Wednesday January 11 2023
I’ve been crabby as hell but the following sequence of music has lifted me towards agreeableness. Mohi Bahauddin Dagar’s Ahir Bhairav is his version of a Hindustani morning raga, lasting almost an hour here. He plays a rudra veena, a variety of “tube zither” that connects a fretted body (dandi) to two large gourds (tumbas). Dagar lets the microtonal action of the drone string take precedence for the first half. After that, plucked bass notes and melody drift in slowly. It sounds like a brain, a base that wells with energy and is joined by a few fireflies of thought.
Not a bad idea to go straight from there into Space & Awareness by Inhmost (a.k.a. Simon Huxtable), a recent ambient album in the ‘90s sense, luscious tones and pads with a hint of the grid, an outline of the beat that has been excised from something that was once dance music, as opposed to ambient music that began as chords or a synth patch. The beat does, eventually, kick in, but with slippers on. Huxtable has a past in making drum & bass, as well as house, none of which I’ve heard. He has used the phrase “deep music” to describe his interests, and this would normally make me skittish but it seems right.
K-Lone, co-founder of the mighty Wisdom Teeth label (whose hoodie I wore this weekend) made a fantastic Jon Hassell mix last year. He understood that as much as Hassell made wet trumpet magic, he was producer with one of the squishiest sounds out there. This mix reflects that. Raising the percentage of people singing and playing guitar and using “Amen” breaks (once), this 2022 Dungen album was a slept-on delight. Gustav Ejstes is such a melodic man! How does he do it in 2023? I’ll tell you: SOBRIETY. The name of this album, translated from Swedish, is One Is Too Many and a Thousand Is Never Enough, a saying from the program. Glad to trudge the road of happy destiny with you, Gustav.
Maintaining the presence of the “Amen” break, an increasing the amount of Portuguese, the Nia Archives track “Baianá” has been getting five or six plays a day in my headphones. This is your storm the barricades track for the week. The vocals are from a 2005 Barbatuques recording, their version of a song by Maria do Carmo Barbosa. She may have been born in 2000, but Nia is making jungle straight out of 1995. (I played the song three times while writing this.) We close with five hours of pure delight. To commemorate the 30th anniversary of Artificial Intelligence, the album that simultaneously launched Warp Records as a real concern and Autechre as an outfit with their own sound, the fellas Sean and Rob have made this mix, which the nerds have already provided a track listing for. It is the sound of 1992, and good god is it fun. It is not really head-scratching electronique bingue bongue. This is straight up dance music.
Once you have played it a few times (you actually will), read this oral history of the AI compilation in The Quietus. It was a huge record for me but I did not realize it was for many until about five years ago, and perhaps this is true to its genesis: “You couldn't tell the significance at the time. No way,” Mike Golding of B12 said in the Quietus piece. “Everyone who was making electronic music at that time was all in their own little bubble. It wasn’t this big community of all people that were there changing the world. It was small little bits.”
Do you know RaGa’s 2016 rendition of the Goosebumps theme? (The video is one minute long. You won’t regret watching it for the first or the 29th time.) I watched it again and thought about whether or not it matters if we know how a piece of music really “goes.” Our memory of that piece is the only guide we have. RaGa does not talk in her clip, but she makes it clear that she wants us to remember something. This spooky plastic cornball song made her feel so awake and delighted that she forgot she can’t play the piano. There is very much an “it” she meant to convey.
This proposition made me think of its inverse, that ghastly hedge fund Dr. Seuss voice Didion uses in “Goodbye To All That.” I’ve been grossed out by this terminal preciousness since it was first assigned to me almost 40 years ago. Reading it is like watching a child try to pick someone’s pocket, using the misdirections of “something” and “everything” to fool the mark into thinking a truth has been told. It’s not just that Didion doesn’t describe a recognizable New York—it’s that she doesn’t describe a legible version of Didion. The essay is not brave enough to have the coherence of narcissism. The only distinct impression I’ve ever gotten is that someone who did not come from money decided to hang out with people with Wall Street uncles who complain about “the help,” and who ultimately decides she was only ever a “colonial” in New York.
For starters, Didion’s nerves didn’t constrict (not possible) on her first night in New York, and her hotel room wasn’t 35 degrees because of the AC (aside from that being impossible there was no thermostat in the ‘50s that would tell you that). “Poetry!” the fan cries about these descriptions, but that’s not what Didion ever sold. Her thing was The Wild California Truth and all that turned out to be was a shoplifting coat, roomy enough to hide whatever the fuck she was doing in New York. Didion tells the reader she makes $65 a week working for a magazine and it feels like she’s said nothing. Why did she come from the West to the “mysterious nexus” of New York? To be mysterious?
This wet and over-quoted sentence tries to bundle up a set of specifics we never got individually: “That was the year, my twenty-eighth, when I was discovering that not all of the promises would be kept, that some things are in fact irrevocable and that it had counted after all, every evasion and every procrastination, every mistake, every word, all of it.” All of what counted in what sense? Where was the “it”? I feel like James Hetfield looking for the black ice under the bus that crushed Cliff Burton. What mistakes? Murder? Taking too many cabs? She’s been bouncing around New York with a cohort that stays up till 5 AM. Turning tricks? Writing manifesti? Closing up at the diner?
She writes, “You see I was in a curious position in New York: it never occurred to me that I was living a real life there.” This whole reality thing seems to really be a drag for Didion. She apparently found it “difficult in the extreme” to understand “young women” who experience New York as “a real place.” Me, I wouldn’t think it was a good idea to brag about such callous blindness, but the very concrete truth is that it was a good idea for Didion’s career and I was in the minority, though not a small one. Her “evasions” and “procrastinations” were the rocks she needed to turn over to make this essay say something.
RaGa loves the Goosebumps theme. She sees the “it” and gives it to us. Didion could never.
I spent a month in 2016 helping a rock star with her memoir. She would talk to me for an hour or two, and then I’d transcribe our conversations and turn them into pages. I quite liked the results but she did not. She wanted it all to be more “literary,” which did not seem like helpful feedback. Now, I think what she meant is that she wanted to have a voice like Didion’s. Tragic choice, as hers is better. I look forward to that memoir.
Later in her life, loss transformed Didion’s writing and I love that work.
I spent the last few years working on this piece about Księżyc, my favorite Polish band ever. Thank you to Liz Pelly and Minh Nguyen at Pioneer Works for making it happen. Listen to this band! They have only two albums! Pure goddamned magic.
Here are all 242 albums released in 2022 that I enjoyed and blurbed for Shfl. If you load that in a new tab, it will randomize in a new order. Soon: a 2022 playlist.
