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  The thing about Neil Dixon Smith is that he can play anything. I’ve heard him play reggae music, rock, Afro-Peruvian music, criollo music from all over South America, classical guitar pieces, Ghanaian palm wine music, Appalachian flatpicking, house music, and all on that beat up, knocked down nylon string guitar of his. On this record you’ll hear him play a lot of those styles, too, as he faces off against the luminaries of mid-century modernist English-language poetry.
  
  I first met Neil ten years ago when Tina, my friend and now his wife, introduced us. I took weekly guitar lessons from him for a while, but as my facility on that instrument quickly found its permanent plateau, those lessons evolved into gab sessions. We discovered we had a lot in common. We liked the same movies, had some of the same heroes. We both liked Latin American music – Neil apprenticed and gigged in Chicago with the Chilean guitarist Alfonso Chacón – and read a lot of books. After a few years, we realized we were both hooked on Roberto Bolaño and had both found him – separately – through author and journalist Francisco Goldman, who we also love.
  
  Sitting in Neil and Tina’s apartment in the torpor of a Chicago summer, guitars in reach, smoke in the air, and talking non-stop about The Savage Detectives or Distant Star; Phantom Numbers must be some still swirling effluvium in a corner of those evenings. Bolaño took the waking world and made it a sensual dream he seemed to be having. In his world, the quotidian became luminous: He showed us the banality of evil as though it were a paint-by-numbers kit that could turn anyone into a fascist. His stories were full of desire, but always tempered with enormous regret, and as his characters protected themselves from these two things – love and loss – they constructed enormous, encompassing interior lives for themselves… Every event, every encounter, carried the weight of a closely-held conspiracy theory. We loved it all, the passion, the paranoia, the drive to keep going no matter how weird the world got. Roberto Bolaño’s world was oceanic and we drowned ourselves in it.
  
  So, if there was ever a hook that would pull a guitarist of such scope and skill into a project where he played against poems read aloud, that hook would be Bolaño. In part 40 of his poem “A Stroll Through Literature,” Bolaño writes (as Laura Healy has translated it): “I dreamt that a storm of phantom numbers was the only thing left of human beings three billion years after Earth ceased to exist.”
  
  When the pandemic started in March 2020, Neil and I hadn’t played music together for several years. I had spent those years learning more and more about poetry (because of Bolaño!) and had recently started narrating audiobooks. As we traded texts about the state of the world, our fears and our confusion, some sense of a band built around Neil’s guitar and some knotty old poems started to clarify itself. I would record a poem, he would play guitar to it. It all felt very organic and natural, even if neither of us had done anything like it before. None of it was live because we weren’t quarantined together, but it still sounds as intimate to me and as immersive as those hot, smoky nights in his apartment years ago.
  
  The poems here fall together into a song cycle about a night – or perhaps several nights – that we follow from evening until the next day. The first poems show a restless waking life, the next ones show a restless night, and finally we get the brief resolution of another day, before the restlessness returns. We wanted some immersive structure for you to be able to sink into, something that reflects the uneasiness and the lassitude of the quarantine as we experienced it in the first couple of months. But we also wanted to bring a few voices into your head that you might not have come across otherwise, so for this project we chose some older poets – most of whom have passed away – and poems that we thought would be well served by what we’re doing. We hope that in hearing this you feel less isolated, less alone, and that maybe you can share in some of the head weather Neil and I enjoyed while making this record. Wrap yourself up in it. -- Wes ... more
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