Deep Voices 128
Eternal sound
Deep Voices 128 on Spotify
Deep Voices 128 on Apple Music
This week’s Deep Voices is made up of airy, downtempo, triphoppy, IDM-ish electronic music. Some bubbliness, but not too much. A little singing, but mostly not. I’ve been in this zone lately, one that splits the difference between Aphex Twin and Everything But the Girl. It’s an eternal sound—there’s music on here that is more than 30 years old and there’s music less than a year old and it’s all very much in conversation with each other. Thoughts on what’s being said 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. These playlists and their accompanying text are always free. On the weekends, I publish an additional newsletter, Down the Wormhole—musical revelations, recommendations—just for paying subscribers.
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Playlist notes:
I started this playlist with “Burnt Sienna,” a 1993 track from µ-Ziq, the solo project of Mike Paradinas, who has long run the Planet Mu record label. (Briefly, at this early point in the project, µ-Ziq was a duo with Francis Naughton.) A few weeks ago, a friend texted me that he heard it on Astrid Sonne’s NTS radio show while he was driving. He said he almost had to pull over.
The song comes from µ-Ziq’s debut Tango n’ Vectif. It’s a very good album, and a cornerstone album of its time. Some of the tracks feel dated now, slightly tinny, but most feel prescient, robust, metallic pieces of techno that rattles around feverishly and then sink into dramatic ambience. “Vibes” is particularly fun, “Whale Soup,” excellently weird. “Burnt Sienna,” though, is the highlight to my (and Astrid Sonne’s) ears. It’s eight minutes long and earns its runtime. It begins with a harpsichord-like synth run, almost like a psychedelic music box. That riffing lasts for about three minutes, until a sound I cannot identify as anything other than totally alien, takes over. It’s very sci-fi, makes me think of something neon green and gloopy. That sound pulses as the harpsichord bit reenters along with several angelic sustained notes and woodblock percussion. Oddly, these elements of organic and inorganic sound don’t blend. You get this alien syrup dousing the track, but the softer sounds don’t melt under its pressure. “Burnt Sienna” feels both robotic and earthly. And that push-pull works.James K, a transcendent singer and producer, was on Deep Voices’ best songs of 2024 playlist with her track “Blinkmoth (July Mix)” and I think she is going to be really big. She should be. On today’s playlist, I looked back to a track from 2013, “P.E.T.,” and it’s interesting to hear the similarities and differences with her new work. The fundamentals are there in terms of the heavy drums and the dreamy vocals, but the older song is moodier. Her new songs have a skittering clarity. Less shy.
The trickpony, Doss, and Infant tracks on here all feel similar to James K, trip-hop-y tracks with whispered vocals. Music descended from Portishead and Tricky, with a touch of Bjork and Grimes, too. trickpony, a new project from producers Roza Terenzi and Mike Midnight (who was just on Deep Voices 124) and vocalist Maria Korkeila feels like a good midpoint between the smooth and the brittle. Their EP from last year is sultry but stark, with very up-front production choices. Trip-hop made modern, similar to (fellow lowercase loyalists) a.s.o., if you happened to have been a fan of that project.
Like James K, Doss has been working in this sound for over a decade, establishing a small cult. Her music is more mechanical than James K’s, though, less soulful. I love the wooziness of her first EP, from which “Here Tonight” comes. Infant (whose music is not available on Apple Music) is the least well known of the four, and the music feels very accessible and sweet, meeting at a similar place of dreaminess with a rock approach rather than an electronic one.Shamanic Spirit by Alvin Kramer is kind of random New Age/world music/trance blend of music I find myself impervious not to check out every time I come across it. Most of the time, this type of thing has diminishing results, but sometimes, it truly hits (see my delight in discovering the music of Mathias Grassow in Deep Voices 123). The minimal information I could find about the album online has a “do your own research” kinda vibe. One catalog says the album is “inspired by nature and by a desire to return the listener to a state of well-being through sound, rhythm, melody and electronic overtones … It is music that arises from the intuition rather than the logical mind.”
Despite those claims of harmonious rejuvenation, Shamanic Spirit is not a chill, ruminative piece of music. The album is actually pretty punchy, really a homemade take on psytrance. The song I included here, “Glaciers” is a gem, with rattling, icy percussion and hyperspeed pan flute. I usually start zoning out the moment I hear anything approaching a pan flute-like sound, but the one used here one has an anxious quality, not a meditative one so it works (that says more about me than about pan flute, I realize). The whole thing obliterates three minutes in with a dialed up drum break and some wordless moaning and horror movie organ accents. Bizarre and funky. A cool discovery.