A heavy purple heat sits on you in Mississippi. Driving down the delta along the river on route 1, there’s a wild moon, so big and red that for a moment I think I’m looking at the sunset. And heat lightning – the sky flashes and strobes like evil, which seems right: this is strange land, this is deep South, filled with rumor and legend and scorn. This is, they say, where bluesman Robert Johnson sold his soul to the devil for guitar skills. It’s dark and the insects scream and sometimes you see fires burning in oil drums in front of trailer bars.

Just outside of Greenville, red and blue lights dazzle and the police have four men on their knees, hands to their heads. Then it’s dark brush and swamp again. My headlights pass over a car door, beaten shacks, a dead turkey. A schoolbus sawed in half lengthwise charges down the dusty road, there are screams and shouts, and then it rumbles off. Three in the morning and I’m the only soul. The heat lightning gets more frantic and I pull over on a rough road next to the river, kill the lights, and stand in the road, watching the sky flash.

I wake up in Vicksburg, which is beautiful and desolate on Sunday. Maybe the old red brick and tin town was left for dead. Maybe everybody’s in church or sleeping something off. My footsteps echo down the boiling asphalt. A small soul food restaurant is the only thing open. The man behind the counter has some fun because I don’t know what a neckbone is. I order catfish and mustard greens. Gospel plays softly from the kitchen and a boy wipes down the tables, mumbling to himself. He drops into the booth across from me and quizzes me about my camera. He says he wants to be a photographer and travel the world taking pictures of snakes. Rattlesnakes. King Cobras. Black Mambas. Water Moccasins.

“But that’ll never happen.” He looks around the restaurant, then leans across the table and whispers, “Because I’ll probably get killed.”

I think of those flashing police lights in the swampy night, the people glaring drunkenly from paint-peeled porches, the title pawn shops on the edge of town…

“Why?”
“I have bad luck. I’ll probably get bitten by a snake.”

* * *

Dub Kult – Cluster Fuck
My new favorite song since it popped up around two in the morning about fifty miles north of Vicksburg. When I first heard it a few months ago, I was nonplussed – despite the breathless reviews, it sounded like yet another overwrought semi-tribal drum workout in the vein of Villalobos. But that changed on the backroads of Mississippi. Listen to it loud. Very loud. And wait for it: at six minutes and eleven seconds, there’s all of the raw, brutal excitement that is possible in techno. With each listen, I hear something new: that insect buzz, those throbbing sub-bass revs. And what are those voices? Are they backwards or foreign? His new One World 12″ on Living is also worth picking up.