Deep Voices - Playlist #11
Hang Soon Edition
Deep Voices #11 on Apple Music
Playlist notes:
A lot of guitar today. Not too much shredding because I don’t want everyone to immediately unsubscribe when I send out an hour of grindcore. But hopefully some innovative ways of using the instrument. Agitation Free was a German psych band whose song “Laila, Part 2” starts the mix off and is, in my opinion, basically the height of that genre. It builds and builds to a jamming solo (light shredding only). The drummer deserves a lot of credit here for keeping things extremely tight. Truly an ecstatic song. Moving on, Peel Dream Magazine, more of a dream pop group, stashed away this lovely instrumental jam on a collection of B-Sides. “The Soul Quietens” is a truly terrible song title but Roy Montgomery earns it with an effortless three minutes of spacey strumming. And worth noting that Jean Ritchie plays a dulcimer and U. Srinivas plays a mandolin. Guitar-adjacent.
In 2005 I moved to New York with my friend Brian. He’d just come back from a year in Ghana and we’d sit around listening to all the cassettes he bought there. Boubacar Traoré’s music really destroyed me, his wallowing guitar and deeply searching voice. Later that year, Brian started the Awesome Tapes From Africa blog and a few years after that, I saw him open up a DJ set for Traoré. Was a nice full circle moment.
I can’t stop listening to “Hang Soon (For Pat)” by Bari this week. It’s not guitar and it is 14 minutes. An instrumental modular synth piece, it starts on the cooler end of the spectrum and mostly stays there, though it progresses in speed and eventually in clarity from its slightly foggier beginnings. I have a baby and he’s learned to crawl in the last month and the song’s trajectory reminds me of his progress, slow and steady, curious and attempting to overcome the frustration of limitations you can’t control. In reality, I know that’s not what it’s about. I know that Pat is a friend of the producer who passed away tragically young. I knew Pat but only a bit, a super social and super warm person. I found this song to be a hugely moving tribute. I listen to it repeatedly in blocks a few times a year and today, my birthday, when I’m honestly lonely for the world in so many ways, found its simple title and the promise within, to feel so hopeful. A beautiful song.
This is the first one of these I’ve received since subscribing, but when I saw it included a Roy Montgomery track, particularly one from Temple IV, I knew I was in the right place.