Deep Voices #105
Really, really nice music
Deep Voices #105 on Spotify
Deep Voices #105 on Apple Music
Thanks to Laura Reilly of Magasin for recommending Deep Voices in Substack Reads this past weekend. If you’re new here by way of Laura’s kind words: welcome! To reiterate what Deep Voices is: a weekly newsletter with a one-hour playlist of underground and/or underloved songs and writing that touches on the music, its origins, and its evocations. Some editions have themes, some do not. My name is Matthew Schnipper, and I’m a former editor at Pitchfork and the Fader. For the last four years I’ve been making these playlists, hoping to bring music outside of the mainstream to a wider audience.
This week’s playlist is all instrumental. It moves in segments, from loose and funky to tight and funky, then tight and lush, to loose and lush, before it ends spacious and peaceful. In more practical terms, there’s house music, a trio of string-based songs, a dip into the dramatically Lebanese, and, finally, a couple of lovely ambient tracks.
Playlist notes:
—My friend Raph told me about a film they saw this weekend called Mermaid Legend. It’s from Japan in 1984 and the director, Toshiharu Ikeda, previously made softcore porn films because the backers said as long as there was a sex scene every ten minutes he could do whatever he wanted with the plot. Mermaid Legend, though not soft core, is a surreal revenge fantasy. Escapism takes all kinds.
Raph said the movie was really moving and the soundtrack was great. I couldn’t find a copy of the film online, but I did end up exploring the music of the composer, Toshiyuki Honda. In the last few days, I’ve become pretty obsessed with his album, also from 1984 titled, Modern. Some of it sounds like Philip Glass’ film work if he just chilled out from time to time. It’s peppy jazz-funk with shimmering synths that feel somewhat dated, which, at 40 years old, it is. But track three, “Transcontinental Bop,” which opens today’s Deep Voices, feels like it’s from an ancient future, music for flying cars zipping around the Hanging Gardens of Babylon.
Honda is primarily a sax player and on “Transcontinental Bop” he wields the instrument like a wizard’s staff, luring in listeners to his magic cave with a reedy call. The whole thing is high concept, but it’s self-knowing, not too heavy handed. And, speaking of hands, the cover of one of Honda’s other album’s features a t-rex fossil holding a sax in its little mitts. Honda still performs and, apparently game to stretch a theme to its breaking point, his website is http://dinosax.net.
—“With Squirrel on Christmas Day.” What could it mean? Is it a National Lampoon reference? Was National Lampoon big in Japan, where the producer Interferon resides? None of the other song titles on his album, the relatively seriously titled Seance-Room Music, even hint at anything goofy: “Levitation,” “Ball of Light,” “Dawn of Rainland.” How do you go from seance to squirrel?
Anyway, I love this song. It’s a techno song, sure, but a humid one, crawling languidly across its 10-minute run-time. There have been plenty of bands who have tried to recreate the sound of electronic music with live instruments, but it rarely happens the other way around. “With Squirrel” is not quite a one-to-one recreation of a guitar band, but it does have the tension and release of a jam band more than the repetitious trajectory of a club track. The scratched vocals give it a bit of suggestive humanity too, a herky-jerky ringmaster occasionally interjecting with his thoughts. This would be great music to hear on an island with a lot of friends. On a boat. In a hammock. I can see the squirrel connection. Watching them crawl up oak trees in the park hoarding acorns while on your headphones the keyboards wash away the rest of the known world. Christmas, though, feels like a stretch.
—Toumani Diabate, one of the greatest players of the kora, a 21-stringed African harp, died recently and unexpectedly at 58 years old. The Guardian has a thorough obituary that I recommend you read—it breaks down the significance of Diabate’s playing on a global level, especially the importance of his decision to record solo albums without overdubs, a first for a kora player.
If you’ve never heard the kora, I’d suggest listening to one of those solo albums. I’m particularly fond of 2008’s The Mandé Variations, whose opening song, “Si Naani,” I included here. The instrument, by its nature, is resonant and sparkling, and Diabate’s music does often shine. But his playing is pensive, quiet. The kora is such a tactile instrument, with its parallel rows of strings, that the creation of the music is imbued in its final product, the plucking, the work of the hands on strings. So when he moves slowly, speeds up, slows back down, you feel the thrill and fever of the playing rise and fall.
I saw Diabate play once but I didn’t remember much about it until I went back and reread something I’d written about the performance. It turns out it was the night before the 2008 presidential election. I would have been newly 26. I’d just returned from a vacation with a friend and apparently I was lost in thought about the good time I’d had now colliding with the political fear into which I was returning. About the music, “It felt nice,” I wrote. A comical understatement. Or was it? I don’t presume to know exactly what kind of nonsense was rattling around my head 16 years ago, but I do know I’ve often resorted to unimpeachably grandiose statements of praise when met with art of such great beauty that attempting to deconstruct it seems beyond my abilities. It takes a lot to play the kora at all; the skill level of Diabate is, to me, an arguable klutz, largely unfathomable. Still now, with a good deal more linguistic practice under my belt, I’d prefer to not be a fool in my attempts to elucidate the magic of his playing, and I’ll say that listening to it still feels nice. Really, really nice. RIP.
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thanks for the studio jams. great one