeing no men."
-Rand

Golden land
Our crate of orphans
Separated from the past
Sailing by the beast of anguish
Passion tied us to the mast

Walls that slide
Around us quickly
Grabbing on to all we've got
Finding out it comes to nothing
Empty hands and overwrought

Bankrupt, Faltering
Every tree cut to the ground
Whitewashed credo
Wishing we could
hear the sound

Blind, deaf, crawling
Faith brought this to us
Floating weightless

Tethered to the iron barracks
Mortals all we cannot fail
Holding close
our barren mother
God below we shrink and pale

All we learned
to live and fight for
Humbly gave it all away
Stripped ourselves
of all we cherished
Wrote this heartless
passion play.

Grasping hammerhand
Fleeting in the limelit sky
Crazed and desperate
Fast the moment passes by

Waiting inside
We ponder our silence
We rest on our silence
Killed by our silence.

Whitewashed credo
In this dead light
Please call for me.

.

10. Y-clad

"I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it is gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain."
- Herbert

 

I don't fall
Fragrant in the sieve
A plaster group of tidings

Wide and narrow
Building above the salty plain
And home is plowing deep

Lover
Lock the door
And show the way to the sea astir in us
Create my god
Nail him to my heart

I sway with anxiety
Shake away the hate

.

11. Poem

"But the doom of dark death now closed over the dog Argos,
When, after nineteen years had gone by, he had seen Odysseus."
-Homer

.

Kurt Rongey: vocals, keyboards, drum programming.
Bill Pohl: guitars.
All music and lyrics by Kurt Rongey except "The
Interrogation" (Pohl/Rongey)
Produced and engineered by Kurt Rongey.

Quotations:

Homer (trans. Richmond Lattimore): The Iliad of Homer, The University of Chicago Press, Ltd, © 1951. The Odyssey of Homer, Harper Perennial, © 1967.
Lenin, Mayakovsky, and Solzhenitsyn (trans. Thomas P. Whitney): The Gulag Archipelago I-II, Harper and Row, Publishers, ©1973.
Lao Tzu (trans. D.C Lau): Tao Te Ching, Penguin Books, © 1963.
Anna Akhmatova, "Love", from Evening, 1911, (trans. Richard McKane), Selected poems, Bloodaxe Books Ltd, P.O. Box 1SN, Newcastle upon Tyne NE99 1SN. © 1989.
Ayn Rand, "Collectivized Ethics" from The Virtue of Selfishness, The New American Library, © 1964.
Frank Herbert, Dune, Berkley Books, ©1965.
.

SOUND SAMPLES (Real Audio G2)

St. Petersburg (1073K, 1:25)

Some Things Should Not Be Expressed in Words and Music (1008K, 1:21)

Valutnaya (1645K, 2:12)

Kira (667K, :53)

The Interrogation (1104K, 1:29)

Desperation (2361K, 3:10)

Yclad (758K, 1:01)

The recording of the first incarnation of That Was Propaganda took place during 1991 and 1992. Most of the instrumentation was realized with the Kurzweil K2000 keyboard, sequenced with Voyetra's Sequencer Plus Gold. The Yamaha SY22 is featured more prominently in "Valutnaya" and especially "Kira." "Leningrad" uses a Roland JX8P, the main keyboard used on my previous album Book in Hand. When the album was finished in 1992, I spent a great deal of time mixing and mastering the recordings, but the sound of the recording turned out to be unacceptable after several tries. In 1993, I essentially gave up on the project as I was financially unable to gain access to a good studio to finish the mixing work in. I decided I would have to rerecord the entire album to ever be satisfied with it sonically. Recently, digital editing software and hardware has made it possible to clean up the EQ problems of the original recordings. In addition, over the last couple years, as I've found time between other projects, part of "St. Petersburg" and the entire "Valutnaya" have been rerecorded.

That Was Propaganda owes a great deal of what musical power it has to Bill Pohl who contributed an enormous amount of time, energy and gear during the first recordings and rerecordings. I thank him from the bottom of my heart for his seemingly inexhaustible patience, for his belief in the message and the music, and of course for his incredibly expressive guitar playing.