Since its release on March 28, 2017, the podcast “S-Town” has been downloaded over 40-million times, a figure that suggests just how many people have heard about the John B. McLemore, the mercurial genius from Bibb County, Alabama. In 2012, shortly after McLemore first connected his computer to the internet, he contacted Brian Reed, a producer at the documentary radio show “This American Life” to investigate what he believed to be an alleged and covered-up murder in his hometown. The real story, as Reed and “S-Town” point out, was McLemore—a renowned antiquarian horologist (an old clock repairman), an architect of intricate hedge mazes, an amateur expert in climate science, and an eloquent autodidact. Reed detailed McLemore like a character ripped from the pages of a Southern Gothic novel but in the middle of reporting his story, John B. McLemore killed himself by ingesting his own tincture of potassium cyanide.
From an extensive Reddit fan community to a mountain of essays dissecting the ethical and aesthetic merits of the show, “S-Town” has produced its own cottage industry of errata and commentary in the year since its release. And perhaps the most unusual finding from McLemore’s life comes from the ambient musician and painter Tor Lundvall. Right around the time McLemore was in contact with Brian Reed, he was also emailing Lundvall to express admiration for his work and to ask him if he could upload a mix of Lundvall’s work (including his own remixes and original compositions) to YouTube.
Lundvall consented, and he and McLemore began a two-month-long exchange of emails and letters. One of the exchanges included five ambient pieces McLemore composed—using manipulated field recordings collected around his property along with synths, drums, and piano—in 2003. Lundvall only learned of McLemore’s death after “S-Town”’s release when he revisited the Youtube mix and saw commenters eulogizing McLemore. Since that discovery and after listening to “S-Town,” Lundvall and Dais have decided to make McLemore’s music public, and that collection, Witness Marks, provides a fascinating new way to understand the life of the most interesting man in podcasting history.
Witness Marks’ five pieces come with an important set of listening instructions: McLemore wrote that it “requires a nearly Isolated listening environment...It should be heard After Midnight, in the Late Fall of the year, and, not surprisingly, a Very Long Attention span is a Prerequisite.” Comprised of field recordings and instrumentation, the songs range from 55 seconds to over 22 minutes. Each composition is dark, sprawling, intricate, but rough, and almost DIY. The album’s first six minutes, on its opener “Clock Chimes in the Mist” is this hypnotic collage of clock chimes and the interlocking of gears—giving a listener a meaningful peak into the personal emotion behind McLemore’s craft as a horologist. Taking the song’s title almost literally, slowly a kind of sonic fog rolls over the sounds of the clock, creating this undeniably spooky feeling. But it all breaks, and a chintzy synth line, drum machine, mournful piano, and later rain sounds slither their way into the scene. The piece hangs together, but the sudden, almost random shift in the middle shows McLemore might’ve been still learning how to sew together a song, and the seams in many of these pieces are still showing.
McLemore did show real chops as a fledgling ambient musician. On the album’s second track, his cover of Lundvall’s 2001 song “Dark Spring,” he creates an evocative backdrop with the sound of a thick rainfall and swirling noise that is soothing and just a little screwy—like encountering a Irv Teibel new age field recording if it was passed through a funhouse mirror. The collection’s best song, “His Darker Paintings,” is both simple and inventive: It’s just a manipulation of recordings of dried seedpods being shaken like a rain stick, mixed with insect chirps and other environmental sounds. And right towards the end, those noises disappear and a creaky door opens, the sound looped over and over again, till the album ends, with the image and noise of a door left ajar being the last thing we encounter. It’s absolutely haunting.
Yet, even as I listened to the album over and over again, discovering new bits and pieces of sound each time, I kept feeling like looking at these songs on a purely musical level might be missing the point. The final lines from McLemore’s suicide note rang in my head each time I played Witness Marks: “Sometimes I just spent hours playing my records...Sometimes I sat in the dark and listened to the creaking of the old house,” he wrote. The album is the closest someone will get to hearing what McLemore heard on his farm—its field recordings of crickets, dog barks, clock machinery, and all the rest. As Ryan Martin, the co-founder of Dais notes, the album is attempting to “capture the universe” of McLemore’s home, and listening to Witness Marks, it’s hard to say he does not succeed.
In a way, Witness Marks is as tricky to critique as “S-Town”: As a personal work that might never have been intended to be consumed by a public audience. If we take the music for what is—without all its baggage—it is the work of an incredibly skilled amateur who showed great potential. But it is impossible to look at the work in a vacuum. As another accessory to “S-Town,” it gives the podcast’s giant audience a new way to understand McLemore. From that angle, like the show, it feels beautiful and painful all at once to listen to even one minute Witness Marks.
