Deep Voices 121

Mechanical polyrhythms, synchronized with the human alpha and theta waves

Deep Voices 121 on Spotify
Deep Voices 121 on Apple Music

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Deep Voices is a newsletter featuring a one-hour playlist from me, Matthew Schnipper. I work hard to feature artists across time and genre that may not otherwise be getting the attention I think they should. These playlists and their accompanying text are always free. On the weekends, I publish an additional newsletter—musical revelations, recommendations—just for paying subscribers. know asking for a paid subscription is a big request. If you can afford it, and you feel like paying for one, know that I am hugely grateful for your support of this project, my writing career, and the quest to spotlight more artists who deserve it. Thank you.

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Playlist notes:

• Late last year, Geologist of Animal Collective announced a new album, A Shaw Deal, made up of samples from Instagram clips of the music of Doug Shaw. Shaw played with White Magic and Gang Gang Dance, and often solo, under the name Sleepy Doug Shaw and, once, as Highlife, a tribute to the genre of Ghanaian guitar music of the same name. In 2010, he released one record as Highlife, an EP, Best Bless, and, hearing about A Shaw Deal, I revisited it. It sounds great.
  
  Most photos of Shaw you can surface find him smoking something, and his voice has a sweet hoarseness to it that I assume has been seasoned by a lifetime of cigarettes and weed. He’s British, and he sounds a little posh, but a little mischievous, playing his acoustic guitar like an Eton runaway busking in a London Underground station.
  
  Best Bless is essentially just Shaw and his guitar—or at least that’s how I remembered it. Revisiting the record, I found an abundance of sound, including guest vocals from Mira Billotte of White Magic, rickety percussion, piquant basslines, and some of the happy fuzz that accompanies a lot of Animal Collective songs. The upcoming collaboration makes sense—I look forward to hearing the album when it’s released on Friday. For now, I’m listening to Shaw’s 2022 solo set at Tubby’s on Bandcamp. A musician to be treasured.

• When I was in high school, I had very little context for either electronic or experimental music outside of the album TNT by the group Tortoise. If you’ve heard TNT, and I assume there’s a good chance many people reading have, you know that it’s a special record. The sound is all over the place, largely due to the group’s big size and the talent of its players. It’s a jumble of post-rock guitar, synth noodling, dub reverberations, and amble marimba. But because I had no larger understanding of the album’s influences or contemporaries, I sort of assumed that was a more typical sound, not an anomaly.

  
  I’ve maintained a soft spot for TNT for the past 25 years and, as my horizons have expanded, I learned how unique the record is. I think much of the reason for its distinctiveness is due to the time and place it was recorded (Chicago, a city with a cross-pollinating underground music scene, in the mid-’90s, before more advanced digital software was introduced). Not a lot of people try such a sweeping sound; it’s a big swing. So I was pleasantly surprised to hear the new album from LA musician AV Moves, which gives a 2025 take on TNT-core. The album is jazzy, ebullient. The synths are bigger than in TNT, they feel more modern, but not extravagant. The drums are fierce. The guitar shows up occasionally, a spectral counterpoint to the glimmering murk. The song “atoyota” is punchy, wiggly. “K-Ci & Coco,” a pleasant downtempo journey. The song I included on this week’s playlist, “77mph,” is somewhere between jazz and indie rock, the same liminal space in which Tortoise happily floated. A really lovely record—my first real discovery of 2025. And it seems I’m not the only one: the album was released on vinyl in an edition of 100 that has already sold out. If you’re holding one, let me know! (NB: this album is not on Apple Music. Check it out on Bandcamp.)
  

• I’m a creative person, but I’m not an artist, something I sometimes lament. I think there’s a specific type of uncompromising drive and adventure behind many artists that I simply don’t have. Even in writing, I don’t venture away from the truth. I like to decorate it, but I’m just a mirror for reality. That said: there is nothing more I love than when I see a freak who simply cannot be anyone other than themselves.
  
  Add László Hortobágyi to that list. A Hungarian musician with a bowl cut for the ages, Hortobágyi has released several hundred albums, from doomy orchestral pieces to majestic ambient works to traditional Indian classical music. He plays sitar. And organ. And who knows what else. His website, which looks nuts, has a detailed list of each release, as well as a Tumblr-like section, and many pdfs of his writing, most of which is, unfortunately for me, in Hungarian.
  
  I did find one piece in English that was a strange joy to read. It’s an interview, kind of, though it’s mostly Hortobágyi talking about music and his own existence. Asked to describe his music to an alien, he says, “The new transhuman musical language should be a language and technology that is asymmetric, bitonal, applying more tempi-simultaneously, but applying ‘in phase inverted’ mechanical polyrhythms, synchronized with the human alpha and theta waves, but using more dimensional space-algorithms, implementing more channel mapping and performance.” That appears to be doomed, though, “because this sort of musical language would demand a new humankind.” He also says he did not plan to be born.

  
  I’ve been trying to take in Hortobágyi’s massive discography. It’s overwhelming, but it’s fun to explore. He’s interested in sampling, global percussion, classical music, and humor. His 2000 album, Fomal-Hoot Al-Ganoub, is a maximalist journey of major chords. His 2016 album Barokritis 2016 makes space for metal, dub, trance, and the occasional Indian classical excursion. Is it good? Jury’s out. But is it a lot? Absolutely. This is music made by someone not interested in following any other impulses but their own. I admire it.

  
  I opened this week’s Deep Voices playlist with a more lowkey Hortobágyi track from 1987. It’s a hybrid of orchestral music and industrial (kind of). The song I chose has babytalk, a trumpet, and a bitter guitar line. It’s a mishmash that manages to not topple under its own weight into the muck. I cannot say the same for much of his other music. Thank god for that.