Deep Voices 122
The 10 best songs of January
Deep Voices 122 on Spotify
Deep Voices 122 on Apple Music (NB: Apple Music is missing the AV Moves and bambinodj and Phillip Jondo songs)
January was a good month for music, if not much else. For January, that includes Sam Amidon’s perfect bad singing, Ocean Moon’s perfect bleeps and perfect bloops, Vanessa Amara’s perfect blogcore, and more. I also wrote about two artists on the playlist, AV Moves and Gajek, in the most recent Deep Voices and Wormhole emails, respectively). Further playlist notes are below.
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. Once a month—right now—I put together a playlist of the best songs of the month. These playlists and their accompanying text are always free. On the weekends, I publish an additional newsletter—musical revelations, recommendations—just for paying subscribers. I know asking for a paid subscription is a big request. Four years into this project, I am hugely grateful for those who can afford to support Deep Voices, my writing career, and the quest to spotlight more musicians who deserve it. Thank you.
Before I compliment their music, I want to register a complaint about Vanessa Amara. Namely that they are not a woman named Vanessa Amara, but a trio of men. There has been a spate of men using women’s names for their artist name (and, of course, a group of men literally called Women) which feels purposefully misleading at best. Vanessa Amara’s new album, café LIFE is their fourth album and the first one that I liked enough to find out who this Vanessa Amara person is, only to find out she is three guys named Birk, Victor, and Sebastián.
Anyway, café LIFE is great. It’s full of sped-up and/or chopped-up vocal samples, for a sound somewhere between early Kanye West and Deadboy. The production feels throwback-y too, almost like a techno influenced take on Washed Out-style chillwave. The track I included here, “Don’t Let This Feeling” combines the choppy vocals with swelling strings. It’s simple, short, and goes straight for the heart. Nostalgic catnip for me, honestly. I have listened to this song like 5,000 times. If this came out in 2008 when I was working at the Fader and blogging all day I am sure I would have written something totally over the top about how it sounds like if Daft Punk went to couples therapy. But it does.Speaking of the Fader, my former colleague Duncan Cooper recommended Sam Amidon’s new album Salt River to me over text in the funniest way: “I really love this guy and his insistence on singing despite having such an annoying voice.” I’d heard of Amidon but never listened and I’m glad Duncan’s push made me check him out because he really is the worst singer in the absolute best way. I mean that very much as a compliment. My favorite song on the album, which is made up mostly of covers and reinterpretations of traditional songs, is a version of “Big Sky” by Lou Reed. Reed’s original, from 2000, is really hard rocking and kinda sucks, but the lyrics are fantastic. “Big sky, big enormous place/Big wind blow all over the place/Big storm wreaking havoc and waste/But it can't hold us down anymore.” I love the rhyming of “place” and “place.” When Amidon sings it, with his sideway warble, it’s a sweet lamentation. When the song eventually gets to the weirdo lines, “Big sin, big sin, big original sin/Paradise where I've never been/Big snake break the skin,” Amidon sounds almost confused by what he’s saying, like he’s being asked to read a surrealist poem at gunpoint. There’s like half the song he doesn’t even sing. It’s about monks and I guess it was too much.
For those of you who know the name, Salt River was produced by saxophonist Sam Gendel, and his wonky touch adds some heft to the instrumentation, while still letting Amidon’s voice be the star, very loud and very clear.
A couple years back, the Music From Memory released a compilation of music by the duo MLO, who made really airy ambient techno ’90s. Now they’ve released a new album by Jon Tye, half of MLO, under one of his monikers, Ocean Moon. Tye also runs the label Lo Recordings, which, across decades, has released all kinds of electronic and underground music, including serving as a home for several of Susumu Yokota’s albums.
Tye’s new album’s title may give you a hint to its sound: Ways to the Deep Meadow. The music is correspondingly mossy. It’s unpretentious, gentle, twinkling music. Ambient music is a tricky thing to get right because the bar to entry is relatively easy; by nature there’s not much there. Tye’s music contains few ingredients: resonant synth tones, gurgling water, the hum of a slowly played thumb piano. These sounds overlap, commingle, fade away. It’s not rocket science, but only because rockets are loud.