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In 1996, while on tour with Radiohead, Virginia-born singer Mark Linkous, leader and often sole member of the band Sparklehorse, all but died in his hotel room after a massive overdose. He lay for several weeks in a hospital bed, undergoing operations to save what was left of him. Blanket … me, sweet nurse … and help me keep from burning, he sings, in Saint Mary. The song, like all of Sparklehorse’s masterpieces, lingers in this hospital bed, the supreme dark place, a cradle of dreaming where he somehow touches death from both sides at once. Indeed, this simultaneous dimming and brightening of consciousness defines Sparklehorse’s musical universe.

Many of Linkous’s songs yearn to nestle into very quiet places – deep underwater, hovering in mist and rain, sprawled out in the desert, on the moon or in the coldness of outer space: I'm so sorry … my spirit's rarely in my body; it wanders through the dry country … looking for a good place to rest. But there’s always a demonic counterpoint to this, so that his weary soul expects no quarter in its slumber: I would sleep in the fire, with snakes I have sired. From the title of his penultimate album – Dreamt for Light Years in the Belly of a Mountain – through the songs: with rocks in my dress, and smoke in my hair … I walked into a lake, to get some sleep down in there … will you promise me not to rest me out at sea, but on a fiery river boat that’s rickety, he searches for a place to sleep, and watches as legions of phantoms emerge from behind his closed eyes.

Fourteen years ago, after a brief run of mainstream popularity, Linkous awoke from his hospital bed and began to create more intentionally cultish and transcendentally strange music, knowing that he had his greatest work still to do. Today, perhaps, he has finished it. He has, at the very least, come as close as he ever will: a few weeks ago, he shot himself in the heart in Knoxville, TN.

1. American Suicide / Ghost Folk

The news was shocking, as suicides always are, and for faithful listeners the end of his musical output will always have come too soon. But, in the larger scheme of his artistic landscape, his death is something other than a tragedy. It is, rather, a deepening of the same sleep from which the music issues. His final act is prefigured by and in many ways completes his musical project: that of tracing the contours of deathly America, of the dead that inhabit America, of dying in America and America the dead. But in a way, this realization only increases its own mystery: where does death, let alone suicide, find itself in a nation founded on the mythic assurance of novelty and youth, the headlong rush of the immortal Frontier?

This suicide raises another unanswerable question: who is it that we have lost? Someone named Mark Linkous, or something called Sparklehorse? It seems rash and insensitive to answer with a band name, as opposed to a real individual who in the end must somehow have been more than the sum of his sonic experiments. But what has silenced itself goes beyond the human, under death to some other place, into the inhuman staticky whisper that distilled an impossible space-time of fevered innocence and rot, both always-already gone and only just dawning. Good morning my child, you’ve not got anyplace … to be.

Sparklehorse’s America is one with a lonely interior, haunted by specters of decay, windswept stasis, unheeded wisdom festering unseen to break and rot a whispered fate. But he’s not without company in this America: that of the subgenre that has burgeoned in the last two decades into what might be called ghost folk. At the nexus of alt-country, lo-fi, and rugged, raspy balladeering, its constituents range from Bonnie “Prince” Billy and M. Ward; to Band of Horses, Iron & Wine, and Bon Iver; to the more pastoral melodies of Fleet Foxes and Midlake; back to the Wilco of A.M. and Summerteeth, and forward into the more beguiling corners of their Yankee Hotel Foxtrot and A Ghost is Born; incorporating the starker, sparer ruminations of Vic Chesnutt and Grandaddy’s Jason Lytle, who meet on Sparklehorse’s Dark Night of the Soul, his final work, with DJ Danger Mouse and David Lynch (which we’ll come back to).

Sparklehorse was squarely at the vanguard of ghost folk in the mid-90’s, already cutting his Appalachian instrumental core – banjo, finger-picked guitars, violin – with a strong dose of synths, organs, vocal distortions, mechanical drum triggers, and heavy blankets of feedback and reverb, both coddling the timorous acoustic lines and breathing waves of plague across them, corroding his whispered vocals into a far vaster tide of digital sequencing and stray radio bleeps, static, groans, bees buzzing at the margins of the melody. Can you feel the rings … of Saturn on your fingers? Can you taste the ghosts who shed their creaking hosts? he whispers, and, as long as he keeps whispering, you’re pretty sure you can. But by the time he stops, something else has come into view.

2. The Dim Interior