Deep Voices #19
Overwhelming the audience
Deep Voices #19 on Apple Music
On this week’s mix is a Malian singer named Ramata Diakité. I came across her music recently and found it to be incredibly powerful. Sometimes her songs plead, sometimes they celebrate, and always in a way where it wraps itself around your body, huglike. Reading about Diakaté, I was heartbroken to find out she died of an unspecified illness in 2009. She’d won awards in Mali and begun planning international tours and recording, but it never came to fruition. According to the Google translation of this newspaper article, she was predeceased by two children. She was only 35. It’s devastating to hear music as beautiful as hers, and then learn its maker died more than a decade ago, so young with so much talent and sadness. Hers was not a case of promise yet to be fulfilled. It was fulfilled. It should be heard.
I discovered Diakité’s music because of streaming. She showed up as a recommended artist for people who listen to Kandia Kouyate, another singer I like. Had I discovered her through a review or word of mouth, hearing her music before digital music would have been more difficult. Certainly not impossible, but it would have taken additional money and effort to track down a CD from Western Africa. But I didn’t have to. The gap in time between finding out she exists and having access to every song she’d ever recorded was infinitesimal.
Instant access to such a vast catalog of music is blessing and a curse. Imagine a museum that includes every painting ever painted. All the Picassos, the Mona Lisa, everything in every gallery in Chelsea, and everything you ever made in fifth grade art class. Now imagine, with the exception of the really famous stuff, everything else is hung up in indiscriminate order and there’s no information aside anywhere. That’s essentially what streaming is.
A few years ago, Manohla Dargis wrote in the NY Times pleading with distributors to buy less movies. “There are, bluntly, too many lackluster, forgettable and just plain bad movies pouring into theaters, distracting the entertainment media and, more important, overwhelming the audience,” she said. The distribution systems for film and art are different than music, owing partially to their differences as mediums. But music is unique in that, with some exception, you can pretty easily have access to all of it. That’s a lot of possibility, and perhaps too much possibility. If you have infinite choices, you’ll never make a decision.
What if what we need in music is something similar to what Dargis is suggesting in film. Less albums, not more. Like all criticism, it would be arbitrary, but perhaps a helpful culling for those who can’t compete on what is clearly not a level playing field, as much as it resembles one. Ramata Diakité is never going to get the spotlight over your Drakes and your Ariana Grandes. I get it. If streaming treats all music the same, which it essentially does, the old, the underground, and the avant-garde really have no chance of breaking through to the casual listener. Maybe that’s an old problem. It still bugs me.
Playlist notes:
A housekeeping note: I’ve created a master playlist of every Deep Voices playlist. The songs are in order, so you can listen to them in sequenced hour chunks as intended or go nuts and hit shuffle on 18 hours (so far) of weirdo shit. I’ll add the new playlist after it’s been out a week, so you have some time to marinate on that solo. This is Spotify-only for the time being.
John Beltran is from Lansing, Michigan, but based on his song titles he is a citizen of the world. Over several decades and a handful of aliases, he’s released a slew of tracks named for places large and small, some with narrative embellishment, others straight out of the almanac. “Israel,” a single in 2016. “Rain in Shibuya,” the first song on his 2004 album, In Full Color. “Africa,” the second song, after “Joy” on a 2004 single. “That Day in Monterrey,” track seven on 2006’s Human Engine. “Ocean - London Mix” from his 1997 masterpiece The Cry, as Placid Angles. There does not appear to be a non-London mix. My favorite of his songs is “Nolita,” a Manhattan neighborhood which means “north of Little Italy” and is occupied by ritzy stores and rich people. The song is lush and lovely, the kind of evocative music that feels like sitting in a field on a warm day looking at the harvest moon showing off in the early afternoon. Nolita the neighborhood feels like spending money on shit you don’t need. No idea what the connection is but I love that Beltran made it. If window shopping for expensive pants can open up your third eye, god bless. Anyway, “Brilliant Flood” is a pretty good song and, at a touch under four minutes, fits here nicely.
If someone asked you “What does techno sound like?” you could do worse than playing them German producer Efdemin. I loved his 2019 album New Atlantis, on which he is quite playful within the set of sound he’s established throughout his career. It’s fun to hear, thinking simultaneously inside and outside the box. The album’s opening song, “Oh, Lovely Appearance of Death” features the octogenarian American artist William T. Wiley slowly speak-singing an 18th century poem over a long drone and some very light rattling. It sounds like Sam Elliott’s mustache learned to talk.
Chinese-Australian musician Mindy Meng Wang plays a guzheng, a long, rectangular stringed instrument that is a cousin of the zither. She does pick the metal strings as you’d expect, but at times her playing is so fluid it feels closer to a pedal steel guitar or a harp. There’s an ominousness to “Forbidden City, A Cold Moon.” Instead of that tension dissipating elegantly as the song progresses, it explodes. A unique artist making new sounds on a very old instrument.
I asked my wife if the God’s Wisdom song on this playlist was annoying. She said yes even before before the vocals came in. Apologies if your experience with the nasally rapper is the same.