Deep Voices #22
"Things just keep getting heavier"
Deep Voices #22 on Apple Music
In Philadelphia last week, a black woman inadvertently drove into a protest following the police shooting of Walter Wallace Jr. Told by cops on the scene to turn around, she attempted a three-point turn before her car window was smashed, she was arrested, and her toddler son was taken from her. The police, who had essentially kidnapped him, then used photos of the boy clinging to an officer as propaganda, lying that he had become lost during the protest. The woman was released without charges. This is one of the most disgusting things I can imagine.
I honestly thought my head was going to fucking explode when I read about that. How do you respond to such multilayered horror? I don’t usually find myself lacking for words but for once I’m without much of a desire to use them. It’s too tiring to continually look for accurate ways to verbalize sadness and rage in an attempt to gesture at the disaster of being alive in 2020. I’m grateful for the music on this week’s playlist for taking the place of explaining how I feel about the gaping maw that is the state of America. I’d rather listen to a song that sounds like a garbage truck crushing wet trash than talk about it. On Tuesday, maybe the main character of our story changes, but I’m afraid the narrative will not. I’m not a particularly hopeful person but I am traditionally a positive one, and lately manifesting that feels impossible at worst and foolish at best. I hope everyone who has ever stolen a baby, from the Philadelphia police to Stephen Miller, is extensively punished, but it feels much more likely that they’ll never face consequences. What a terrible thing to have to say.
Playlist notes:
The trash song I refer to above, “Sledghammer II,” is by Ron Morelli and is from his 2013 album Spit. I liked listening to it when it was released because it felt like a vista into a darker world, not a reflection of our own. Now it feels prescient, a Trump era album straight out of the Obama years. When I interviewed Ron that year he outlined his worldview pretty accurately. I didn’t expect to adopt the same one seven year later. “Things just keep getting heavier,” he said. “It's all gonna come crashing down; everyone's number is gonna be up soon, for sure.”
Not everything on this week’s mix is full-on apocalyptic, some of it is just batshit crazy. My favorite entry into that category of tunes is “Icy Lake,” a 1998 house tune that features an answering machine message of a man saying, “I just thought I’d call before I throw myself into the icy lake.” The song would be pretty busy without that, featuring a creeping keyboard line, the sound of glass breaking repeatedly, and a long dial tone. But the placidness with which this guy says leaves his courtesy voicemail pre-suicide brings it beyond. Vice’s now defunct electronic music publication Thump made a short film about the song which answers the call’s mystery and gives it some further historical context.
The other day I spoke briefly with a friend who also had a son this year. We’ve both experienced confusion trying to square the joy that comes from having a child with the sadness and stress of the rest of the year’s events. As if trying to illustrate this dichotomy literally, the other morning I listened to Flora Yin-Wong’s debut album at seven a.m. while feeding Renzo tiny spoonfuls of a blueberry smoothie. Though her song that opens this week’s mix is not from that album, Holy Palm, it’s similar in spirit, crinkly and weird, a mix of field recordings and feedback buzz that might fall under the banner of ambient music, if the ambience you want is of an unsettling nature. Holy Palm is expansive and beautiful and also kind of horrifying. Its last two tracks, “Loci I” and “Loci II” are both 15 minutes long and appear to be field recordings collaged together, snippets of gamelan, pop music, wind, conversation, laughter. It probably belongs more in a museum, playing loudly in a dark room that you sit in with strangers, thinking about the freakiness of being alive. Honestly, I love doing that. I miss it. But it passed existential muster playing from the Sonos in the kitchen early morning with Renzo while my wife got some much needed rest. He got blueberry all over his face and was so happy. Email me for a pic if you want to stare at it while you listen.
Five of this week’s songs are solo piano pieces. They diverge widely in style, but are all slow in tempo. Three songs are drums only, with one being gong-only. And the last song is 17 seconds long and features a man screaming his head off. Surprisingly, it’s not me.