Ganja & Hess OST (1973)

I had a strange dream last night. I dreamed you murdered me.

Can we hear the conditions of the music coming into being? Sam Waymon shut himself in to create the soundtrack for the profoundly antisocial Ganja & Hess, a story of shutting in. Liner notes may grant us provisional access to that productive withdrawal, but the music itself is the signal of that reticence. In “The Black Catatonic Scream,” Harmony Holiday traces how “the unsayable, unspeakable, and unspoken align in Black music,” and explores “Blackness speaking while exceeding the verbal.” The dub count-off that introduces a piano figure’s intro to a libretto that preaches a historicized framework for the film, which melts into work song and sampled storm, delivering us to a blues, overdubbed with heavy breathing, gunshots, knockabout, until echo rends the singer’s calls into the void, opens the doors and windows to an album that takes the place of the film as a sounding and a haunting. Sonic themes are established, but we are no better prepared for the permutations the soundtrack will wend and rend through its foldings and unfoldings. Perhaps the closest thing to what we enter into here is Bill Holt’s Dreamies from the same year. But Waymon is not trying to make sense of the legacy of pop and folk music in the wake of late-60s socio-cultural tumult. Waymon doesn’t give a shit about the Beatles. He’s dealing with a much older history of violence, subjugation, torment, and loss of humanity. The only perversions that can be comfortably condemned are the perversions of others. … I will not be tortured. I will not be punished. I will not be guilty. Hess gives voice to the record, in response to Ganja’s dream of her murder, as we sink into the second side. The soundtrack’s inclusion of dialog rhymes with its revisitation of church song, led by Waymon’s appearance as a preacher in the film. The soundtrack is an opening, as vampirism is an opening, for delivering us to the truth of where we find ourselves, now as then, in the world made from bondage. The children’s chorus of “There Is a Fountain Filled With Blood” cannot redeem us, is salve rather than salvation. You’ve got to learn to let it go when it’s all over plays on repeat as we exit the theater. 5 out of 5 sacs of blood

—J †Johnson