Tyler felt different. His feet were torch hot and his hands were ice cold. He was digging a deep hole, dodging gangled spruce roots, nestled by the cold countless limbs of the winter woods. Snow kept toppling in from the side of the hole. Occasionally a gust of wind would whistle through the trees, swaying the moon shadows around his feet, but most often there stood a stiff baited silence; a silence so cold and thick that he could reach out and touch it.
His shovel hammered against the stone hard soil. Tyler could not remember a time in his life when he was so unsurrounded. This was his first taste of true solitude, in the woods, without a flashlight – just a shovel.
There was that time on the airplane when he was eight, and then the time on the airplane when he was eleven, but still, both times, he was around a bunch of people, even if they were strangers. There was also that time last year, he mused. Tyler was sixteen then. His family was on a horseback trip in the mountains when his horse lost its bolts and darted away from everyone. It must have seen a snake or something. He was very alone then. But it wasn’t for that long, really. And it was too bad about the horse. It was a young white Arabian, one of Tyler’s favorite breeds. The guide who had taken them got down off his saddle and slapped the horse hard in the jaw. Tyler had sort of winced. The horse had always been Tyler’s animal throughout the years – he couldn’t help but feel a twinge of indignation.
The hole was becoming deeper than Tyler had intended. He’d become so immersed in his thoughts that he realized to stop digging. He paused for a moment but decided to keep digging. He didn’t want to lose this train of thought that was beginning to awaken himself to his own existence. These must be the fruits of solitude, he pontificated.
His feet were achingly hot. His hands, however, had become so cold as to appear inanimate, just two frigid dead claws vice-gripped around the shovel’s neck.
The ground resisted him but he tarried, chipping away at the frozen loam. The resistance reminded Tyler of his driving instructor. Tyler had just gotten his license earlier that morning. Earlier that very morning, he thought. It felt as if that was so long ago: scraping the ice off the window, letting the car warm-up, driving with his mother to the registration office, kneading his hands anxiously. The driver’s test terrified him. He had already failed twice and each time it was the same stern woman administering the test with her calculated voice and implacable grimace, making him feel like garbage for not parking correctly or shoulder checking twice or some such thing.
But that was all over now. Now he could drive. When he remembered his car he remembered how far away it must be. He was going to have to follow his footsteps back to find it again. Through a field, over a frozen creek and down a slow sloping hill, he had been so enjoying the quietude of the walk and so stubborn about finding a perfect place to dig that he really did let himself get too far. He started to regret it.
And the forest was so much darker than Tyler could have imagined. He was left at the mercy of what little moon light managed to weave through the dense thatch work of towering evergreens. It was all so dreadfully reminiscent of his lonely childhood bedroom, facing the quiet village street. He would lie awake for hours just trying to make out the details on his hand. On the rare occasion a car drove by, the fierce headlights would pierce the slats of his blinds and the linear lights would streak from one side of Tyler’s room to the other, streaking over his horse poster and back out of the room on the opposite side of the window. He was terrified of that haunting ghost, clueless as to the origin of the lights, imagining them as a warning from the dead to do no wrong or else the darkness would close in on him and leave him lying awake forever. Even after he had learned the source of the lights he could never shake the foreboding sense of a punitive darkness that existed somewhere, patiently waiting to swallow him, and it kept him accountable.
The shovel struck Tyler’s foot. The heat intensified. He swore under his breath. He stopped for a moment and looked about the thick brush. There was absolutely nothing anywhere. The ground was at shoulder height now. Under the bottom of the trees he could see an eternal distance of stumps rising out of the frosty pine needle carpet. Tyler couldn’t even guess at how long he had been out there. The pit was about four feet deep by now and about four feet wide with steep slopes on each side. His shovel looked even colder than his hands.
He went back to work with added diligence, trying to remember the night he discovered that the lights were in fact just cars.
He struck a new depth and all of a sudden the soil became much softer. The shovel drove in easily and the soil lifted lightly. He began to dig with renewed vigor, accomplishing so much work with so little effort. He flung the dirt ruefully, feeling empowered, feeling urged downward into the warm crust of earth.
The soil suddenly nudged.
Tyler stopped, staring at the spot he thought he saw move. There was a flake of white protruding into the soft cold openness. He poked at it with his shovel and it twitched. He recoiled and the soil awakened. A minuscule horse unfurled, rearing its pale head and pulling itself up into the moon light. It huffed and hawed and broke curfew with the covenant silence. The sound was caught in Tyler’s ears with his pounding heart beat. More pale horses began to nudge their way through the firm and into the cold thick silence, grunting and shaking their wild manes off. Tyler’s body was struck stiff.
The horses began to come faster now, uncurling out of the soil and rushing headlong out over the edge of the pit and into the forest, stampeding mightily. They were fully mature but only the size of large hand guns. Tyler let out a mute shriek as the inexhaustible stampede finally knocked him over, stomping over him and coming up under his back, lifting him off the ground.
He scrambled up the side of the hole, his face contorted with grief and terror, and he quickly shoved the body into the pit.
Ducking the strong placid limbs, Tyler took off under the foliage into the labyrinth of funereal stumps, his feet searing. The forest was filled with the quieter but no less resonant whinnies of feral subservience. His horror would not abate. He could see the pale horses scurrying darkly in and out of moon light. He could hear them neighing wildly and pounding the earth. His hands were pitch-white and his feet were kilns for clay.
A horse crashed into his ankle and he shrieked and jumped and tripped on a root, another horse came from the other direction and trampled over his head powerfully. He could taste blood. Clamoring to his feet again, he sprint madly into the cold arms of nowhere.
In a glimpse of clairvoyance, Tyler realized that he needed to find his car. He tried to stop and think but his inertia and terror kept him careening away from the mouth of the stampede. He realized that he was running downhill. Tyler knew the car was uphill from where he had dug. It infuriated him to think that he was running in the very opposite direction of the car. He had to go back.
There were more horses now. The hole had not for one moment stopped pouring out. A horse galloped right in front of his feet. Tyler spilt onto the ground, just trying to turn around. He reoriented himself toward the pit, swallowing the pulsing ball of fear at the top of his throat. Taking account of his body, Tyler noticed blood on his coat and dirt under his nails. His hands were visibly frost bitten. His boots had streaks of hot blood on them.
The stamping flow of stallions piled up against him now, crashing against his shins. Summoning his pithy strength, he stumbled forward, forcing himself to lift his feet and trample on the horses with bitter resolve, feeling them crunch under his boot. He began to moan and sob. He had so loved horses, all his life he loved horses, but now they were highest horror. Tyler felt betrayed - emotionally, spiritually, inherently robbed.
As he approached the abominable hole, his heart thud in time with his coal hot feet. From a distance he could see a figure presiding over the stallion blitzkrieg and the horses were funnelling around his ankles very deliberately. Squirming in his idle arm was a small horse, nonchalantly dangling by the neck. Tyler, in the weather of such dread, yelped. He could see the horse begin to convulse until it died. Tyler stumbled to the ground and began to throw up hysterically. The foaming wake of pale beasts toppled over him, kicking him violently in their crashing frenzy.
Tyler swarmed to his knees and saw the man approaching him sternly.
When the moon grabbed a glimpse of the stranger's approaching face, Tyler bleat and vociferate, blinking urgently. The figure was Tyler himself – older, tired, pale, and bewildered with consternation. When the man saw Tyler's face, he turned around and raced back to the pit.
Tyler struggled onto his feet and ran, screaming and shouting inconsolably. He glanced back and saw his older self charging after him. The ground was alive with pale racing hides. They were so many now that Tyler was running as if to stomp or else they would knock him down.
The limb of a tree knocked Tyler's shoulder and spun him on his heels. He saw his assailant's face – anger mingled with fear and duty – and in his icy hand, the godforsaken shovel.
Tyler stumbled back and fell under the assault of so many foals. As they trampled over his numb body, the shovel went through his neck.




www.myspace.com/tylerbutlermusic


Tyler Butler - Feral Horse


art by Sean McMahon


PRESS:
Thoughtful, mature and intentional: three words that come to mind as Edmonton electro-folk singer-songwriter Tyler Butler talks about his new album, Feral Horse. In the vein of Red House Painters or Bon Iver, Butler blends haunting, engaging lyrics in warm, lo-fi acoustic gems that are hemmed with sparse, ambient textures. A five-star bedroom recording, Feral Horse reflects not only a three-month recovery from a debilitating illness for the young artist, but also his DIY confidences.

"There's so much that went into it that's mine: it's a very do-it-yourself record—I did everything at home on one microphone, and that's really important to me, because every person you bring into the recording process is this extra layer of music-making that's a dilution your own voice."
Although relatively new to Joe Gurba's Old Ugly Recording Co., Butler had previously been writing and recording his own material under the label Labrador City Records. Now with the Old Ugly release of Feral Horse, Butler is enjoying the label community's collaborative strengths and breadth of artistic challenges.

"I can't stress how much the people I work with are influences," he emphasizes with enthusiasm. "After Joe approached me about doing an album, that's when I focused on making a good-sounding record, not just a sudden expression of myself. There are these themes that took a year to collect in a way I liked.

"There were all these stages, like when I was sick, that's where the fever/illness themes come from," he continues. "And there are the horse metaphors, which have always been a literary symbol of beauty that kept coming up over and over again when I'd try to describe something. And, I'd started dating someone, too, and all these themes blend together to describe the last year of my life."

These autobiographical details, fueled by his studies of literature ("So potent and full of metaphor"), allow for gorgeous, if not darker, connections and reflections on day-to-day life. Alongside compact, complex metaphors of historical narratives, illness, relationships, landscape and longing, there's an equally satisfying melodic sensibility at work here—one that marries weighty lyrics ("I fought this opium war with a lack of patience") with a melodic momentum that haunts the listener long after the song is gone. It's a maturity that Butler shows, in crafting intimate songs that blend gut-wrenching lyrics and veiled violence in gorgeous form, that makes them all the more engaging.

"Certainly, the lyric writing is a very intentional part of my songwriting, but there's never just one meaning to my songs, and I've intentionally made it that way. While I do say that it embodies how I've spent the last year, it's also really open to interpretation," he offers. "A lot of my songs are based on conversations and quotes from my life. If there's a darkness to the record, it's more a sense of discontentment and longing for something else, someplace else, that I think people can relate to."

  -Mike Angus, VUE Weekly