Deep Voices 114

The call is strong

Deep Voices 114 on Spotify
Deep Voices 114 on Apple Music

A real random mix of stuff this week. UK soul, Greek dub techno, French jazz, Argentinian psych, and more. Classic Deep Voices mix of decades and genres after a few weeks of interviews and themes. Notes on the tracks below after a brief word from your sponsor (me). 

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Deep Voices is a labor of love (emphasis on labor, emphasis on love). Each week, I bring you a one-hour playlist, built out of a lifetime of musical exploration. I have high standards but bottomless curiosity. On the weekend, I color outside the lines with the weekly wormhole posts, offering life recommendations for music lovers (think freaky eBay finds, sharp essays, YouTube flotsam, and more). Sign up for a paid subscription to get access to those, as well as discounts on Deep Voices merch and exclusive playlists. Music journalism exists if you support it!

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Playlist notes:

• My friend Michael spends a lot of time on Soulseek and listens to music on FLAC files. He’s one of those people who has impeccable taste in clothes, food, television, and most realms of culture. I take his recommendations pretty seriously (I have him to thank for my time passed watching “The Craftsman”). Michael’s most recent album recommendation to me was the 1990 house/soul record by the UK singer Carlton. I was not familiar with Carlton, though you may know him from a handful of vocal features on Massive Attack tracks. His only solo album, The Call Is Strong sounds similar to those tracks, with bubbling digi-dub bass lines and house-y pings throughout. Carlton has a squeaky falsetto and an impassioned delivery that makes him sound serious. That can border on self-serious, so he’s better when the beat is a little looser. I included the album opener, “Cool With Nature,” which is album’s warmest track. The rest of the record is a real feast of ’90s tropes, in a sweet way. “Come on Back,” a slow-moving reggae track, is excellent. “Do You Dream” is almost hip-house, but anxious. The whole album feels retro, dated. I mean, it is. The beats likely sounded futuristic in 1990, but the future they were pointing to has long past. That’s not a bad thing. It feels tactile. I think if Carlton made this album today, it would be slick and maybe forgettable. A chunkier past at least gives you something to chew on. Thanks, Michael! 

• I’m late, but lately I have really been enjoying the one EP Christelle Bofale has released, 2019’s Swim Team. It tiptoes a tight line in its blend of rock guitar riffs and soulful vocals. A difficult thing to do so deftly. So difficult, in fact, that I have to go back two decades to think of a close comparison. To me, Bofale’s music strongly recalls Res, the singer who had a few incredible singles on an album executive produced by a pre-Santigold Santi White. After her debut, Res basically disappeared from the music industry for a dozen years. It’s been three years since Bofale released any new music at all. She did recently perform in New York opening for Astrid Sonne, so I’m hoping her career does not share the same fate as Res’. 

• I didn’t expect to end up listening to a bunch of French jazz from an incredible drummer I’d never heard this past week. Here’s how I found it: In the 1960s and ’70s, the French record label BYG released the Actuel series of jazz albums, an incredible who’s who of the avant-garde world. There were albums by Archie Shepp, Sunny Murray, Don Cherry, Andrew Cyrille, Sonny Sharrock, Sun Ra, and more. Some of the music is a tougher, wilder listen, but it’s all very talented musicians attempting to push the boundaries further. 
  
  I’ve always been a fan of saxophonist Steve Lacy’s album from the Actuel series, Moon. It’s a fun record, a real racket. Listening back to it recently, I realized I had no idea who were the members of Lacy’s backing band. I was most curious about the drummer, who skitters manically across his kit. On many of the Actuel releases, the artists were American, recording abroad with local sidemen. Lacy’s album has an group of European players, including the French drummer Jacques Thollot. Thollot also plays on Sharrock’s entry into the Actuel series, Monkey-Pockie-Boo, which is an earth shatteringly furious guitar record. 

  Thollot’s solo albums are much more quietly exploratory than his work with Lacy or Sharrock. His 1971 solo debut, Quand Le Son Devient Aigu, Jeter La Girafe À La Mer (which excellently translates to, “when the sound gets high-pitched, throw the giraffe into the sea”), features a few songs of berserk drums, but the piano is the most prominent instrument. Thollot plays delicately, at times baroquely. I included his song “Mahogany Extraits,” an echoey piano solo which has pretty much nothing in common with his rampaging drums on the Actuel jazz albums. His other records have more psych undertones, and a later one is more straight ahead jazz. Worth digging into Thollot’s catalog to hear the diversity of his skills and interests.

• The final lines of Leslie Walker’s “Night Moon” operate as a good thesis statement for his music at large: “It is love that brings us together and love is what we need.” Walker is more of a narrator than a singer, talking about the power of love over a somewhat generic baroque trap beat. For the ten songs he has available on streaming, he has only used two different beats (six of them use the same beat as “Night Moon,” the other four, from an EP called Composistion of Love 3, are similar if slightly more haunted). 

  
  From what I can tell via some light googling, Walker’s family member (his son?) owns a clothing store in the Bay Area called Slick Bridge with a recording studio in the back. The beats all have a “Slick Bridge” tag, so I assume the store/studio’s proprietor is the producer. On each song, Walker talks about god and the power of love with a major echo on his voice. It sounds like he’s being recorded in a cave. 

  
  In a traditional sense, this music is not “good.” But it is dripping with goodness. It is unbeatably earnest, the type of art someone makes because they have a message lodged inside their gut and it needs to be shared. I found Walker’s Instagram. He appears to be in his sixties or seventies. There’s only two photos. In the first one, from May of 2022, he’s wearing a suit jacket and doing a funny pose. “Hey,” the caption reads, “life is still wonderful.”