Charlie Kaplan is an independent songwriter from New York, a muisc writer and the bassist in New York art pop/soft rock trio Office Culture which just released its fourth album, Enough, in October. As a solo artist, Charlie had three LPs and two EPs out, all via the Glamour Gowns imprint: Sunday came out in 2020, followed by Country Life In America in 2023. Eternal Repeater, Kaplan’s latest solo album, which came out on November 1st, is a great folk rock work, and was produced by Nico Hedley.
About the album Charlie said: “My third album, Eternal Repeater, centers around mankind’s entropic inclination to cruelty and fear. To my ears, each successive song radiates out from the most private paranoias to, by the end of the album, the terrible form these atoms take in aggregate: mass panic, prejudice, demagoguery. I found this theme in the eerie mode of music I was writing, which recalled the spooky, northern English folk that seems to ooze out inevitably from heavy music from Pink Floyd to Ty Segall. I decided to put together a playlist of sounds like these to illustrate why my ear led me to paint this picture, one that combines both tempting sweetness and an abiding darkness“.

What Charlie Says:”I wrote this song after having an anxiety attack at a concert. I went to go write about a very popular band and didn’t get a plus-one. Working my way through the crowd, I collided with a drunk reveler, who yelled “Asshole! You spilled my drink!” before throwing their half-filled plastic cup of beer at me. I spent the rest of the show trying to focus on the performance and taking notes, but also peeking out of the corner of my eye for a group of people to confront me again. Lying in bed that night, I played through this riff, transcribing the interaction into this song’s sparse lyrics.“

“I love the oxymoron at the center of ‘Cloudburst’: ‘Caught in a cloudburst all day.’ I sat on it for a long time. Then, in those uncanny first few weeks of lockdown in 2020, it suddenly seemed to describe everything around me. How long would this last? What would be washed away once it passed? Ambient fear suffused the placidity of a moment that never seemed to end or resolve. For me, this song is a study in stasis: by the outro, the cycling bass line churns below diurnal major chords and nocturnal minors in parallel keys. I thought of Debussy’s ‘The Sunken Cathedral’: submerged, changeless, uncertain, repeating“

His Mixtape:

Donovan – Hurdy Gurdy Man

Donovan recorded this two months after returning from India with the Beatles, where they cooked up most of the material that would make up the White Album, including the similarly doomy Helter Skelter. The apocryphal – but plausible – story behind this song is that it’s got an uncredited performance from pre-Zeppelin John Bonham and Jimmy Page on it. If it’s for real, Bonham and Page stand behind the starched and haunted Donovan like grim sentries to an evil princeling. Just a year earlier, Donovan was the mellow yellow mystic of the summer of love; Now he’s Grimm’s Pied Piper, with his hypnotizing rhyme.

Radiohead – The Numbers

This is a mode that Radiohead get into a few times across their catalog: Go To Sleep, Desert Island Disk, and on. You can hear Burt Jansch and Nick Drake in there. And as they did many times in their career, Radiohead criticize the looming specter of enemies of democracy.

Pink Floyd – Fearless

Again and again – from Pink Floyd’s “lunatic in the hall” to Radiohead’s “we don’t want the loonies taking over” – psychedelic music returns to the panic and fear at the prospect of the insane coming to run the asylum. Because of their sadness about Syd Barrett’s decline, I always felt a tenderness in Floyd’s music about this outcome; like it was looming and inevitable, but that it would only scare off the pigs, sheep, and dogs who keep the rotten institution in place. In Fearless, the magistrates and potentates laugh as the lunatic achieves something you’d have to be crazy to try.

Skip Spence – War in Peace

Oar is a fascinating album because it feels like the very last echoes of a brilliant person disappearing over a horizon of their own sickness. His reverberations still reach you, they sparkle, they contain the argot of familiarity (the little reference to “Sunshine of Your Love”), yet they’re submerged, gone.

Ty Segall – The Hand

Manipulator is a brilliant and dark record fixated on the occult. In The Hand, Ty is a bewitching cult figure whose talismanic, omnipotent hand bends will to his command. It explodes into a double guitar solo that unfolds like a society crumbling beneath his thrall. This song became a major touchstone for me in how a song could finish by burning itself to the ground, and I took particular pleasure in this YouTube video that slows, downpitches, and places it over footage from Yellow Submarine.

Cereal – Adults

Before he recorded under his own name, my friend and frequent collaborator Ian Wayne recorded as Cereal and made a lot of my favorite recordings and songs. He wrote at this time very movingly about love and loneliness. In this song, the slow pace and delicate performances contrast the shame and furor in the lyrics. They burn like a contained house fire, raging silently in view from behind melting glass, voraciously consuming a life within. When I first heard it I thought of another of my favorite recordings ever, Mark Hollis’s Westward Bound. I didn’t make anything that sounded like this song on Eternal Repeater, but I kept thinking about it; the way it seethed with unsettled energy.

The Beatles – Long, Long, Long

Arguably the most haunted Beatles recording, sounding as if the ghost of George were calling to the listener from beyond the spiritual plane to tell of his final deliverance. His words are so satisfied, so enamored, but his distant voice and the unsettling final coda of the song suggest that things are deeply amiss.

Sandy Denny – She Moves Through the Fair

Sandy Denny, Fairport Convention, and Pentangle are I think sometimes unfairly tarred by modern feelings about the use of English folk music by RenFaire LARPers. Respect to those people. This is such beautiful music, led by beautiful singing, and it feels so shadowed and mysterious to me. Some is the pace, some is the harmony.

Thee Oh Sees – Minotaur

John Dwyer has a beautiful command of kitsch. He can take a deadpanned “la la la” and a plasticky mellotron and; once placed over his scuzzy palettes, hit like criticism of the whole enterprise. Here he sounds like a Mike Judge character or David Foster Wallace in The Pale King; gradually metastasized and destroyed by the gnashing grind of mundane modernity. He sings, “men get sick at their work each and every day / there ain’t no cure but to stay home today and go to the beach instead.” I love this juxtaposition of the real world and B-movie schlock: “I take my meals there, I sleep in the maze.”

Anne Briggs – Living by the Water

Anne Briggs recorded 30 songs and retired at 27 years old after deciding she hated her beautiful voice. Despite her best efforts, she became a giant influence on English folk music in the psychedelic era and has many recordings like this one which, with nothing other than singing and strumming, seem to contain hundreds of years of history.

Eternal Repeater is out now via Glamour Gowns. Look HERE for more information on Charlie Kaplan.