Deep Voices - Playlist #5
Thanks for reading and listening. A new playlist with light annotation every Monday and Thursday morning. Subscribe if you’d like and please let me know what you’re enjoying.
Playlist notes:
The opening track here, though credited to Marion Brown as part of his exceptionally lush album Sweet Earth Flying, is actually a solo performance on organ by Paul Bley. I’ve always found it to be a very moving. I bought this record in like 2003 at a record store the drummer of White Magic was running out of his living room on Graham Ave.
There’s a little block of techno and techno-adjacent tunes in the middle here (with the excellent KWC 92 track on L.I.E.S. towards the end). Vague Imaginaires is a French producer who sounds like he’s enjoyed both his fair share of beachside raves and crying jags while listening to Air. John T. Gast’s moody track isn’t totally typical him (and is maybe my second favorite song called “Jonathan”) but I love it because it sounds like he made a regular song and decided it would sound better at half speed. D Tiffany makes the traditional exciting and I am a sucker for anything that sounds even remotely like a wind chime. DJ Haram does not get the praise she deserves. Her use of percussion can be intense—the gun sounds on “Body Count” are no joke—but it’s not aggression for aggression’s sake. There’s a lot of interwoven play with her rhythms, sounds from every region dipping in and out. The delicate tabla and incessant hi-hat here are undergirded by an occasional little jingle. What a weird and exciting song.
Molly Joyce’s debut album Breaking and Entering is stunning and worth listening to in full if you like her song on here. It’s on New Amsterdam, a classical label, and it’s not getting much crossover coverage. I read about it, of course, in The Wire.
Insides’ album seems to have been forgotten when it was released in the ’90s. It didn’t seem to get much attention when it was reissued last year, either. No idea why. It’s easy to digest, it’s extremely catchy, it’s innovative. If you like Fiona Apple or the Cure or drum machines you will love them.
I’ve been using my spare time to try to put to memory the names of the world’s 196 countries. While doing this, I realized there are a few places in the world I know very little about. Togo is one of them. Reading up on the country’s music, I discovered the wonderfully named Bella Bellow, whose voice is so gorgeously smooth. She was all set to become an international sensation when she died in a car accident at at 27 in 1973. She’s regarded as one of the greatest Togolese musicians ever. The BBC has a comprehensive audio story about her life.
Roger Robinson is the vocalist in King Midas Sound, a group I have always liked more in theory than in practice. Better is his earlier work with the Bug aka Kevin Martin (the other half of KMS). But “Stay”—produced by the wildly underrated Amos Childs of Jabu—is likely his best song. I don’t think what he does here can quite be called singing. But it’s not spoken word, and it’s not rap, either. It’s really like humming, but with words.
Alain Kremski recorded the extensive piano works of Gurdjieff and De Hartmann, which is how I discovered him. He also recorded a few albums of gongs. The man loves a gong. But he also composed the score to a documentary about nuclear war, In My Lifetime. It’s as pensive as you’d imagine, but it’s gentle, too, as much about healing as it is about pain.