Deep Voices #109

Perfect B music

Deep Voices #109 on Spotify
Deep Voices #109 on Apple Music

The opening three seconds of this edition of Deep Voices are likely the most difficult to listen to. A piece of a reworking for saxophone of Bach’s Cello Suites by Yasuaki Shimizu. It’s an ambitious project and largely swoonworthy, but it begins with a brittle honk, reminiscent of Albert Ayler or Arthur Doyle, two masters of free jazz. I have been craving music that feels like it’s splitting apart. 

I was listening to Hayden Pedigo’s new album (nicely reviewed by Colin Joyce over at Pitchfork and recommended to me by my friend

Alex Frank

) and noticed the song’s had numerous short pauses, almost like he was performing in Morse code. It’s a live album, and, sure enough, at the end of one song, he addressed them. “The pauses in my music, the reason they’re there is, in Amarillo [his hometown], the flat planes that go on forever, they’ve always been refreshing to me. They feel like a giant…long…pause.” I like that, it’s as if he was painting the landscape. If there’s a theme to this playlist, it’s texture. Nothing is a feeling too.  

So: brittle music. I guess it’s about the moments when sound isn’t there. Barf, pretentious, I know. But I think I have wanted to listen to music like this because it’s by definition imperfect, unburnished. My friend was telling me about his artist friend who is obsessed with (theoretically) getting a “B” on her artwork, a B as in the letter grade. Not a perfect “A” but a perfect B. The perfection of an A is a burden. Step it down a notch and you’re back in human territory. I guess I have wanted to listen to music that made me feel less lonely? Again, barf, sorry. Can’t help myself. To borrow a phrase from Hoobastank, I’m not a perfect person. Neither are the people who made these songs. Thank god. 

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Playlist notes:

• I always imagine the guitarist Mark McGuire as a wizard. Long beard, one of those triangle hats. Moondog-esque. It’s because his music feels mystical to me, something closer to casting a spell than playing an instrument, as if his guitar was a wand. The sound he gets out of it, kaleidoscopic and expansive, it sounds like it’s being played from inside a giant prism.
  
  “Soaring” is his new single, from July. Mcguire, on his Bandcamp, says that on it he played both synth and guitar, a heavenly duo. That lineup has obvious echoes of Brian Eno and Robert Fripp’s Evening Star album (side one, duh), as well as Manuel Gottsching’s E2-E4 (I’m a side two freak over here). The synth seems like it lays down the movement of the day, the sun’s rise and fall, while the guitar is peripatetic, skittering across the landscape like a little human going about their pointless and beautiful business. I like this music because it feels both small and big at the same time, like the only way to respond to the wonder and woe of life is to try to mimic it. You know you’ll fail, but you do it anyway. 
  
  As a side note, while trying to figure out if McGuire uses an ebow or not (a guitar tool that I thought maybe what was making me think of prisms) I stumbled onto his fan-made profile on equipboard.com, a website that documents what pieces of musical equipment artists use. They have to document proof of how they know. There’s only one source photo for McGuire, from a show in 2011. He’s not in the picture, it’s just a shot of his gear on the floor, presumably before he played. The caption: “In this photo, which shows McGuire's pedalboard during his 2011 gig at Shacklewell Arms in London, one of the pedals that can be identified is the Boss SL-20.” Beneath that, the site suggests you, “Explore more artists that use Boss SL-20 Slicer,” like Brian Eno and Noel Gallagher. Will do! 

  
  This brief journey into fact checking really just makes me want to go back to thinking only a wizard could make these sounds from a prism. 

• Speaking of fact checking, I was trying to read up about the 20_14 Assembly, a Danish trio making experimental improvised music. I really liked the music. It reminded me of Musica Elettronica Viva, radical but well aware of their place in history. I wondered: What were their motivations? Their influences? I went to their Bandcamp to see what I could find out. The answer: not much. Aside from the names of the musicians (​​Lil Lacy on cello, Aase Nielsen on synth, and Rune Kielsgaard on drums), and the name of the club this recording was made at (Ny Lille Klub in Copenhagen, which I did find out was now permanently closed and looking for a new home), and the fact that they were opening for Florence Sinclair (who I had to google), the only extemporaneous info was, “special times 4 sure.” Thanks, for the info guys! Perfect B behavior. 

• If you’re going to dig into one full album from this week’s tracks, I’d urge you to check out Flaer’s Burrow. It’s a string-laden, wistful album, the second release under the Flaer name by Realf Heygate, who is otherwise a painter who lives in West Cornwall, England, which is, I believe, craggy, and by the sea. The album, Heygate says, was inspired not just by that environment, but how it’s depicted by the painter Paul Nash. I was not familiar with Nash, so I looked up his work, and, based on the seriousness of the music, expected to see gray realism, a UK equivalent of the Hudson River School painters. But instead his paintings are moody, active. There is gray, yes, but also green, pink, deep hues of turquoise and aquamarine. The landscape, his primary subject, is always alive. 

  
  After looking at his work, I went back to Flaer’s music. The music, which features string arrangements met with acoustic guitar and mechanical percussion (the first song, I believe, literally samples the chug of a grandfather clock), had felt heavy, doleful. Grand, but in the ominous way that a storm cloud is grand. 

  
  Nash’s work was not a skeleton key that unlocked a Day-Glo interpretation of Flaer; the music was very much still serious. But it helped it feel less doleful, more celebratory. “Burrow,” the title track which I included on Deep Voices, feels cinematic and dark. I was thinking funereal. But maybe I’ve misread it. Maybe this is music for a birth, for a beginning, not an ending, a gentle entrance into the world, and not an exit out of it.

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If you made it this far, perhaps you’d like to discuss this music. Or any other music. I have a thread going for weekly chat about what Deep Voices readers are listening to. Join us over here.

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