Deep Voices #56

“Thx again for this excellent mix”

Deep Voices #56 on Spotify
Deep Voices #56 on Apple Music

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One of the things I have always liked about myself is my sense of awe. Tall buildings! Warm days! Great songs! Wonder is the engine of this newsletter, the realization there is such a vast world of music to explore, supplying emotion after emotion, and that I could be your guide to it. What a privilege! To discover and then to relish in that discovery together. But one of the many things that has changed since Renzo died is that my curiosity has waned. It’s not like the world has been drained of color, it’s like the world has been drained of the world. 

I have no wisdom to offer here, very little insight on the meaning of it all. Grief is a punishment. The sudden death of a young child, of my son, is inextricable from every experience I have. I’m not sure what I was thinking. That I’d write one newsletter about his death and then I’d be back the next week with recommendations, business as usual? 

I’m writing this in the evening on Memorial Day. My wife and I went to Storm King today. If you’re not familiar, it’s an enormous sculpture park. Imagine vast, open fields of flowers lined with trees, pockmarked with works by Alexander Calder, Sarah Sze, Richard Serra. In the faraway corner is a piece by Maya Lin called “Wave Field” that we wanted to see. It was a hike in the hot sun, so we waited for the trolley to come, and when it did, it was full. No one got off. It sat at our stop for five minutes, us looking at the people on board, them avoiding looking at us. We gave up and walked over to a stone wall by Andy Goldsworthy. It was inarguably a lovely day. We both said that we wished Renzo was there. More than anything. 

One of the things that has been weird is how little of an idea people have of what to say to us about Renzo’s death. It’s sad when they say nothing. But I do like it when they say, “There’s nothing to say.” My friend Molly has abandoned words entirely and most days sends me photos of her old black lab, Ava. Sometimes she sends me videos of Ava eating chicken fingers. My friend Michael texts me most mornings. “Morning Matt. How are you today?” Usually I tell him. Most of the time we don’t talk about it. Instead we talk about music. 

When I wrote the last edition of Deep Voices, music had taken on a sort of sour quality. For a couple months, I couldn’t listen to anything except piano. But the music that then felt alien has begun to become familiar again. Consciously or otherwise, I started to want to hear new music. I got really into ’90s guitar music, shoegaze and adjacent. Michael and I texted about Pale Saints, Ride, Bark Psychosis. Whenever I see him, his eyes well up. He got to know Renzo so well. Renzo knew the name of his dog. Bruno. 

A month or two ago, Michael and his girlfriend took a vacation to Mexico. I thought it would be a nice thing to make him a mix for the trip. I put a lot of thought into it, trying to match Michael and Mexico’s vibe. Oceanic, peaceful. He didn’t have service there, so he emailed me. He said he ended up getting lost on the beach for several hours. But he also said, “Thx again for this excellent mix.” It felt good to be of service. 

On the drive back from Storm King, trying to think of what to listen to as we approached traffic returning to the city, we put on the playlist that I made for Michael. I didn’t recognize any of the songs! Or, I mean, I recognized them, but I couldn’t place them. I had to keep clicking away from Waze to check Spotify. Each time I’d realize what we were listening to it made me excited. So when we got home I made this mix. 

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Playlist notes:

• Closing a bunch of tabs recently, I found that I had open the YouTube video for the song “On the Mountain,” by John David. I have no idea how I stumbled onto this. It sounds like a mashup between a Christian choral group and a sleazy Ibiza disco track from the late ’70s (it’s from 1983). So peaceful on the mountain is the refrain. I did a little digging on John David and, to be honest, there’s not too much information out there despite his extensive writing and performing resume. He has a Bandcamp page with an album dated 2011, but there is no way that it true. I bought it anyway. One of the tracks is a song he wrote in the late ’70s for the soft rock group Airwaves, “You Are the New Day,” which opens this mix. This one is fully a cappella: “I will love you more than me, and more than yesterday.” It’s beautiful.

• On the one hand, Soft Location sound like an indie band from 2007, which they are. But on the other, they transcend. They have this laissez-faire approach to forward motion. Their songs stroll by lazily. “Whistling Song” is accented by what I think is a xylophone. The singer, Kathy Leisen, starts repeating words (“He waited, waited waited, waited…”) and that staccato feeling she slips in and out of gives the songs a Motown feel. You can imagine the backup singers. Other songs feel influenced by Hawaiian music. Sometimes the drums get played with brushes. The bass is always high up in the mix. Something echoes. Leisen pushes her voice higher than it probably should go, but it never cracks.

• I was listening to a lot of Bowery Electric a few months ago and started looking up what happened to the two members of the band. It turns out Martha Schwendener went on to become an art critic for the New York Times. I thought it was incredibly cool to see that she had been so successful in multiple fields. Most exciting, though, was the discovery of her solo project, Echostar, which unfortunately only released one album, Sola in 2003. It’s an amazing mix of glitchy beats, airy synths, bassy synths, and her breathy vocals. It sounds like the kind of music I imagine spies listen to at bars. “Higher,” with its massive drum loop, is my favorite track on the record. I’m not quite the critic Schendener is, but it’s my opinion that it should have been a hit.

• You may or may not have noticed that I strive to keep every Deep Voices playlist to one hour. That was a limit I put on myself when I began sending these newsletters out twice a week two summers ago; any longer, I thought, and it would be too overwhelming. Now that my cadence is erratic, I suppose I could loosen that restriction. But I like the framework. I like to imagine I’m working backwards from some platonic ideal of 60 minutes of music, filling in the time song by song like puzzle pieces. What that means is that I usually shy away from from songs that are too long so I can include a healthy variety of music. Relying too much on a few long songs in a way feels like cheating.

  
  I have broken my own rule with this week’s last song, pianist Mike Nock’s, “Forgotten Love.” Clocking in at 16 minutes, it’s a behemoth. But I’ve been so enamored with the song since I was gifted the record by my friend Jacob that I couldn’t not include it. Jacob knew I had been leaning hard on Bill Evans’ piano music for relief, and brought me a copy of Nock’s Ondas one day when he came by to visit. Both Evans and Nock played in piano/bass/drum trios, and both played with Eddie Gomez, bassist on this piece. Nock’s own playing is more nervous than Evans, if not less lyrical. At one point, nine minutes in, it seems the song is over. But Nock comes back in with the song’s moody refrain. It’s like he had to gather his strength in order to finish. Once he does, his left hand keeps the three note repetition, while his right pensively explores the higher register. Gomez, who had played wild and thick notes in the song’s first portion largely fades until he takes a heartbreaking solo. Drummer Jon Christensen is perhaps the key player, however, as he largely neglects anything like rhythm for more than a few seconds at a time. He hits the cymbal incessantly, small little taps like he’s mad at it. It’s expressive, passionate, beautiful. But not beautiful in the same joyous way “You Are the New Day” is. The song is clearly a song in pain. Which is better, so much better, than pain with no song at all.