Deep Voices #80
Interludes, or crab molting music
Deep Voices #80 on Spotify
Deep Voices #80 on Apple Music
The other day I watched a video of a crab molting. I didn’t know crabs molted. They have to pull their eyeballs out of the shell, tighten their legs and slip them out, too. It was crazy. It’s not like hermit crabs, where they outgrow their shell and then find a bigger one they immediately move into; the crab discards its crusty old exoskeleton and grows a new one. For a little while, that new shell is soft. It hardens over time. But the newly molted crab is very vulnerable to predators.
It’s got to be exciting and scary to be in that period in between. You’ve grown, so there’s pride. But that growth comes with a built in vulnerability. Eventually, you settle. And then you grow again.
It’s not a one-to-one metaphor or anything, and maybe it’s a little ham-fisted, but I was thinking about crabs molting when I was thinking about this playlist. I tried to make it sound like only interludes. Sometimes my favorite song on an album is the interlude. The song that isn’t a song, the way station between. To me, that’s where ideas are most exciting, most alive, as they transition from one place to another.
Sure, polish is good, focus, the crystallization of a thought. But I feel like there’s enough music that gets fussed over. I’m a cheerleader for the random slapdash thing, accidental music, either every idea at once or no ideas at all. What you make as you’re moving from island to another, waiting to become yourself, knowing you will become yourself. Crab molting music.
Each edition of Deep Voices is a one-hour playlist, with a mix of personal writing and music criticism. A paid subscription gets you access to exclusive playlists, including Deep Voices deep cuts on YouTube. It also supports my writing, for which I am extremely grateful. If you read and listen to Deep Voices, please consider a paid subscription. It would mean a lot. Thank you!
Housekeeping: the next Deep Voices you’ll receive is the annual playlist of best 100 songs of the year. It is both completely arbitrary and empirically correct. If you have any last minute songs I absolutely have to hear, leave a comment below!
Playlist notes:
•Chickenmilk dot com has got to be the stupidest artist name I’ve heard in my brief 41 years. So, obviously, I love it. The music he makes is totally disorganized, the itchy shifting of a radio dial. Often that type of sound, especially in electronic music, which ostensibly he makes, is the prelude to a proper bit of musical coagulation. But on his album, My Angels, My Souvenir, CMDC, has little interest in narrative coherence. We move from vocal sample to vocal sample, to video game noises to brief, claustrophobic moments of hyperpop. One song feels like Burial karaoke for like 30 seconds. Multiple songs are over 10 minutes long. It’s like reading completely unrevised writing. My non-musician’s impression of making electronic music is that it’s fairly tedious business. Someone please correct me if I’m wrong, but it has got to take quite a bit of effort to make pastiche this…pastiched. It’s not always necessarily “good.” But it’s also really, really good.
•If you’re a fan of Mount Eerie, Grouper, Joanna Newsom, Silver Jews, etc, I’d urge you to give a listen to Matteah Baim. I’ve been quite moved by her 2007 album The Death of the Sun, a folk album whose core is tightly defined, but that sits in a bed of wiry exploration. It’s full of energy. Her voice sounds tentatively confident as though she was recently frightful, but has since overcome fear. The use of the drums is jazzlike, ramshackle sometimes, supportive others. The opening song, “River,” which I’ve used here as a closing song, is remarkable.
“River” opens with the sound of water rushing and of a guitar being tuned. Plinking commences for about a minute until her husky voice begins. Forty-five seconds later, a piano enters. It sounds like it’s being played in another room. The song appears to end at about the 2:20 mark, when Baim’s voice winds down. But the guitar continues and the song unfurls into something noisy. Her voice returns at the 3:44 mark. “Alonneeeee” she sings. This isn’t a totally new trick, that play between loud and quiet is the basis for a lot of avant garde artists: When all the squall subsides, you know to listen up. A break in the clouds! But despite her voice’s return, Baim’s return doesn’t bring clarity. Her voice is muted. The drums blast in fiercely. You have to strain to hear her. When you do, you notice her voice is actually doubled. That’s something usually done to underscore an artist’s presence. Here, it underscores her distance, the effect being one of both power and an overpowering.
•In 1995, Shelley Hirsch, a vocal artist/singer, released what I guess you’d call a concept album, O Little Town of East New York. It sounds sometimes like a radio play, sometimes like a Philip Glass opera. She describes growing up in East New York, Brooklyn, in the ’50s and ’60s. “Maria Baskin’s house always had the smell of chicken soup. Her mother was always boiling it” goes one song. “And you know what?” she continues, “When Kennedy was being assassinated on TV, Marcia was over there in the bathtub having her pimples picked.” It’s a slice of Jewish America that feels close to my heart; both my grandfather and my grandmother grew up not far from there, a few decades earlier. I don’t live too far from there either, though I only really go through when I’m headed to the airport.
Most of the 35 songs on O Little Town are brief sketches, an album of interludes. The primary focus is Hirsch’s voice, which slithers around in a Brooklyn accent. The backing music is an eerie take on Cole Porter style instrumentals. One song, called “Bongos,” is 13 seconds of bongos. The next few songs focus on the story of Aida Vidzner, a new student in school, and a subject of fascination, who moves from Brazil. “She had blue, blue almond eyes and bangs that covered her eyes, and she spoke with an accent.” Shelley visits Aida at home, a scene of dentures and cockroaches. Eventually, the story moves to Aida’s brother, who robs change from payphones. It’s a meandering tale, but one that feels true to how memory works.
My favorite song, which I’ve included on today’s playlist, is “Grandma Gertie,” which I’ve included here. Hirsch sings it straight and her voice, in its earnestness, is lovely. The music feels like whatever a harp would sound like if it could blow bubbles. It’s 51 seconds long. The lyrics, in full are: “My grandmother Gertie died when she was 30 plus 22. That makes 52. I loved her best of all. She had two dresses, one purple paisley and one green paisley one. And she held card games in her house for a living. They said she was crude. They said she was the most immaculate one too! And she cooked fish for us on Friday. And I loved her.”
Some years ago, I wrote the obituary for my grandfather. It was a strange exercise in memory. How do you sum up a life? He was an electrician who adopted my father as his own when he married my grandmother, after my father’s father died very young in a car accident. He was cheap and liked to read the sports section of the paper, he had a vice grip, and, though he was quiet, towards the end of his life, told me stories of his life. He walked from Flatbush to Manhattan some days during the Great Depression, looking unsuccessfully for work. He said he’d end up drinking beer with friends instead.
These memories were insufficient for a detailed portrait. Biography is maybe not the artist’s game. But when Hirsch sings about her grandmother, you can feel her spirit. A brash woman from another time. “And I loved her.” Me too.