Deep Voices #89

What a concept

Feb 27, 2024

Deep Voices #89 on Spotify
Deep Voices #89 on Apple Music

Deep Voices is a labor of love. If love is equal in both passion and blindness. I love nothing like I love music, which is not a slight to other things. Music is unique, inanimate, gorgeous. It does not love you back but it will make you feel like it does. Why? How? Deep Voices does not answer these questions but I try my best. And I make a one-hour playlist. If you enjoy Deep Voices, consider supporting it/me with a paid subscription :) Thank you.

I was a terrible DJ. Truly awful. Which is why I quit. But for a few years, during college, I had a semi-regular presence in Washington, DC bars and clubs. This was the early 2000s, and hauling around crates of vinyl for a DJ set was not unusual. Nor was it unusual to routinely find great records for 10 cents, 50 cents, a dollar. Spending much of my free time going from store to store, I amassed an extensive collection on the cheap. That was a key part of being a DJ, though unfortunately not the only key part. So while the music I played was good (I like to think), I lacked entirely the ability to perform any of the technical elements that make a good DJ set. I don’t even mean mixing (though that, too). I mean the extreme basics: queuing up songs, keeping the volume consistent, not knocking the needle off the record accidentally with your elbow.

Putting together this week’s Deep Voices, I wished I was a good DJ. I’ve become pretty obsessed with sequencing these mixes and this one seemed to actually flow seamlessly. It’s mostly electronic music, some crinkly, some faded. It moves from big and powerful to frail and back to bold. Imagine what a skilled DJ could do with these songs! Well, we don’t have one of those on hand. Just me. So, as you listen, imagine it’s 2003, you’re at the bar at Visions in Dupont Circle and an excited little nerd is blasting out these songs for you. He’s absolutely trainwrecking every single transition but at least he looks happy.

Playlist notes:

•A friend turned me on to Headache, the collaboration between the producer Vegyn and the writer, Francis Hornsby Clark. Each song features a shambolic narrative by Hornsby Clark, read aloud by a very human-like AI. Each “vocalist” is different; the songs vary in tone, some dialing up the drama (worse), some the humor (better). The one I included here, “The Beginning of the End,” the opener and the album’s best track, basically sounds like “Streets Score” by The Streets. A high compliment, in case that’s not clear. Both, in their own ways, are songs about trying to figure out the meaning of life, though Headache puts an amnesiac’s spin on it: “If you really think about it, life shouldn't feel this strange/If I could just figure out what the old woman wearing that salmon pink snakeskin jacket wants from me, I'd feel a whole lot better/ Doesn't she have a job?/Do I have a job?” A nice nod to the hallucinations shared by most people and chatbots alike.

By the way, I feel absolutely nothing about the use of AI in music. Is the music good? Okay, carry on. This is a decent use case. The album, like many, is lopsided, but interesting. That’s why you need a person to pick out the best song. ;)

•I really enjoyed Larry Fitzmaurice’s recent interview with Actress in Larry’s newsletter Last Donut of the Night. Actress’s output can be pretty varied, careening between house and techno, usually fuzzy, sometimes angular, often inscrutable. He is particularly open about his purpose and technique in this interview and it’s cool to hear. After Actress mentions his work being conceptual, Larry asks him about “conceptronica,” a phrase coined by Simon Reynolds in an essay for Pitchfork a couple years back to describe a wave of music whose sonics seemed to come second to the idea behind it. It was not necessarily a compliment. Actress has an interesting take; I liked reading it. “My work eventually becomes conceptual because it starts to sprawl over the span of the creative process,” he says. “It might not be until the end where I know what it's actually all about, to be honest with you.” It reminded me of writing, where you have some nugget of an idea of where you want to go, but you have to put in the work to get it all out on the page, and then, what you’ve done may surprise you. That discovery can be the best part. The hard work certainly is not. When Actress made his most recent album, LXXXVII, he didn’t start off trying to make a record influenced by chess, but that’s how it worked out.

I’m particularly fond of the song “Oway (f7),” because it really shapeshifts depending on how you listen to it. I’ve heard it now on my home stereo, on earbuds, and on a nice pair of over ear headphones. The track is nominally a downtempo house song, albeit one that had a piano dropped on it from 10 stories high. You can’t quite get that wonkiness without the nice pair of headphones where the bass feels less like bass and more like “bass,” hazily repeated low end pounding you like a sundown. It’s not a club thing. But that’s not the way it feels on earbuds, on a Sonos. Lesser mediums. On those, it feels like, for once, he wrote a normal track. But it’s a feint. It’s sneaky, like a killer chess move. Maybe, I don’t know. Like DJing, I’m not very good at chess. So I’ll compare it to a poem (not that I write those either). You have to read it closely to really get its meaning. But even if you don’t, it’s probably still pretty good.

•Emeka Ogboh identifies as a “sound artist,” though he does say he has, with the release of two albums, “ventured into the world of music.” What is a sound artist if not a musician? Did he really have to venture that far? It reminded me of an interview I did a few years ago with Kim Gordon where she insisted that she was an artist, not a musician. Did her long discography not contradict that fact? She couldn’t be both? As a big fan, it took the wind out of my sails. What’s wrong with being a musician?

With his second album, I’m glad Ogboh has owned up to the fact that he is making music because, whatever you call what he’s making, sound art or songs, it’s excellent. The name of his second album is a geographic point, 6°30’33.372”N 3°22’0.66”E, which, when you map it gives you a location on Ojuelegba Road in Lagos, Nigeria. It’s a busy road. A bookshop, a cell phone stand, a beauty supply store, a bank, cars, motorbikes, pedestrians, a bus station. It’s the last location that Ogboh used as a homebase to record the clatter of people’s comings and goings. The album is based around those recordings, which Ogboh manipulates into watery techno. The honk of a horn gets stretched like taffy, clipped dialogue swells. To some songs he adds drums, to others he lets the collage float free in the sky. It sounds like waiting for the bus while listening to Actress on your nice headphones.