Deep Voices #18
Love all the elements
Deep Voices #18 on Apple Music
On Friday night, settling in to watch some Netflix with my wife, I teared up watching the trailer for My Octopus Teacher. It’s a documentary about a guy who becomes enamored with a specific wild octopus, and visits it every day. In the ocean, he experiences danger and beauty, and the two of them form a kinship. He lets the octopus guide him towards a feeling of being a part of the universe, not only its observer. It’s Shakespearean, balletic, otherworldly, capped by scenes of the octopus student, a South African guy in a green sweater sitting at his kitchen table philosophizing about gratitude for simply being. I couldn’t take it. We watched Emily In Paris.
It’s been four months since and I lost my job and, as I’ve written here before, I miss it a lot. Not only for the work, but for the people. Being an editor gave me the ability to get close to many lives: a story’s subject of course, but also its writer, and maybe the photographer, the designer, the stylist, and whoever else it took to assemble a narrative. Mostly at home now, I miss greatly the ability to meld into this kind of hive mind. It gets tiring being only yourself.
To me, listening to so much different music feels like playing dress up. Not necessarily as the artist, but as someone who is a fan of that artist. Lots of people are pretty devout in their musical tastes, and often their lifestyle reflects that. What would it be like to only love Japanese ambient electronic music? Chicago house? Memphis hip-hop? Northern soul? I’m closer to being an excitable dilettante, jumping in and out of genre as it suits me. Or maybe I’m like a non-discriminating archeologist, happy to dig up either dinosaur bones or old bottles. Flipping through as wide an array of sounds as possible has made me feel a part of the world in a way that right now I desperately need. Anyone know if that octopus can sing?
Playlist Notes:
The saying that someone is “before their time” feels wrong. It should be that time was late to them. That’s the case for Gangsta Boo, the Memphis rapper and onetime member of Three 6 Mafia who did not receive the acclaim of her male peers, many of whom made far less interesting music. At a minimum, she should be canonically recognized as a predecessor to Megan Thee Stallion and Cardi B, and who, when she was in her prime, should have gotten the same level of attention they are rightly receiving. The two albums she recorded in the late ’90s and early 2000s, only in her early twenties, are raunchy, aggressive, real, and sometimes very funny. She has a way with baroque beats, often supplied by DJ Paul and Juicy J, and her songs are tales of weed smoke, faked orgasms, and the endless quest for money by any means necessary. “Mask 2 My Face” is about getting stoned, but it should have been in coronavirus PSAs. Her delivery is impossibly staccato, every syllable a gut punch. “Mask to my fucking face, I’m fiending to increase my high.” Even a song about a reliable downer like weed is an occasion to scare the shit out of you.
N.Y. House’n Authority is one of the many pseudonyms of house producer Rheji Burrell, who, along with his brother Ronald, released a slew of classic records on Nu Groove Records. My favorite is probably The Utopia Project, who I believe showed up in another edition of Deep Voices. He used an ton of pseudonyms for his projects and in this interview, explained that in a way that feels similar to how I feel as a listener. “I didn’t have to be Rheji Burrell all the time,” he says. “I could be six different people.” N.Y. House’n Authority feels a bit more sinister than his other projects, the crash symbol hitting like the crack of a whip.
Every day it seems like the internet offers newer and newer ways to discover music that I assume most people are not using. The old ways were pretty efficient. But one way I have enjoyed is scrolling through people’s purchases on Bandcamp. After listening to a song by the producer Machinewoman, I checked out her Bandcamp profile and discovered two of the artists on this playlist, Anushka Chkheidze and Seventhgaze. Though she doesn’t comment on everything she has in her collection, when she does, she’s an enthusiastic booster. “This track is super cool!!! Love all the elements,” she wrote about Anushka Chkheidze. Honestly, same.
Lee Gamble feels like the godfather of the deconstructed club music scene. Simon Reynolds wrote about that world in a piece I worked on last year. He called the music “conceptronica,” and said that it largely belonged in a gallery, not a club. Gamble was quoted in the piece, and spoke about the shift in trends in electronic music that led to the fractured sounds now being commonplace. “Brexit was happening, Trump was happening, and I was like, ‘Am I now supposed to make an ambient record for everyone to just zone out? In these times, making music about escapism would be a cop out.” I wonder, a year later, what the pandemic response to music will feel like. The final minute of his track on this playlist, “Many Gods, Many Angels” is a combination of a church hymn heard from the sidewalk and the rush of a fast car passing by in the distance. Music, as well as life, is apparently largely happening at a distance. Not a concept I am particularly interested in, but it sounds good.