Deep Voices 117: The Best Music of November

Nothin' lasts forever and we both know hearts can change

Deep Voices 117 on Spotify
Deep Voices 117 on Apple Music

November is the cruelest month IMHO. You’re the furthest away you’ll be from being warm. Many folks have already lined up their year end playlists but I still wanted to send the best music of November because, despite my resistance to frigidity, it was a great month for warm music. This Pondlicker album came out of nowhere and really wowed me—one of the best records of the year for the resurgent soft IDM dub techno. More along those lines (but jazzier) from my friend Earthen Sea with his best (?) album yet on Kranky. He also shows up playing sax on the also jazzy Lifted album, which is Max D of Beautiful Swimmers with Matt Papich of Ecstatic Sunshine in maestro mode. There’s also jam band overdrive with YHWH Nailgun’s new single, whispercore with Perila, drum workout perfection with DjRUM, Relaxer craziness, and “Northern Exposure” fan fiction with Mark McGuire. Enjoy this month’s playlist and I’ll see you soon with Deep Voices’ 100 best songs of the year (objective edition).

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Each week, Deep Voices bring you a playlist built out of a lifetime of musical exploration. Very deep, many voices. You want jazz? You got jazz. You want relaxing ambient. You got it. You want beach guitar, Uruguayan indie, Canadian dub, and, inevitably, weird British people doing whatever they want? We’ve got it all. On the weekend, I color outside the lines with the weekly wormhole posts, offering life recommendations for music lovers—stuff to read, buy, watch, listen to, consider. Sign up for a paid subscription to get access to those, as well as discounts on Deep Voices merch and exclusive playlists for the cost of one beverage a week. Music journalism exists and is worth the price of a mid-level iced tea. Thank you!

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Playlist notes:

• Sonically, “November Rain,” the Mount Eerie song I end this week’s playlist with is a throwback/continuation of his OG Microphones sound, with its bare strumming and plainly sly singing. The lyrics are first person (the first word is “I”), but unlike his youthful songs, the narrative isn’t navel gazing. Instead, he’s singing about environmentalism, colonialism, and an unearned sense of home. The song is about the vacation homes dotting the island of Anacortes where Mount Eerie’s Phil Elverum lives year round. “I can see the lights of the unoccupied second homes/That they keep lit up for no reason reflecting on the barely moving water/On an inland sea where people park their money.”
  
  What I like about the song is that it’s not simply a lamentation of excessive wealth. I mean, it is that, but Elverum also feels for their shortsightedness. “All these absentee owners miss/The huge embrace, the pressing kiss/ Of this specific November rain in the long darkness.” It’s a sweet and generous and complicated way to live. I also like the song stole its name from a Guns N Roses epic, while not referencing the original at all. A sense of humor never hurt anyone. Except for sensitive rich people.

• As I mentioned above, the Pondlicker album really hit me by surprise. I always check out releases on NAFF, since the release of the Perishing Thirst album six years ago (the group the label dubbed a “rave band.”) In the time since, the label has ramped up their releases, with multiple records by inventive electronic artists like Priori, Cousin, and Purelink. Pondlick is Adam Feingold, who has released many fine records as Ex-Terrestrial. As Pondlick, he adds a welcome buoyancy with his debut Soft Focus. It’s certainly techno, electronic music with a steady pulse, but there’s a simmering across the songs, a bit of steam being released slowly. The impulse in dub techno is often to lean into the dub part, for the techno part to sink to the background. That makes sense—it’s exciting to break a structure down to the joists. But what I like about Pondlicker is that he works opposite to that, with the emphasis on the techno. The dub parts are accents, moments of vanishing that disappear and reappear. It’s music made with a deft sleight of hand.

• Is Mark McGuire’s “Anhedonia” the song of the year? Perhaps yes. Throughout these monthly playlists I’ve sprinkled in instrumental guitar music (see: Alan Licht, Marisa Anderson, Raphael Roginski, Ava Mendoza, Bill Orcutt), slippery songs that move from the center out in all directions. Take the taut rope of John Fahey’s guitar soli and launch it into outer space where it splinters into parts and you have this next, next generation of guitarists who are more interested in texture than tension. McGuire, formerly of Emeralds, has found the right liminal space between structure and explosion, honing his wondrous playing across a prolific career. “Anhedonia,” which samples a funeral speech from “Northern Exposure” to great emotional effect, is a woozy, loving sweep of strums. You can hear each note being plucked, with multiple layers of McGuire’s guitar in conversation with each other. There’s the noodly solo, the elongated countryish twang, and the buzzy hum where it sounds like the strings have turned into fried rays of the sun and McGuire is the only player on earth able to wrestle them into submission. A beautiful song we are lucky to have.