Deep Voices #90
For the ’90s, for Weatherall
Deep Voices #90 on Spotify
Deep Voices #90 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 it tries its best to. And it includes a one-hour playlist that will make you ask them, too. If you enjoy Deep Voices, consider supporting this project with a paid subscription :) Thank you.
What did the ’90s sound like? Whatever noise Andrew Weatherall happened to be making that day. The British producer, most notable for his work behind Primal Scream and their album Screamadelica, developed an ecstatic hybrid of house, techno, and rock, with touches of hip-hop drums and an otherwise vast collection of percussion. No one in the time since has been as able to as fully synthesize the aesthetic of bliss into music.
I’ve been listening to a lot of Weatherall’s productions lately (since the monarchy death music edition of Deep Voices a few weeks ago) and, this being Deep Voices #90, I thought it would be nice to center it around the person who I think really best defines the decade. Technically there’s only one Weatherall track here. Leading off the mix is a miracle of a song from the 1993 Weatherall-produced (newly on streaming!) album by the trio One Dove. From there are tracks made by his contemporaries and then others who have walked in his footsteps. A tribute, not a compendium.
Weatherall died in 2020, too young. He was skeptical of his own contributions to music. “I never meant this to be a career,” he said. “It was just a job that paid for new clothes and records.” I love his laissez-faire dedication to populism. Looking back with a shoulder shrug in 2016: “Here we are at the apex of the punk-rock dream, the democratization of art, anyone can do it, and what a double-edged sword that’s turned out to be, has it not?” Depends on who’s holding sword. He had a good grip.
Playlist notes:
•Bless my friend Rachel who got me into One Dove a couple years ago. Not to brag, but I was lucky enough to find an affordable copy of their lone album Morning Dove White on Discogs (the cover is trashed, it’s got BPMs written on the run out grooves in silver marker, but it plays great). He began recording it around the time Screamadelica was released, and it has many of that record’s hallmarks: funky percussion, reverb all over the vocals, disco keyboard lines played at half speed, drums borrowed from both early techno records and Def Jam productions, guitar solos, and the sheen of the best shoegaze records that were being released. Here are some comparisons for fun: Imagine if Larry Heard had produced Portishead with Bruce Hornsby on keys. Imagine if Rick Rubin went to college in Ibiza, not NYU, and the Beastie Boys had gotten into acid, not booze. Imagine if My Bloody Valentine had been given proper mental health treatment and celebrated their 25th birthdays recording an album about appreciating each other’s good heartedness. Alas, the album was not a big hit and the band broke up (singer Dot Allison has released several good solo albums).
•The extremely knowledgeable-on-Weatherall blog Bagging Area has a sweet anecdote posted from One Dove guitarist Ian Carmichael about working on the album. “When I arrived [late to recording], breathless and sweaty and terrified, I was thinking I've kept this VIP DJ waiting outside on the doorstep for 20 minutes; he's going to be so pissed off and I'm the biggest jerk in the world. He was sitting reading NME. Smiling. Smiling BIG. The reviews of Screamadelica had just come out that day. The NME saved my life.” Weatherall, along with his Sabres of Dancehall crew, worked on the album, its diversity of sound, its wide-eyed adventurousness is perfect. A true pleasure to listen to.
There are also an extensive amount of alternate mixes and remixes released. The Sabres’ “Paradise Mix” of “Transient Truth,” with its whispered vocals and avalanche of percussion is as good if not better than anything on the album.
•The second two tracks on this week’s playlist both feature vocals from Seefeel’s Sarah Peacock. Seefeel, blended shoegaze and techno perfectly, and Peacock’s vocals soft, plainspoken singing carried the songs. Scala is all of Seefeel plus Locust producer Mark Van Hoen. Their 1998 album To You In Alpha is heavy, like they were digging into the ground while Seefeel attempted to float into the sky. I like this track “Blank Narrow Shut” best; it sounds like someone accidentally left their elbow on the high end of a church organ while recording a tense piece of shoegaze and they decided just to leave it.
On the one-off Echo Park collaboration with the very ’90s title, “Razor Kiss,” Peacock implores you to “close your eyes” behind the backbeat that defines the decade. Could have been the soundtrack to either a makeout or a runaway scene in Girl, Interrupted or a party in the Matrix. “Is it safe to be alone?” she asks. Doesn’t sound like it.
•Weatherall’s longtime partner in the duo Two Lone Swordsmen, Keith Tenniswood, has a project called Radioactive Man. His self-titled debut album for the project has one arguably perfect IDM track, the curiously named “Goodnight Morton.” It doesn’t do much other than twinkle with a little bit of percussive pitter patter before fizzling with 20 seconds left, like a star that burns out. If you’re looking for something beautiful, and you don’t need much, it’s more than plenty.
•I love Fauzia’s largely a capella “Stormy Days.” “No more stormy days, now I get to play, in the sunshine with you,” she sings repeatedly, softly, with a building echo. It’s simple, sweet almost a children’s song. Ripe for remixing, were Weatherall still around. I don’t know if this is purposeful, but I’ve always thought of it as a response to 1972’s “It’s a Rainy Day Sunshine Girl” by Faust, both songs with repeating lyrics about the day’s weather.
•Another group, were Weatherall still alive, I could see him working with, is Berlin duo a.s.o. Their debut album from last year was a dark, slinky update to trip-hop (the talented producer Tornado Wallace is half of the group). They recently released a remix EP with two tracks in particular that are distinctly Weatherallian, one by the producer Cousin who I highlighted in Deep Voices #81 that makes nimble use of his hand drum wizardry, and the one (which I included on this week’s Deep Voices) by the ambient dub super group Purelink which gently harnesses that same essential ’90s backbeat as “Razor Kiss.” I could see a lot of people doing that rolling-an-invisible-orb dance at a rave to this one. Sometimes people talk about music being an update to a sound as a compliment—indie rock, but make it Gen Alpha—as though progress in and of itself is a worthwhile artistic component. That’s not the approach here. The sound quality of this track is super high, owing, I assume to technological advances not available before the turn of the century. But if you told me this was released in ’95 I would believe you. And I’d think it was amazing. Isn’t that enough? The future isn’t always essential.
Damn, thanks for turning me on to that One Dove track. Terrific!