Deep Voices #61
A lot to listen to
Deep Voices #61 on Spotify
Deep Voices #61 on Apple Music
This is the last edition of Deep Voices before the annual 100 best songs of the year playlist. Right now, that is squaring up to be all 20 tracks on Wicca Phase Springs Eternal’s new album, Full Moon Mystery Garden, with the other 80 to be determined. If there’s something that came out this year that you think I should hear, please leave a link in the comments! Here’s 2021’s best of and 2020’s, if you feel like reminiscing.
Playlist notes:
Black Dice has been playing squirmy music for a quarter century now, stoney baloney theme songs for playful freaks. Hardcore punk, house, whatever genre fits with the times and/or their whims, they’ve made it all. My love for the band is overarching and undying, if practiced specifically from song to song. I am, however, totally taken with Riders on the Storm, the collaborative instrumental between core member Eric Copeland (who, many moons ago, as the band’s singer, was infamous for attacking audience members while performing) and Josh Diamond, guitarist of Gang Gang Dance. My love for Gang Gang Dance is as deep, maybe deeper, than my love for Black Dice. A rock band very much ahead of their time, Gang Gang Dance are (or were, I’m not sure) synthesists of techno, world music, goth rock, and the powerful vocal blasts of someone like Patti Smith or Diamanda Galas. Diamond’s role in the band was to add the sprinkle of sugar, maybe with a touch of African highlife or some light soling. Both bands, in their abandonment of genre (or perhaps their voracious gourmandizing from its buffet) made complex, challenging music with high listener rewards of cockeyed bliss if you let it knock you over.
Riders on the Storm sits somewhere between the work of Black Dice and Gang Gang Dance, not as seasick as Black Dice and airier than Gang Gang Dance. Removed from the confines of the groups that have long defined them, Copeland and Diamond found a weirdly wonderful middle ground. “Blob” is maybe my favorite song on the album, though you can really pick any of them. There’s a repetitive blistering of some drum machine before two guitars start playing. It’s not exactly a conversation, more like two drunk bluesmen talking over each other, trying to get their point made. Then that just stops. Some keyboards shimmy into the spotlight for a bit and then the end of the song is quiet plucking. Is it a serious song? A silly one? A funky one? A meditative one? Yes and no. But yes. The music feels so, so true. Music made by lovers of sound for lovers of sound. It’s a lot to listen to. Which is a compliment.
Like many people, I listened to a lot of Low after the death of the band’s Mimi Parker earlier this month. Though their sound has evolved and expanded in the nearly 30 years they’ve been band, I’ve always been most drawn to their first few albums, particularly Secret Name, from 1999. I hadn’t listened to the album in a little while and putting it on after Parker’s passing, found it as impressively depressing as I remember. “Soon,” in particular. The song was written well before Parker’s cancer diagnosis, and so it’s not about that, but I can’t hear it without thinking about it as being about death. “Soon,” sings Alan Sparhawk, Parker’s husband and the band’s other singer. He pauses as he strums the guitar loosely, and continues, “it will be over.” Parker joins him on the word “over.” It sounds like relief, acceptance. Her voice is so beautiful. In another mode, it could be folk music, a campfire duet. But it’s a dirge. A cello enters mournfully. Parker’s drums pound away, like someone knocking at a locked door. “You think that I don’t know your name?” Sparhawk sings. Is his the voice of God? As if you couldn’t imagine you’d made his list?
On a similar note, I think I’d be forgiven for thinking a largely unchanging, eight-minute elegiac piece of music performed on an obscure synthesizer entitled “Everything Ends Here” is about death, right? My friend Michael turned me onto the song a few months ago, sending me a YouTube video of it being performed by Blindoldfreak (aka Alessandro Cortini of Nine Inch Nails) in a duet with Don Buchla, inventor of the Buchla modular synthesizer company. Cortini looks like a guy who is in Nine Inch Nails on his day off. Buchla, who died in 2016, is significantly older, with white hair, beard, and mustache. The piece slowly climbs, like a hot air balloon creeping into a dark sky. Perhaps it makes me think of flight as it very much resembles “An Ending (Ascent)” from Brian Eno’s Apollo. Except much, much heavier. The way Buchla touches the machine, he looks like a country doctor making a house visit to a sick patient, gently checking for a heartbeat. I think there are many musicians and music fans who might claim he saved their lives.
Lastly, I know it’s not the point, but does anyone know what the sample is in Moin’s “Hung Up?” “He said hello and after my first few sentences there was silence. Then he hung up.” It sounds like Cherry Jones. I love her.