Sub Pop Records

The Law of Unintended Consequences states that, while human actions often give way to their intended results, all human actions have at least one unintended result as well. For example: tell your lover you don’t love him and he will eventually leave your bed. But, driven from your bed, this same person might be pushed so far off track that he packs a bag and heads for a secluded mountain retreat where he replaces a life of beer and pretzels for one of prayer beads and incense. Our actions reverberate in unexpected ways.

Twenty-something years of studying these sometimes surprising causes-and-effects is what led Jesy Fortino to become Tiny Vipers. Her songs are stories about choices. She likes to believe that things can be plotted. She likes to believe in planning and in decision making, but she also reveres the unknown, the unknowable. Take, for instance, the song “Swastika” from Hands Across the Void, her acoustic/goth debut album.

Stripped of its cultural and historical implications—which do not, of
course, begin and end with a mustached madman—the swastika can be seen as a series of choices made along a path: a right turn here, a long straightaway there, another turn, a dead-end. Stripped of its hammered and humming guitar strings, Tiny Vipers’ “Swastika” can be understood as a series of “if/then” statements plucked from the source code of just about any life. Close to eleven minutes long and wholly complete in three distinct parts, the track begins by asking, “If I would let you into my heart/would you thank the Lord/would you tear it apart?” Later, as the lines ask you to consider fever, violence, God, and more—as well as the intended and…