a conversation with cime
hauntology, spongebob, and the lost city of the monkey god!
This interview was originally broadcast on WCWM on August 15th, 2023.
If you prefer to listen to interviews instead of reading them, you can find the recording wherever you listen to podcasts by searching for ‘I Hate Music with John Dietz,’ or by clicking the Spotify link below.
Cime is the Southern California Latin trans avant-folk/post-punk project of Monty Cime. I first interviewed her last year about her debut full-length, The Independence of Central America Remains an Unfinished Experiment (TICARUE).
Her new album, ‘Laurels of the End of History,’ builds on the freak-folk and nueva canción latinoamericana roots of TICARUE, while taking new inspiration from the SoCal DIY scene by incorporating elements of noise rock and post-punk. It’s a dense, layered project with allusions to the works of Jacques Derrida and Francis Fukuyama, the October Revolution, and the patron saint of Honduras. It’s out now on streaming services.
The edited transcript of the interview follows below.
John Dietz: Before we get too deep in the weeds about this upcoming album, I wanted to go back to TICARUE, because in a recent Instagram post where you outlined Laurels, you described it as being the antithesis of TICARUE — so for those who are unfamiliar with your music, could you briefly define TICARUE and how Laurels functions in relation to it?
Cime: For sure! So, TICARUE is an album that is an allegory about my life, for one, it’s a call to action for the present day geopolitical situation in Central America, and it’s a reflection on the past from independence onward. I use history as a pretext to talk about these things, drawing comparisons between historical events and my life, or drawing comparisons between historical events and how those connect to the current day instability of the region.
The album is marked by a lot of spoken-word interludes — it’s a very operatic experience in a lot of ways. I was inspired by an album by this band called Quilapayún, which is a Chilean nueva canción latinoamericana (that’s ‘new Latin American song’) band, and the album is called Cantata Santa María de Iquique. It’s kind of structured in the same way where there are songs that outline a story, and in the middle there are spoken-word interludes to show what’s going on — it’s poetry.
Some of the most common criticisms I heard about TICARUE were that people didn’t really like the spoken-word, they didn’t really like the instrumentation, they didn’t necessarily like some of the songwriting and lyricism, they thought it was a bit clunky. And while I would never say that it’s a correction, because I think that everything I do is everything it needs to be at the time it’s released (and that’s the philosophy I go into with everything), I did kind of want to throw a bone to that crowd. Cause I kinda get where they’re coming from, even though I think they’re wrong.
So, the way I approached Laurels was by doing no spoken word interludes, and a very intensive compositional process where I scored every song — every instrument on every song. I made it accessible in some ways, but also I think it’s equally as avant-garde, if you want to use that word. For example, people take issue with the lyricism because they don’t really understand what’s going on, but for this I think it’s a lot easier to understand that every song is an individual story. In the same way, though, there’s a lot still to be gleaned and a lot to look into and read into.
Cover art for ‘Laurels of the End of History’ by Cime. (Source: Cime)
J.D.: Going into Laurels now — in the first song (‘Obertura Neoliberal’), you make reference to Kaha Kamasa, which is a lost city in Honduras also known as the ‘Lost City of the Monkey God’, and that imagery is featured prominently on the album cover. I was wondering if you could tell us a bit about how Kaha Kamasa is significant to the album’s narrative.
C: Well, there’s been this fixation on the Lost City of the Monkey God, also known as the ‘White City.’ I particularly like the imagery of it because even the name itself… ‘the Lost City of the Monkey God’ is a Westernized interpretation of the legend they’re describing. It really got a foothold in the American consciousness in the 1940s — it was in one of those pulp periodicals called ‘The American Weekly’ or something like that, and it was this very, very sensationalist pseudoscience-adjacent stuff. I think it’s really interesting because Latin America in particular has always been a source of fascination for pseudoscientists. You might think of stuff like the ‘Lost Continent of Ma,’ right, which was like an extension of Atlantis, which is really funny to me because Atlantis was a political allegory — it wasn’t meant to be a thing, but people take it like reality.
So it’s an extension of that, and it comes from the fact that when we were discovering the Mayan civilization, the response was ‘These Mexicans, these Latinos, could not have made this, what? There must be some lost link.’ So the connection being made there is a reflection on exotification and a reclamation of that. But second of all, Kaha Kamasa and the White City have taken up a space in the Honduran collective consciousness as a representation of a lost hope, or of political autonomy that there once was, but no longer is. It kind of reminds me of the cultural baggage associated with the concept of han in Korea, or the space that Hiroshima and Nagasaki represent for Japanese people. I think that that iconography is very much equal.
So it’s a reflection on that, especially with the lyrics in the first song — the opening lines of the album are:
El espejo del pueblo que pierde / refleja laureles que alumbran La avenida de nuestro historia / que a todos nos espera
That’s “the mirror of the pueblo,” and pueblo can be both a village and a people — it’s a very culturally prominent word, the idea of the pueblo can be your people or your town. And it’s a pun, this line — “el pueblo que pierde” — that’s both “the people are lost,” and “the people that have lost.”
“The mirror of the people that have lost / reflect laurels that illuminate / the avenue of our history / which awaits us all.” So I think with that in mind it starts to make more sense as a representation of a lost history, both literally and metaphorically. Especially when you look at the album cover as a path! You’re looking at it, it’s a path to the temple… what does that mean?
J.D.: Yeah, and that kind of leads perfectly into my next question, cause in that same Instagram post I mentioned earlier, you also tell us that to be an artist is to transgress, and that the act of creating art is kind of like merging the past and present and future. Could you speak a little more about the importance of time in your work?
C: I think time is something that, speaking holistically, I focus on a lot in my work. TICARUE was so focused on the past, present, and future, and I think for Laurels, it’s very much in the same way focused on bringing everything together. These stories are a way of us understanding the world, right, and we can glean so much about whether things are different or things are the same. I don’t know if you ever learned about, or heard weird stories about Mozart, and then you’re like, “Man, these people were really not that different from us… these people were WEIRD.”
For example, on Laurels there’s ‘Yoro,’ which is an interesting little anecdote about the lluvia de peces, or ‘fish rain’, which happens every year in Honduras — every story is a fable if you go about it in the right way. It’s the same thing with the opening line, they’re all a laurel of the history — not necessarily the end of history, that’s something else, but there’s something to be learned from everything, and I think that that’s the importance of time. In creating the future we want to see, we have to take from history the things we are meant to learn.
The phenomenon of the lluvia de peces, as sung about on Cime’s song ‘Yoro.’ Source: Radio Uraccan Siuna.
J.D.: You also mention being influenced by the work of philosophers Jacques Derrida and Mark Fisher, which I assume is a reference to the concept of hauntology, or the cultural memory of lost futures and the nostalgia for those lost futures. How does that play into this idea of time?
C: Uh… you got me! I’m trying not to squeal here because you’re the only person so far who has asked me about this stuff, thank you very much! I think it’s one of those things where I’ve touched on that already, in part, but there’s so much more, evidently. When I go into a project, I really make sure everything connects back into itself — it’s all an ouroboros, the snake eating itself. As soon as you’re finished understanding everything you find out that there’s so much more because it connects right back in. I’m not the first person to do this specifically, but if I’m going to make it about this, I figured I had to follow in the path of hypnagogic pop artists, like Ariel Pink or James Ferraro or Dean Blunt where they really managed to encapsulate it in sound — something that sounds old but in a way where you can tell that there’s something not quite right. I’ve had people tell me, even without knowing that, they feel it, which tells me holy shit, I’ve really hit it, haven’t I? That was my intention and I suppose I hit it.
So, a lot of the album’s inspirations, as always, are gained from both old 60s and 70s Latin American songwriters and more contemporary influences. I’m really into a lot of my local DIY scene and there’s a lot of post-hardcore, and there’s a lot of punk and stuff like that, post-punk. Noise rock is big on this EP specifically. With that in mind, there’s more than just the sonic aspect to it too, there’s the lyrical aspects to a lot of it.
I conceived it as a direct response to a lot of the more silly presumptions from Francis Fukuyama, in The End of History and the Last Man. You know, a lot of it kind of being also refuted by Derrida in The Spectres of Marx, and saying these things out loud, a lot of the song titles start to sound familiar. [In reference to Fukuyama] I think it’s fucking stupid, but in a way where you just have to laugh at it even though you know that this is something that people actually believe. The supposition that liberal democracy won out because it was the morally best thing there was, which is really funny when you know even a little bit about how it won in some of these countries like Indonesia or Chile — oh, very kind, very kind, you know? Of course, just such a benevolent ideology — people just had no choice but to hold hands and sing Kumbaya, that’s exactly what happened.
I think nowhere is it more evident than on ‘The Lost Last Man,’ which, being taken from the title of the book — it’s also an allegory. Who is the Lost Last Man? The title itself is derived from the fact that liberal democracy is the ‘last man standing,’ so to speak. Well, what about everyone else, are you telling me that they all just bowed out? No. The Lost Last Man is kind of a representation of everyone who stood up to try and create something new in defiance of that, and was killed for it.
I was talking with Hex, and they drew a comparison to that episode of Spongebob, where they have a kid, and Spongebob is showing Patrick all the diapers in the wall. And I thought that was really funny, cause I totally understand where they’re coming from… I’m just like Spongebob! No, you gotta look at the diapers in the wall, it’s not that pleasant!
J.D.: That’s a really great comparison… I gotta go back and rewatch that episode now (laughs).
C: Hex was like, ‘I’m sorry, I don’t know if that’s disrespectful,” and I said, ‘no, you don’t understand, that’s so spot on!’ The emotion of it…
J.D.: That adds a whole new layer of context to ‘The Lost Last Man,’ so now I need to go back and relisten… I caught the Derrida reference but I didn’t pick up on the Fukuyama reference until you pointed it out. Going back to the whole musical side of the hypnagogic aesthetic — I think it’s a difficult line to walk between having it be that really surreal feeling and having it just sound old and hackneyed, and I think you walked that line really well on this album. It’s one of my favorite parts about it.
I’m gonna switch gears a little bit now and talk more about the live performance aspect of your work. You’ve been pretty prolific as a live performer in the past year, so I’m wondering if you found that performing these songs live changes at all how you think about them, or if going into the writing process for Laurels you found yourself writing differntly at all with this live context added.
C: Oh, of course, of course, and I talk a lot about music as a language. You have studio recording/performance, and you have live performance — different languages. It’s like going from being an airplane pilot to being a helicopter pilot — some things are transferrable, but you can’t rest on that. You learn to adapt things… and things like virtuosity, which I think are kind of lame to go for on a studio album, become a lot more prominent. Like doing an awesome, epic guitar solo on a record, it’s like, okay, cool I guess, but you do it live, it becomes a lot more interesting when you’re there in that space.
And yes, yes, it has for sure influenced the writing process a lot, to the point where I find myself reflecting on a lot of the choices made — not saying I'm correcting them — during TICARUE. If you listen to the live versions of the songs, they’re completely different — not because I think they’re flawed, I think that it’s everything it needed to be. When you’re a painter, versus when you’re a musician, let’s say… if you want to portray sadness, you’re doing them in two different ways, because they’re two different mediums. I see it the same way [for studio performance vs. live performance].
For example, on TICARUE there’s a lot of inspiration from children’s music in the delivery, and I think it gives it a certain wistfulness; it’s sad, but in a poignant way… bittersweet. I don’t think it necessarily works live, it just sounds a little bit lame, so I’ve taken on an intensive, emotional hardcore, post-hardcore approach, just because that’s what works in a live setting. I found that really interesting because I wouldn’t say that my music is like that at all, but even before I put out that album I had people comparing it to [emo]. It kinda feels like Brave Little Abacus, where those people are not emo, but they’re an emo band, you know what I mean? So that’s been really interesting, but it’s also been a lot of fun, especially recently where more and more people have been singing the songs, and it’s like, really? It’s very sweet to me.
J.D.: You mentioned in a previous response being influenced by the DIY scene that you’re a part of in California — and of course the Internet has made it easier than ever to take inspiration from different scenes around the world, but do you find yourself taking particular influence from the SoCal DIY scene, and what does it mean to you to be an active member of a scene?
C: Like I said, there’s a lot of really great post-hardcore bands, there’s a lot of really great noise rock bands, and one in particular that I’ve made a couple friends in is this band called reclusr (they just put out an EP).
I think a lot of people are really big on the sound, like the cohesive sound, of a scene. That’s cool. But I think there’s something to be said for not doing that, but just taking influences from whatever you want, and just forcing it to go into live, forcing live from it like Frankenstein’s monster. There’s a terror about it, but also a fascination with it. And so what I appreciate about it is just the diversity, you know? There’s this band called Ms. Daisy, and they’re like post punk but with rap — they have a hip hop vocalist. There’s Killjoy — it’s funny, they used to be an indie rock band, but then they became a post-hardcore band, but playing the same songs, and you can kinda see an interesting mix of them.
And reclusr, which I brought up earlier… YOU probably know about this, because you’re online in this particular way — not to air out your dirty laundry on the air… but RateYourMusic sometimes adds new genres, and people like to make fun of them. There’s one now called shitgaze, which is noise rock, garage rock, and shoegaze, with post-hardcore. That’s them. I didn’t realize it, cause I was thinking ‘That’s not a genre, that’s not a genre,’ and then I thought about it, and I was like ‘Oh my god, that’s reclusr.’ I sent it to them, and said ‘Hey, I found your genre,’ and they were like ‘No, stop it! That’s not true, that’s not even real.’
But I think it’s really interesting, because there’s so much diversity in the scene, so many Black and brown people really giving their own voices and their own perspectives. And so while there isn’t really a cohesive sound, I think it’s really beautiful in that way, as a reflection of the people, you know?
J.D.: Okay, one more question and then we’re going to get to the speed round. Earlier this year, you organized a split called ‘Trans Folk,’ which featured another I Hate Music guest, aa & tyr. Why folk music and where do you see trans musicians as part of the folk tradition?
C: I want to talk about the name, because I’m so proud of it and no one ever asks me about it. It’s a very cool, in my opinion, triple entendre, in the sense that it’s:
Trans folk, as in trans people
Trans folk, as in folk music made by trans people
Trans folk, as in avant-folk
Cause it’s all very weird, but it’s all evidently folk, just in very weird and different directions. So as for where I think they fit into it, I mean, they fit into it like in every genre. But for me I think it was important to let people know — maybe not in an infographic way — I’m not trying to neg anyone. I just wanted to showcase that hey, there’s more to trans people than hardcore music. There’s nothing wrong with that, but trans people can make any music. It seems like such an obvious thing to say, but I think at times there’s a lot of preconceived notions of what we are, and while I think it’s a bit silly to say I’m breaking anything down, I found it important at the very least for us to do. And it’s fun! I mean, you listen to it and it’s just such a weird collection of stuff — it showcases both the diversity of folk, (it’s probably the most nondescript genre there is) but also specifically an even smaller subsection of that, of trans people making folk music.
SPEED ROUND!!!!!!
J.D.: What was the last book you read?
C: Radical History of the World.
J.D.: Favorite live performance of your own, ever?
C: My own? Most recent, 7/8.
J.D.: Favorite live performance of someone else, ever?
C: widowdusk, 9/8/2022.
J.D.: What are your hobbies outside of creating music?
C: I like to read, I like to research — this isn’t even a one word response, but I digress. I like to research particularly about Latin American history, surprise surprise. I like to cook. I think cooking is fun. I like to host people, I think it’s cool, because food is the way of entering people’s heart in no other way. If you cook someone a nice meal, they’ll trust you more than if you talk to them for weeks, you know.
J.D.: What’s the biggest single inspiration for Laurels?
C: Oh, Jesus. Single inspiration? Man, that’s a good question. By good question, I mean give me a minute. If I take too long, you can edit out the silence.
J.D.: Wanna skip it?
C: Yeah, yeah, pass.
J.D.: Best live music venue in SoCal?
C: The Haven.
J.D.: What’s your favorite instrument that you recorded for Laurels?
C: I’m gonna give you two, I’m gonna cheat. Probably the theater organ, duh, that’s just me cheating, or the trumpet.
J.D.: What’s the best song or album to come out this year (that isn’t your own)?
C: (anguished cry) Pass, pass, pass!
J.D.: Okay, last one. Cassettes or CDs?
C: CDs.
J.D.: Wanna go back to the inspiration question?
C: (hesitantly) Yeah… yeah. Oh, I know it. It’s Smile, by the Beach Boys.
J.D.: One last question — not a speed round, so answer at your leisure. If you could tell listeners one thing to pay attention to or take away from Laurels, what would it be?
C: I think it would have to be that a better world is possible.