Photo by Brandon Johnson
In the film First Reformed, the inciting incident sees a pastor consoling one of his parishioners who is anxious about becoming a father. The man is distraught at the prospect of bringing new life into a world plagued by climate change and feels it would be sinful to force an innocent child into such a broken, doomed world.
A similar thought plagues folk-jazz songwriter Eleanor Elektra halfway through her album Exquisite Corpse. On “Family Tree,” her narrator wonders about how to ethically propagate life in a dying world. Shunning the “bible of a patriarch,” they opt for a different kind of child-rearing, one outside the bounds of the male-centric family unit, and plant a tree in their yard. “Monotheistic religions are patriarchal,” Elektra told me. “This is an ideal that I could never achieve because I am fundamentally not a man.”
Exquisite Corpse is an exhumation of a ruined world. Elektra peels away layer after layer of modern life to reveal the roiling sea of exploitation, empire building, and patriarchy beneath it all. But a corruption of spirit is what binds these forces together. Elektra explains: “In Bible-speak, ‘mundane’ was the word to describe the earth. And now the word ‘mundane’ is used to describe anything that is not special.” By separating the “mundane” realm of nature from the holy realm of God, humanity could justify the destruction of the environment for our own ends, giving rise to urban societies and, ultimately, the entire western world. “There are big system processes in motion now that can’t be reversed,” Elektra says.
Elektra rejects this spiritual/material binary. To her, nature is as holy as any cathedral. “The natural world has always been what embodied my spirituality,” she says. Her fascination with the intersection of religion and environmentalism led her to study folklore, and found particular meaning in a Norse creation myth in which the Earth is fashioned from the corpse of a god. “It personifies the earth in a certain way and it speaks to this phase of decay that we’re in,” she says. This helped to crystallize her vision and was part of the inspiration for the album’s title.
Exquisite Corpse paints a portrait of a world hurtling toward destruction, where even fleeting moments of hope reveal darkness beneath. On “Condor” she chronicles the efforts of the U.S. government to preserve the highly endangered California Condor in the late 1980s and early 1990s and their successful reintroduction to the wild. Today, there are more than 400 wild condors, up from just 23 in 1982. However, Elektra sees this as just another part of the cycle of domination that humans and animals have been living under for hundreds of years: powerful forces push a population to the brink of extinction before finally working to prevent their demise.
“After [the condors] were released from captivity, they were released into a world that is totally dictated by the choices of people. We might have revived them for a period of time but that doesn’t mean that they’re not going to suffer extinction from other things that are out of our control like accelerated habitat loss or climate change. The reasons why the birds were endangered before and had to be rescued by us are still active forces in the world,” Elektra says.
Will our solution to climate change be a band-aid, like it was with the condors, or will it wholly tackle the issues facing our planet? “The fact of climate change is inevitable,” Elektra says. “The scope of climate change, the destruction of climate change, that’s what we don’t know and we have to harbor a little bit of blind hope just so that we don’t give up.”
Exquisite Corpse is out now on Bandcamp and will be coming to streaming services later this year. Follow Eleanor Elektra on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and her website. Full album credits for Exquisite Corpse can be found here.