Deep Voices #82

A tree falls

Deep Voices #82 on Spotify
Deep Voices #82 on Apple Music

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My upstairs neighbor is a book dealer, though he’ll sell whatever he can get his hands on. Each apartment has a storage space in the basement, and his is overflowing with stuff, so he’s expanded into the hallways and common areas. There’s a big plastic table piled with boxes of books, posters, CDs, toys, and records that gets added to once or twice a week. I see it grow when I go down to the basement to take out the trash. The other day he had a box where the record facing out was Tim Buckley’s Happy Sad. It’s not the rarest record in the world, but I figured, where there’s smoke, there’s fire. I wanted to know what was in there. As this is his job, I’ve generally avoided asking him if I could look through his stuff, but I couldn’t help myself and texted to ask him if I could flip through the box. “Would you be open to me taking a look through and potentially buying some from you? Understand if they are spoken but for had to ask!” I asked my wife if I should add, “Sorry if this is weird.” She said I should. He said I could take a look the next morning.

When I went down there, he had two guys helping him pack up everything from the plastic table and move it to outside storage. The box with the Tim Buckley was on the floor. It was about 50 records of folk, new age, and psych records, mostly in fantastic condition. Some were common, but a handful were rare, including a few I’d never heard of. I pulled them out and he said he’d give me a price. 

I noticed another few records in another box. “Junk,” he said. A copy of Nina Simone High Priestess of Soul had a different record in the sleeve. I recognized another record, sealed, as a rare and expensive rap single. He set it aside for sale. I hoped it might give me some good karma. He handed me Happy Sad from the pile; a gift. Very sweet. 

The next morning, he set a stack outside my door with a note. He said he’d checked Discogs and priced them on the low side. No steals, but a fine price for the bundle. I was a little crushed that he decided to keep the weirdest record of the bunch for himself, one I’d picked out excitedly because of it’s wild cover but that I hadn’t previously known. It turned out to be Dariush Dolat-Shahi’s Otashgah: Place of Fire, an impossible to find mid-’80s piece of electronic composition on Folkways. It’s a precursor to noise music, with a blend of Persian instrumentation with digital effects, made by a guy who looks like he wants to sell you a water bed. Perfection. I wish I owned it. Still, it was a nice reminder of all of the ways discovery can happen. Even in the basement. 

But I guess not everyone can live in the same apartment building as me. So I was sad to find that one of the best ways to discover music online recently shut down. Spotify data scientist Glenn McDonald was laid off late last year, and thus he lost access to the internal info he needs to keep up his highly organized, easily digestible feed of new music by subgenre on his site, everynoise.com. I’ve written about the site before—each week I’d search a handful of favorite genres for new releases and discover unknown music I otherwise would never have stumbled across. It’s how I came across the music of Deryck Styrne, idiosyncratic and devoted ambient musician, who I wrote about in Deep Voices #54. A lot of people responded with passion and excitement about his music, which at that point had no listeners. That kind of discovery is near-impossible without a digital assist. An unheard record takes up as much physical space in a store as a popular one. An unheard album on Spotify might as well not exist. If a tree falls, I’d like to hear it. 

I continue to believe in the magic of discovery. Not only in music, either. A memory: being on the street listening to parents explain birds to a small child. He had seen a bird. He’d likely seen birds before, he seemed to be about a year and a half, but this was the first time he clocked them. They fly. Birds! Can you even imagine?

This week’s playlist is a classic Deep Voices playlist. On “Jeopardy!” when they have the “Potpourri” category and all the clues are a mishmash of stuff. I started the playlist with Kenny Larkin’s lusty track “Tedra” and attempted to build a playlist of similar takes on techno. I was unsuccessful—nothing measured up. So I went the opposite direction and built from a whole bunch of disparate genres. Australian rock, Japanese percussion, American jazz. I’m especially taken with the Audrey Carmes track—her whole album is amazing. But all the tracks bleed together, so when you pull one out for a playlist, it cuts off. Fortunately, I dug around and discovered a radio edit (!) that mercifully fades out. The last track is from Ash Ra, Manuel Gottsching’s project that emerged from psych rock and, with its pulsing, predates house and techno by a half dozen years. New Age of Earth is one of the records I bought from my neighbor and I’ve been playing it on repeat in the house. A rediscovery. It sounds great.