[remnant three]
A Gentle Collapsing
![[WM09]](images/WM09_medium.gif)
David Tremaine - voice, bass guitar, synthesizer
Katherine Vaughn - electric guitar
Remnant Three was borne in Iowa City, Iowa in July 1980 when bassist/singer David Tremaine convinced an acquaintance, artist Katherine Vaughn, and her roommate, art graduate student Amanda Bell, to learn guitar and drums to form a musical ensemble. All three of these twenty-four year-old budding musicians were fans and consumers of late 1970s post-punk new wave artists, notably the Talking Heads, The Psychedelic Furs, The Cure, and Echo and the Bunnymen. Tremaine and Bell were especially fascinated and influenced by the Factory Records scene in England (i.e. Joy Division, A Certain Ratio, Durutti Column).
Near the end of the 1981, Remnant Three had become competent (if not adept) at their respective instruments, and had honed a particularized style: bass-driven songwriting in minor keys buttressed by intricate and repetitive drumming and sparse, but always poignant, guitar melodies.
In November 1981, the band recorded "A Gentle Collapsing" and "Words Are Fading" to 8-track in a friend's recording studio in Chicago, Illinois. The two songs were self-released on a 7" in an edition of only 200 copies.
The band itself very much considered their debut single a great work of art — the songs were ambitious, highly personalized excursions into the dichotomous tensions between energy and atmosphere, melody and minimalism, perhaps even style and substance.
All of these elements were carefully crafted and produced by the band (Remnant Three mixed and produced the record themselves) to create a single undeniably evoking the Factory Records sound. It was perhaps the band's lack of technical expertise (on their instruments as well as in the studio) that contributes to this fascinatingly flawed release. Tremaine, Bell, and Vaughn were virtually ignorant of studio protocol, methods, and trickery, but, on the other hand, were intimately aware of what they wanted their record to sound like. In fact, the B-side, "A Gentle Collapsing," is titled from lyrics to a 1980 Talking Heads song ("The Overload," from Remain in Light) in which David Byrne wrote about what he had read Joy Division sounded like.
By 1982 Remnant Three was so preoccupied with writing music that they had little time (or interest, for Tremaine) to share their songs with the rest of the world. As a result, the ensemble never performed live and the unit seemed wholly content in creating art in a self-contained world shaped and judged only by their own expectations and the ideas they formulated by situating their work against other great music they considered to be 'high art.'
Buoyed by both pride and single-minded determination, Remnant Three wrote a dozen more songs by the summer of 1982, at which time they decided to record again, this time in Iowa City. The results of these sporadic recording sessions from July through September 1982 included six songs that the band resolved to be their 'first album.'
But the band had conflicting views as to whether these tracks, clocking in at 37 minutes, should be self-released (into likely obscurity, as was the single) or whether it should be treated as a demo and sent to record labels in the hopes of reaching a wider audience. It was the inability for Tremaine, Vaughn, and Bell to resolve this debate that ultimately ended their association as musicians — and as a result brought an end to Remnant Three.
Tremaine had no interest in hawking the music to record labels. He was entirely satisfied with simply having created and documented art for its own sake — he was, in fact, endeared with whatever imperfections their amateur production had brought to bear on the songs. While Tremaine, the band's lyricist of extremely personal songs, was unconcerned if the public ever heard the material, Katherine and Amanda became frustrated with his adamancy. Although they were proud of the songs, they viewed the album as a demo and believed funding from a record label would enable new, superior recordings to be made in a better studio.
In addition, the women's view of music as an art form was far more global than Tremaine's — to Bell and Vaughn, art could not meaningfully exist unless it was shared by the artist with the world--only then could art take root and shape and alter culture. The two women did not believe making music was pointless if unheard by others, simply that it could never achieve the high art status (so confidently self-anointed by Tremaine), if no one but the artists themselves experienced it.
For a full three months the band was at a standstill — occasionally practicing and writing new material, but never resolving the debate over what to do with the new 'album.' In the end, when it became clear that Tremaine would not agree to press more than a few hundred copies, and had no design on demo-ing the songs or performing live, Bell left the group. A month later, after a few practices without her, Vaughn followed suit.
While the secluded band never conducted any interviews at the time they were creating their music, all three of the now 45 year-old (once-) musicians make it clear that Amanda and Katherine were far more than bystanders watching David Tremaine pursue a musical vision. In addition to both women sharing songwriting credits on all songs, it is undeniable, and Tremaine fully admits this today, that Vaughn's and Bell's rudimentary knowledge of their instruments ultimately formed and guided the songwriting process far more than any conscious decision to sound like a "Factory band."
Vaughn and Bell relay that the genesis of both "A Gentle Collapsing" and "Permanent" were Amanda's disjointed and intense tom tom-versus-snare interplay. Bell comments that, in her opinion, it was Tremaine's unwillingness and Vaughn's inability to write 'verse/chorus/verse' material that made the band reliant on her composing challenging, intricate rhythms to keep the songs afloat and interesting.
Katherine Vaughn's contribution is equally evident throughout all of Remnant Three's material — her minimalist guitar melodies play like duets with Tremaine's counterpoint, melodic bass lines. And, in fact, it was Vaughn who wrote the entire closing, uplifting chapters of "Uncertain of Fire" and 'M.L.' The second half of "Uncertain of Fire" is almost early Psychedelic Furs-esque in her use of feedback; 'M.L.' begins as a classic Tremaine composition — perhaps the most Joy Division-sounding of their entire output (i.e. revisit New Order's recording of "In a Lonely Place"), with Vaughn's soft, analog-delayed notes almost crying along with Tremaine's somber voice. But the second half of the song is driven by a chord progression that is Remnant Three at its most optimistic — and the optimism trickles down to the joy and hope one can hear in David's voice and the precious chimes struck by Bell.
In the end, Remnant Three is perhaps viewed in the same lens as bands like Disco Inferno — artists that utilized the sound and style of Joy Division et. al. and yet added a unique stamp to the art form. In the case of Remnant Three, it is unclear whether that stamp is attributable more to the band's undeniable raw talent, their isolated, almost idealized approach to composing music, the simple, underwhelming production quality, or a combination of the above.
Words On Music plans to release A Gentle Collapsing on the 25th Anniversary of the recording of the first Remnant Three single.