Deep Voices #104

Sustained momentum

Deep Voices #104 on Spotify
Deep Voices #104 on Apple Music

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So my friend is pretty sick. He had surgery and is recovering and things are headed in the right direction, which is a miracle, but a month ago, it wasn’t guaranteed. We don’t live nearby, so we text, talk on the phone, send each other music. Lately, it’s been a lot of live Grateful Dead shows. He’s got pretty specific taste and a wide array of knowledge, so he doesn’t really need my recommendations, but I feel pretty incapacitated in terms of usefulness, so I thought this week I would make him a playlist of music that would help him zone out. Not mellow out, but to zone out from the larger world of low-hanging black clouds and to help you tune into a frequency outside of pain. Repetitive music, nothing mopey, just forward motion. Music that sounds like the trains running on time. 

Anyway, then Trump got shot. It freaked me out. I felt like maybe I needed to think bigger than just my friend, who was fine without me anyway. Maybe we all need music to help us forget. But then I felt foolish listening to a bunch of chill music while I tried to put together a playlist. This is not a chill time. Violence, oppression, death. I was confusing forgetting with denying. Maybe, I thought, we need music with presence. I’m not trying to promote anxiety and listlessness, but things don’t seem to be letting up. 

The ultimate makeup of this week’s playlist is music caught in the eyes of these storm. Not exactly a moment of calm, but of self-assured noodling while waiting around to get drenched. Competence within chaos. The closest anything feels to peaceful right now is sustained momentum. That’s what these songs have to offer, not respite, but a place to go.

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Playlist notes:

—“It sneaks up on you,” is what my friend Pete said when he sent me a link to Gyeongsu and June’s “Lead to Curse.” He meant that literally, as it starts with four minutes of pulsing (if not unpleasant) white noise before it builds into a song, a warm slice of shoegaze. It’s a surprise when the drums eventually do kick in. The white noise never disappears, they just play on top of it, which I think is cool. It’s like how all food tastes better with salt. 

—Joan Bibiloni music is made up mostly of the kind of flowery stuff I was trying to avoid for this mix. He’s a great musician but suffers from overstuffing his New Agey compositions with flutes and synths for a convoluted effect. But I stumbled onto an album of outtakes where, on the cover photo, he’s wearing Matrix glasses and grabbing his chin in a way that makes the picture look like a paparazzi shot of Bruce Willis exiting Spago in 1987. So I thought I’d check it out. It’s about half folky acoustic guitar noodling in the mode of John Fahey, champion wildman of the finger pickers. The songs are good, but what I like best is the attitude. He laughs and talks through much of these stripped down recordings, like he’s drunk at a party entertaining his friends. At the end of one song, “Leo’s Tune,” someone says “Wow!” I like “Let Go,” the best, and included that song here. It starts with some good chuckles, moves slow, and then picks up speed, almost like he forgot he was playing guitar. I don’t speak Spanish, so I don’t know what he’s saying, but he says something to someone—“Check this shit out,” probably—and then starts to play double time, a hotfooted ragtime jangle like it’s nothing. Because, I think, to him, it is. 

—Forgive me if I’ve told this story before, but it’s one of my favorites. Back in 2004, maybe 2005, I saw the drummer Chris Corsano play a solo set at a house show. He was set up in the living room, with his kit in front of him and some extra percussion beside him on the couch. Corsano has no boundaries as a performer, so his sets can go from subtle exploration of the timbre of a snare to an explosive free jazz solo. On this night, he spent some time banging out a hypnotic rhythm on a couple of pieces of unidentified metal he picked up from the couch. After the set ended, some guy came over to Corsano and, referring to traditional Indonesian music, presumptuously asked him, “Are those gamelan gongs?” Like they were going to have an ethnomusicological brodown. “No,” Corsano said back to him, “they’re pot lids.”

It’s not wild to suppose that such an extraordinary musician might be exploring various forms of global percussion, so I don’t want to clown too hard on gamelan guy, but watching him come up and say it, with a haughty air of presumption in order to assume a mutually elevated level of knowledge with an artist who then immediately knocked the wind out of his sails with drums he got out of the cupboard is one of the greatest moments of art in my life. Pot lids forever. 

Anyway, Corsano released a great solo album last month, and it sounds like he’s playing everything but the kitchen sink. I wondered if maybe that included pot lids. Great music for when you’re boiling over.