Deep Voices #15
Think small
Deep Voices #15 on Apple Music
The song I listened to the most this week is the one that comes out of my son’s four note keyboard whenever he smashes it. It’s rudimentary by nature, but it’s funky, and I’ve found it stuck in my head often. Though any song will get stuck in your head if it’s 20 seconds long and you hear it ten thousand times a day.
My friend Jesse recently asked me if I’d begun playing children’s music at home yet. I said no, that most of what I like is baby friendly anyway, music made up of repetitive percussion and twinkle sounds. He said in a year or so my son will come home from daycare singing songs nonstop and it’ll make him so happy to hear “Wheels on the Bus” that I’ll have to just play it. That sounds right, if not something for which I’m exactly excited. I love music, but I also love quiet. So that’s the type of records I’ve been enjoying as I pull together this week’s playlist, listening peacefully while I still can.
Playlist notes:
Margaret Le Tan, whose piece opens this mix, is known as the world’s foremost expert on the toy piano. I love the photo of her above, seated low at her instrument in front of the two full-size pianos. It’s really wonderfully symbolic, a bucking of tradition. But instead of going big and bulldozing a new path, she finds one by going small. A nice lesson in there for all those who fancy themselves disrupters.
The Marc Johnson and Bo Östen Svensson songs on the playlist are on the quieter side, with Johnson’s being a piece for solo bass, so perhaps turn up the volume for those two. I stumbled onto Svensson’s music accidentally when it surfaced as Spotify search result while I looking for something else. Looking into his background, I discovered he is fascinating. Born in Sweden in 1937 and blind at 29, he became enamored with Latin percussion, traveling to New York, Haiti, and Brazil to study. He played with the legendary conga player Sabu Martinez in the ’60s and ’70s when Martinez moved to Sweden, eventually joining his group Afro Temple. Svensson’s brief bio is a fascinating tale of a life of deep passion—it is highly recommended reading. It’s made up of wonderful sentences like this: “During the Swedish samba boom in the end of the 1980s, we were sometimes up to fifty percussionists, and we were the first samba group in Sweden using a mobile PA system in the street parades.” Wish we had all been there together.
This week, my friend Jacob sent me a link to a magical video of Don Cherry performing live in 1979. After it ended, YouTube’s algorithm sent me to Cherry’s album Eternal Now, which begins with Cherry playing a wooden flute and beautiful bells ringing. I wondered who had played the percussion and looked up the album’s credits. It’s Bengt Berger, another Swedish drummer! He played regularly with Cherry, and formed the Bitter Funeral Beer Band, whose album Praise Drumming the song “In a Balinese Bar” comes from. The influence of Indonesian gamelan music is strong on him (as it was on Cherry), but “Balinese Bar” is a decidedly stoned take on it, with swaying horns accompanying the drums. A sweet, loping song. I dug into Berger’s discography this week—it’s vast—and well worth exploring to hear another Scandinavian eccentric doing his thing.
Norwegian producer Carmen Villain’s most recent album, 2019’s Both Lines Will Be Blue is leaps and bounds beyond her first two. I think that’s largely because she stopped singing, which gave her brand of electronic music an unnecessary indie edge. Both Lines instead largely replaces her voice with a flute. The music is a mix of downtempo beats and ambient house that feels really modern. Included here is “Type,” which begins with bird sounds and a faraway rumble before the flute kicks in and the percussion rolls by slowly. A song to escape into.
I’ve been waiting for the right mix to end with Nocow’s “MIR.” A prolific Russian producer, his music (some of which he releases under his real name Aleksei Nikitin) bounces between ambient, techno, and house, always with a foggy sheen. He’s one of those musicians who makes the kind of thing a lot of people make, but so consistently does it just that much better. “MIR” is slow and simple, an exhale that ends his double album, Ледяной Альбом. And as good as anything he’s done is this beautiful live performance he gave outdoors at night in the yard of a summer house. So peaceful.