The school year is right around the corner. With coursework and a couple jobs lined up for the next eight months or so, it’s highly possible that my activity on the blog will slow down once again. Here’s the last burst of my late summer writing influenced by my late summer listening.
Gianluca Becuzzi & Fabio Orsi – Muddy Speaking Ghosts Through My Machines
A couple semesters ago, I took a really thought-provoking class called “Who Owns Music?,” in which we read about and discussed various topics and issues regarding ownership and property as they relate to music. One topic that we came back to frequently was sampling and recording. The capacity to create and reproduce recordings comes with some ethical issues when you are recording people who are not yourself, with a primary question being: who do those songs belong to? In the world of ethnomusicology, researchers who make field recordings must consider this question. And with ownership also comes questions of crediting those involved in the recording process, namely the performers.
When it comes to using sampling in creating new music, I am all for it. It is unfortunate that capitalist conceptions of private property are so central to the ownership of recordings, and the crackdown on sampling that has occurred since the 80s has stifled the creativity of many musicians. You can still get away with sampling without going through compulsory legal hoops, and many do. It is easier done when you are a lesser known artist and the music industry is less likely to detect you, or if you sample a lesser known recording that is less lucrative or less likely to be owned by some corporate enterprise bent on milking it for every penny it can get.
Because the music industry polices sampling so heavily to maintain its property interests and prevent/punish those it claims are “stealing” when they sample, many artists are cagey when it comes to revealing where their samples come from. They don’t want to snitch on themselves, but this also can be disappointing as a listener when you hear a great sample that you’d like to find the source of. Many times I’ve discovered great musicians when their works are sampled, but other times my search for the origin of the sample comes up dry. It is disappointing because as a music fan, I just want to find more cool musicians to listen to.
If I had it my way, capitalism and its music industry manifestations would cease to exist. Private property would be abolished for good, and recordings and performances would not be seen as such. The benefits of private property ownership, most primarily the accumulation of capital from the use and consumption of these recordings would no longer be possible or necessary. A society that implements the tenets of the Marxist slogan “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” would ideally ensure that a good dignified living as a musician would be guaranteed and not dependent on the commodification of your performances and recording. Sampling would not be a crime, and perhaps the only obligation would be that the sampler must cite their sources in the credits/liner notes of the release, in a way not much different than one must do for an academic paper or book.
I dream of this world for many reasons, and lament the frustrations that we could not implement it earlier, because perhaps it would relieve one frustration that I have with the album Muddy Speaking Ghosts Through My Machine by Gianluca Becuzzi and Fabio Orsi. This is a really powerful record with a captivating and unique atmosphere sustained throughout. It’s maybe best described as ambient americana, as it contains barren and surreal drone passages evoking wide open prairies dotted with old weathered abandoned farmhouses, that are punctuated by the voices of blues and folk singers sampled from the field recordings of the ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax. I can imagine these women sitting on the porches of those farmhouses singing these tunes, but the time-worn nature of the recordings and the soundscapes created by Becuzzi and Orsi make the voices feel less present and more ghostly. The title of the record highlights that ghostly nature. All recordings are essentially disembodied projections of the voice. They are snapshots, immortalizing the voice but not keeping it free from the passage of time that afflicts the recordings themselves. This record should be of keen interest not just to anyone into ambient, drone, or old bluesy folk stuff, but also those fascinated by hauntology as it has been used to describe the music of artists such as Boards of Canada, Burial, or The Caretaker.
To return to my frustration, it comes from the fact that the singers are not identified on this record. According to Discogs, Lomax’s recordings are credited as being the source of the samples, but it doesn’t specific which recordings they come from. I don’t know whether Lomax didn’t identify the singers, or if it was Becuzzi and Orsi who didn’t. But it is these women, their voices, and the songs they sing, that give the record its greatest power. I would like to know more about who they are, and a lack of citation/credit means that I will have to dig to find the answer if I can. Some might say that the mysterious identity of the singers adds to the strong mystique this record has, but I’d like to know about the names and lives behind the voices that live on and speak through the machines of Lomax, Becuzzi and Orsi, and our own in the present.
Navigator – Nostalgie
The cover art of Nostalgie is emblematic of the record’s sound, lots of negative space with music sparsely situated on the periphery. As far as post-rock goes, particularly the stuff that is more post than it is rock, Nostalgie is quite an underapprieciated record. Navigator’s progression towards their one and only album is a fascinating trajectory in which the music becomes much more obscured, distant, and cryptic. The noise rock tendencies on their debut single progressively wither away as the group plays more restrained and unconventionally, with the vocals becoming progressively more muted, hushed, and unintelligible.
This album was the last release by the group, and if there is one coherent theme within Nostalgie, it is a sense of finality. While some songs are darker than others, much of it feels like a setting sun on a chilly winter landscape. Looking out on the field is to reflect back on time. The light is fading and it is harder to see clearly what once was. In this darkness it is unclear whether to find comfort suggested by the soothing guitar piece that is “My Groshly”, the first track, or something more harrowing like the crumble and whirr of “Menlo Park” that is punctuated by someone’s whaling fading in and out of earshot. The slow and gradual build to drum rumble and shrill screech of “O, Massa” or the plodding off-kilter booms of “Throw Another Receptor On the Fire” may lead me towards the latter. But I am unsure.
I don’t know if I understand this album. But that is why it is so captivating. With music, artists reveal, with differentiating levels of clarity and openness, what their music is trying to convey or could be interpreted as conveying. Nostalgie is so unclear and insular, there is hardly anything in the way of clues or breadcrumbs as far as I can see.
Dorothy Carter is a NYC-based musician considered to be one of the pioneers of psychedelic folk. Menlo Park is a city near California Park. Navigator is from Norfolk, England. I don’t know what a grolshy is, or whose theirs is/was. I don’t think I will ever know.
fawn / cement diver – fawn / cement diver
I’ve seemingly been straying away from the original Honey on the Knife path because I haven’t been listening to and writing about much shoegaze as of late. My tastes are evolving, but I still have a sweet tooth for this stuff. To prove it, let me tell you about this new split from cement diver and HotK favourite fawn. fawn put out one of the best EPs of last year, a very warm and enveloping 5 track odyssey sounding so heavenly and wistful while containing a strong emotional undercurrent that put them firmly near the front of what is a very bountiful crop of Texas-based shoegaze acts that have hit the scene in the last five or so years. Their two new songs continue to build off the momentum of the EP and demonstrate the knack they have for soaring and pristine vocal melodies that glitter through rippled walls of guitar bliss. They expand on their formula too, with a looped beat-driven rhythm section driving the first cut and some really pretty synth melodies on the second.
Cement diver ain’t no slouch either. They carry prominent elements of the texgaze sound, namely lowslung downtuned riffs that rock while still swimming in a dream pop wash. The vocals are also intriguing as they remind me of other newer shoegaze artists that enunciate in a warbly moaning tone reminiscent of sung emo trap and cloud rap that permeated Soundcloud beginning in the latter half of the 2010s.
It’s a solid introduction to both artists if you’re not familiar. I’ll be diving into more cement diver for sure, and if you haven’t, go listen to that fawn EP. Seriously, it’s so good.
Sign Language – Madison & Floral
It may seem hard not to talk about Sign Language without bringing up other acts that they sound like. The reason for that is that they walk the two paths of shoegaze/post hardcore fusion and another style I like to refer to as “yellmo” (think screamo but yelling), and both styles have been well worn in the last ten years or so. In recommending this band to a friend of mine, I jokingly referred to Madison & Floral as a hyperfleshfiddle viewwaterhead balanced and composed in a spite house glowing on type album. But to be honest, I have mixed feelings on the use of artist comparisons to describe the appeal of how a piece of music sounds. On one level it is practical to relate something new to an audience by pointing out what it has in common with points of reference that they are familiar with. And while we do often crave more of what we like, it is also true that the ways in which things stand out and apart from their contemporaries is a big part of what makes them special.
On Madison & Floral, Sign Language stands out because it feels like they are really going for it. The songs sound massive, which is as much a credit to the reverberating and hard-knocking production as it is to the way this group writes anthemic songs and delivers them with such an intense vitality. It is the passion that explodes from this record that feels so monumental and honestly necessary as an antidote to the mundane chillness and numbness that seems to hang over a considerable amount of daily life and popular culture. Music with big feelings often is associated with youthfulness or the nostalgia for youth as one ages and moves away from it. But as I approach my 30s within the coming years, to discover and fall in love with music like this seems like a reminder not to lose any drive to live with vigor and passion, to build community with others, and create an existence that transcends the alienation, boredom, and loneliness that seems like a given if one gives themselves up completely to the routine of working class adult life and its resulting exhaustion that can deprive one of the drive to find meaning in the free time they do have to create the world in their image. This record reminds me of what is worth living and striving for.
A grolshy is not a thing, but Mygrolshy is a term of endearment for Monsieur le Juge.