Hello! Welcome to the Wormhole, a post of Deep Voices recommendations, observations, meditations, celebrations, and reverberations only for paying subscribers. Speaking of paying, Deep Voices is now cheaper. For access to twice as much Deep Voices intel, consider a monthly subscription for the price of a cup of coffee. This week has a photos of the ’90s zine Animal Review helmed by novelist Nell Zink which include her old notes to Steve Albini (I bought copies of the zine off him on eBay a couple years back), thoughts on a Dirty Projectors profile, Rototoms, an unusual time to hear Disintegration Loops, and more.
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Anna Wiener has a spectacular profile of Dirty Projectors’ Dave Longstreth in the
current issue of the New Yorker. The story is generous to Longstreth, who is both a complex person making complex music. What I mean by generous is that Wiener acknowledges his ample talent and gives him space to Longstreth to spin yarns about his mythos, and to (inadvertently?) demonstrate his obstinacy. She does not take him to task, just simply lets Longstreth and her sources present their cases. When she does voice an opinion, though, it’s more subtle, like when she admits that she sometimes doesn’t really get what he’s talking about. Maybe my favorite part of the story: “At one point, trying to convey the song’s intended energy, [Longstreth] played me the opening to Nirvana’s ‘Floyd the Barber,’ then pulled up photographs of a Butoh performance. This was inscrutable.”
Wiener’s quotes from an interview with Longstreth’s ex-girlfriend and ex-Dirty Projector Amber Coffman are tough. What type of behavior does genius excuse? Longstreth worked with Kanye West (pre-Nazism, which Longstreth denounces) and he discusses that relationship, the lessons he got from West. Wiener quotes Longstreth as saying, “‘West was an inspiring figure, honestly—just effervescent creativity, energy on a level that you don’t encounter. I thought he was probably going to die soon, because of how much he was giving at every moment.’” She says Longstreth, “was struck by West’s ‘Warholian’ world view, which seemed to hold that life itself was the art work.” Longstreth is very concerned about climate change, and that fuels his recent work. Otherwise he seems largely stuck within his own head. “Either I was doing some sort of trance on myself or I was really naïve about the separateness of art and life,” Longstreth says about the self-titled breakup album he released to his ex-girlfriend and ex-bandmate Amber Coffman’s vehement discomfort. Unsurprisingly, it’s not not one of his better records.
Anyway, I have always generally liked Longstreth’s music and this story sent me back to some old favorites, which are below: “Impregnable Question” from 2012’s Swing Lo Magellan, “Fucked For Life,” from 2006’s New Attitude and “Naked We Made It,” from 2003’s The Glad Fact.Have you ever read Nell Zink? You need not be a music fan to enjoy her novels but reading a mention of Ian MacKaye in Doxology certainly enhances the experience if you happen to be a Minor Threat fan. After reading and loving that book, I sought out copies of Zink’s ’90s zines, Animal Review, which eventually surfaced on eBay about a year and a half ago. The seller was Steve Albini, who had contributed to some issues of Animal Review (the zine is made up of reviews of animals and music). The copies I bought included notes from Zink to Albini, one where she lightly ribs him for being too busy to write for Animal Review because of the success of Nirvana’s In Utero, which she produced.
Zink has a new book, Sister Europe, which takes its name from a Psychedelic Furs song. I went to see her read this week and mustered up the courage to ask her, during the audience Q+A what she was listening to lately. She said Shubert. Later, when I went to get my book signed, I told her about how I had a hard time finding Animal Review. She told me issues are available at the New York Public Library. She encouraged me to check them out and then steal them.
Below are some photos of the zines and Zink’s notes to Albini. It includes his review of lemurs.