Deep Voices 123

Perplexing music continues

Deep Voices 123 on Spotify
Deep Voices 123 on Apple Music

I like the path this one takes. It started off this playlist as something like a collection of dark funky, but it took a turn in the middle with funky ambient, then a moment of dark rock, and finally a new-to-me Laurie Anderson song that I’ve been obsessed with, that my wife not unfairly (or unkindly) referred to as “Enya-like.” Hear for yourself above and read about highlights from the playlist below. I wrote about new age tropes and a movie with great music.

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A friendly reminder: Deep Voices is a newsletter featuring a one-hour playlist with accompanying notes, essays, and interview. These emails are always free. On the weekends, I publish Down the Wormhole, an additional newsletter—musical revelations, recommendations—just for paying subscribers. I 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:

• Mathias Grassow is emblematic of these New Age guys whose discographies I’ll occasionally stumble across. Often European, often into the flute. Music for meditating in the broom closet of your office job. Take a look at his many album covers and you’ll see starkly photographed nature scenes, many barren trees. He has a song called “Reverence,” one called “Solitary Lighthouse,” another called “Physics of Radiance.” The point is, it’s easy to goof on this stuff. Often it deserves it, too, hours of subpar cheesy keyboard of little substance. But that is not Grassow.
  
  If you’re reading this and well-aware of his supposed standing as, “the king of ambient drone,” consider yourself better informed than me. Or at least than I was a week or two ago, as, since then, I’ve taken in quite a lot of Grassow’s music and I am here to say that, in spite of the corny tropes of its presentation, it is uniformly excellent.
  
  Grassow’s music is warm and searching, many layered synthesizer lines unfurling slowly, often accompanied by touches of organic sound, like a dash of piano, guitar, or (yes) a flute. Listening, I felt curiosity, not confidence. It sounded like he wanted to discover how to make music that makes him feel peaceful, not make music that would force you to. A 2009 album, Praha Meditations, a collaboration with Alio Die, is dark and brooding, close to the type of folk that was adjacent to industrial music in the late ’80s and ’90s. Elixir, from 1998, is made up of three 25-minute pieces that sound like metallic choral works. He has range.
  
  I most like Grassow’s 1991 album Prophecy, with its amazing cover of a wizard man in the purple sky holding an orb that contains a dove. It’s bright, courtly, a little sci-fi. More down the middle New Age, but with spirit, verve. “Guinevère,” which I’ve included here, is a liquidy song, nervous and excited. It’s the best song on a very good album. He’s got a lot of them. It just might not look that way.

• I watched the film Janet Planet this weekend. It follows a single mother the summer before her daughter enters sixth grade as their relationship begins to shapeshift. The film, the first one written and directed by playwright Annie Baker, moves languidly, not necessarily without narrative, but made up mostly of brief slices of life that collectively build to an understanding of the intense connection and growing gap between the two.
  
  The film is set in the early ’90s, in Western Massachusetts. The mother, Janet, is a free spirit, an acupuncturist who magnetically attracts people. She’s eccentric, eager to please. Her daughter, Lacy, is a weird, sweet kid who is starting to realize that while her mom is an amazing parent, she may not always make the best decisions for her own life.
  
  I loved the movie so much. I also had a difficult time understanding some of the quiet dialogue over the hiss of my radiator, so I turned on the subtitles. In a scene where Janet takes Lacy to see an outdoor puppet performance, the subtitle, noting the scrappy backing band, said, in a quick bit of poetry, “[perplexing music continues.]”
  
  The film has no score or proper soundtrack. Baker made field recordings in Massachusetts for two weeks, which she used throughout. The only music you hear is what the characters are listening to. Firehouse, folk singer Bob Carpenter, Beverly Glenn-Copeland, the theme song from ’90s Nickelodeon classic “Clarissa Explains It All,” and Laurie Anderson.
  
  The Laurie Anderson song that plays is “My Eyes,” from her 1989 album Strange Angels. “My Eyes” is a whimsical song, one about regret and acceptance. It has an ebullient world music sheen to it, with keys that sound like a pan flute and a bulbous-sounding fretless bass, while Anderson chipperly sings that if she was president, she’d give ugly people all the money. A perfect song, obviously.

  
  I checked out the rest of Strange Angels and found myself immediately taken with it. Especially the song, “Ramon,” which ends this week’s playlist. It’s really heartbreakingly beautiful. It’s a bit more of a slow burn than “My Eyes,” stark, at least comparatively. The song’s melody is from a series of deep, sour keyboard melodies. Powerhouse drummer Anton Fier, of the Feelies and the Lounge Lizards, plays drums on the song, his only credit on the album, and the drums sound like a horse galloping a long distance. Anderson is accompanied in the song’s latter half by Bobby McFerrin. When he duets with Anderson, both of their voices quiver as they sing. McFerrin was then just a year out from “Don’t Worry, Be Happy,” and “Ramon” has a slightly different take on perseverance: “So when you see a man who's broken, pick him up and carry him/And when you see a woman who's broken, put her all into your arms/Cause we don't know where we come from/We don't know what we are.”
  
  Janet is a complex woman, but a force for good. Her daughter knows that and even as the curtain of reality begins to fall on their childhood relationship, she will emerge into adulthood a better person because of the trust her mother has in her, in the confidence she’s instilled. I get why Annie Baker used “My Eyes” in Janet Planet. It’s a happy song. It’s quirky, but it’s fundamentally a positive piece of music.
  
  “Some fish are fast/Some are slow/Some swim round the world/Some hide below/This is the ocean/So deep, so old,” goes the end of “My Eyes.” It’s a Janet song.
  
  “And you?/You're no one/And you?/You're falling/And you?/You're traveling/Traveling at the speed of light.” That’s from “Ramon.” Much more me. But it wasn’t my movie.