Transmissions from the Mermaid Palace

Abstract

Employing elements of autofiction, place-based field recordings, and local lore and legend from historical archives, Transmissions from the Mermaid Palace seeks a bridge out of the graveyard left by the opioid crisis, a rash of suicides, and the Lyme Epedemic that has blighted a small fishing community in Southern Rhode Island. Through stories of intergenerational myth and memory, the narrators make their way through gritty drug-dens, dilapidated row houses, cemeteries, and the secret locations of folklore, seeking some sort of fix. The ruins of colonial violence poke out from under a Dunkin Donuts, an abandoned, burned down, flooded and drug-addled suburban punk landscape like a Derek Jarman film. Rhode Island music legends such as the Cowsills, Tanya Donelly, and Wendy Carlos wander into the frame at times, reflecting on how the sounds of a place produce the music made there. Spliced in are reports from a mysterious “agent” in latex bondage gear, conducting field recordings of white noise at coastal locations of historical and banal import, places locals go to get high or hook up out of sight. Her mission is ambiguous but she seems to have been hired by her younger selves, attempting contact with the rapidly climbing number of untimely dead, seeking a solution to the crisis, ultimately, to save her own life.