Deep Voices #110

Thought experiment

Deep Voices #110 on Spotify
Deep Voices #100 on Apple Music

I feel like the genre known as “experimental music” is now titled a misnomer. It feels like there’s been too much slippage between the idea of experimenting and the one of making a pointless racket. Sometimes it feels like that experiment already happened, decades before, and now we’re just doing it over again, with arguably worse results. 

And then sometimes, I don’t think that at all. Sometimes I listen to music and it feels like the artist really is trying something new. That’s a good thing. For that artist, at least—not always the listener. Experimentalism can leave the bar to entry relatively low. As the saying goes, fuck around and find out. 

I was thinking about this because I was listening to The Frog Peak Collaborations Project, a double album of 115 “songs,” all of which use a brief piece of spoken word audio as source material. The pieces, mostly very short, around a minute, give or take, are all manipulations of that audio. Not that you can tell. They mostly sound ridiculous, like a VCR eating a tape. Some add piano, some static, a cymbal. They sound, to be clear, like experiments. I like that, even though I don’t like a lot of the music. A lot of it is funny in its scrambled brevity, but it’s not very palatable. I picked out two tracks I did like and those open and close this week’s playlist. How Richard Wilding’s piece, a desperate pulse that I imagine sounds like what SETI sends out into the universe, needed four contributors is beyond me. But I hope he had fun playing around with his friends

The rest of this week’s music, as another saying goes, is (sometimes literally) noise. I picked out other songs that follow the spirit of experimentalism without necessarily the rules. Notes on two favorites below. 

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Playlist notes:

• Shout out to Deep Voices reader (and Mother Jones articles editor! Smart!) Jacob Rosenberg who recommended guitarist Alan Licht’s new album, Havens. I’ve dabbled in Licht’s extensive catalog before, primarily his collaborations with Loren Mazzacane Connors, but this is likely my favorite of his albums. Experimental guitar music, to me, often brings to mind a type of galvanized playing, where the music sounds like it’s being electroshocked. Sonny Sharrock is likely my favorite player of this style. Many people in his lineage are pale imitators. 
  
  Licht’s music has had echoes of that approach, though from the sparer end of the spectrum of Sharrock’s maximalism. On Havens he seems inexplicably influenced by two of my favorite guitarists, Phil Elverum of Mount Eerie/The Microphones and John Fahey. Elverum is a great example of someone whose music does not fit into typical ideas of experimental music but whose music is pretty bravely exploratory in approaching new forms, specifically in its blend of indie/folk and unruly percussion (and, for a period, black metal). Fahey is a singular talent who basically invented a way of playing solo guitar that is so moving to me that it’s hard for me to describe in any literal way. It sounds like wading in a river, it sounds like leaves falling.  
  
  Licht’s album feels like he sat down with these influences in mind, and started to play. It’s unclear if the music is improvised, but early on in “The Daily Sit,” you can hear what appears to be a “mistake.” Was it a moment where Licht couldn’t decide where to go next? A split decision where he hesitated and the hesitation became the decision? 
  
  I didn’t include it here because it’s 17 minutes long, but I recommend checking out the song “Nonchalant,” a slowly meandering acoustic guitar rambler. I don’t play guitar, but it doesn’t sound all that complicated to perform. Perhaps that has to do with the way it was recorded, up close and brittle. It’s almost like when you see a guy take out a guitar at a house party and he plays the worst bullshit. I think this is what he actually thinks he sounds like. Graceful and interesting against all odds. 

• At this point, it seems almost like cheating to put on a song on Deep Voices off an album released by Stroom, like I should have to look harder to find music to share with you. But the Belgian label is just too good, too consistent. Stroom has released dozens of albums, both vital reissues (the Pablo’s Eye albums are essential), as well as weird and delightful new music. Voice Actor’s two albums have rightfully gotten the attention they deserve, quirky and bright. I included Wist on a playlist recently, music that sounds quite a bit like its artist’s name, and I’m looking forward to hearing the Milan W. album out in October. 
  
  On this playlist, I chose a track from harpist Sissi Rada’s album Aporia, which Stroom released in the spring. Her music runs the gamut, with some songs pensive and gloomy, her harp paired with protrusive electronic percussion and swelling vocal choruses. Sometimes, like on the song I included here, “Poso,” the music is gentle, with the harp playing second fiddle to Rada’s sweet and sorrowful vocals. “Poso” reminds me of Caetano Veloso, music so fragile that it might disappear with a light gust of the wind. 
  
  If the ongoing question in experimental music is, “How much noise can you make?,” should the search for the inverse, to make something as barely there as you can, also be experimental music? Yes.