My newest mix for NTS Radio is exactly what I want during the coldest part of the year: cozy, warm-toned folk and blues, with a few leans towards classical, and lots of room tone and vinyl crackle. I hope you like it and that you’re staying warm, wherever you are. You can download an mp3 version here if you’re so inclined.
Tracklist:
1. All In One – In A Long White Room
2. Lee Hazlewood – Your Sweet Love
3. Emitt Rhodes – Somebody Made For Me
4. Arthur Russell – Instrumentals 1974 Volume 1 Part 02
5. Ted Lucas – It Is So Nice To Get Stoned
6. Rosa Ponselle & Carmela Ponselle – Where My Caravan Has Rested
7. Richard & Linda Thompson – I Want To See The Bright Lights Tonight
8. The Durutti Column – Madeleine
9. John Jacob Niles – Go ‘Way From My Window
10. Nino Rota – Sarabande
11. Fred Neil – Little Bit Of Rain
12. Linda Cohen – The Dust
13. Patti Page – Confess
14. Unknown Artist – IV
15. John Cage – In A Landscape (excerpt)
16. Dan Reeder – Nobody Wants To Be You
17. Washington Philips – Train Your Child
18. The Roches – Runs In the Family
19. Mother Nature – Orange Days And Purple Nights
20. Elizabeth Cotten – Mama, Nobody’s Here But The Baby
21. Mark Fry – Song For Wilde
A kind of sequel to last month’s mix, this month’s episode of Getting Warmer for NTS Radio is more deeply autumnal sounds: private press folk, psych, early Fleetwood Mac, a very good and strange Bono cameo, Bridget St. John covering Buddy Holly, and many more great things. I think of it, very loosely, as a “70s meltdown,” even though there are plenty of non-70s things in here–it feels very 70s in spirit. I hope you like it! If you do, you can download an mp3 version here.
Tracklist:
1. Hudson Brothers – So You Are A Star
2. Wool – If They Left Us Alone Now
3. Virginia Tree – Make Believe Girl
4. Gavin Bryars – Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet (Tramp With Orchestra III, No Strings)
5. Dave Van Ronk – Hang Me, Oh Hang Me
6. Fleetwood Mac – Man Of The World
7. Durutti Column – William B
8. The Fleetwoods – Truly Do
9. John Martyn – Don’t Want To Know
10. Emitt Rhodes – Lullabye
11. Bill Fay – I Hear You Calling
12. Fairport Convention – Who Knows Where The Time Goes
13. The Feelies – On The Roof
14. Karen James – The Morning Dew (James McHree)
15. Bridget St. John – Every Day
16. Daniel Lanois – Falling At Your Feet
17. Lou Reed – Satellite Of Love
18. Judee Sill – The Kiss
Here’s my most recent mix for NTS Radio, in which I’m still on an autumnal tip. Psychy acoustic folk, dreamy shoegaze, and a really gorgeous, tears-inducing children’s choir rendition of a song from my childhood favorite, Watership Down. I hope you like it, and that you’re staying warm! You can download an mp3 version here.
Tracklist:
1. Woo – Fanfare
2. Eloy – Horizons
3. A.C. Marias – Looks Like
4. Maxine Funke – Make That Dream
5. April Stevens & Nino Tempo – You’ll Be Needing Me Baby
6. Esther & Abi Ofarim – Every Night
7. Woo – When You Find Your Love
8. Kyu Sakamoto – 上を向いて歩こう
9. Hydroplane – Wurlitzer Jukebox
10. Judee Sill – Jesus Was A Cross Maker
11. Colin Blunstone – Misty Roses
12. The Small Choir Of St. Brandon’s School – Bright Eyes
13. Ichiko Hashimato – A Stranger In Paradise
14. Cocteau Twins – Round
15. Linda Cohen – Madman Samba
16. Karen H. Oznick – I Miss You
17. Scribble – Mother Of Pearl
This month for Getting Warmer on NTS Radio, I made a mix in homage to the great Robbie Băsho, who makes some of my favorite fall listening. I did my best to incorporate both his classics and some of his less known moments, all of which evidence such an incredible range of musicianship and emotion.
Though Băsho’s life was tragically cut short by a freak chiropractic accident, he accomplished so much in his twenty years of making music and left us an impressive catalogue to celebrate. He went to military school, then pre-med. He painted, sang, played trumpet, played lacrosse, lifted weights, wrote poetry, and changed his name to Băsho after the Japanese poet. He went through phases of cultural and musical obsession, including Sufi, Buddhist, Hindu, Japanese, Indian classical, Iranian, Native American, English and Appalachian folk, Western blues, and Western classical “periods.” He “used open C and more exotic tunings and he developed an esoteric doctrine for 12- and 6-string guitar, concerned with color and mood. He spoke of ‘Zen-Buddhist-Cowboy songs’ a long time before Gram Parsons mentioned his vision of Cosmic American music.” He studied under Ali Akbar Khan. He pushed for a broader appreciation of the steel-string guitar as a classical concert instrument. He made 14 studio albums in 19 years. He wrote “a Sufi symphony” and another for piano and orchestra about Spanish and Christian cultures coming to America. He’s considered one of the geniuses of American folk and blues, and yet his name often gets lost in conversations about John Fahey, Leo Kottke, and Sandy Bull.
“My philosophy is quite simple: soul first, technique later; or, better to drink wine from the hands than water from a pretty cup. Of course the ultimate is wine from a pretty cup. Amen.”
Tracklist:
1. Robbie Băsho – Redwood Ramble
2. Robbie Băsho – Cathedrals et Fleur de Lis
3. Robbie Băsho – Roses and Snow
4. Robbie Băsho – Twilight Peaks
5. Robbie Băsho – Rocky Mountain Raga
6. Robbie Băsho – Rodeo
7. Robbie Băsho – The White Princess
8. Robbie Băsho – Mehera
9. Robbie Băsho – Variations on Clair de Lune
10. Robbie Băsho – Salangadou
11. Robbie Băsho – Basket Full Of Dragons
12. Robbie Băsho – Sweet Medicine
13. Robbie Băsho – Orphan’s Lament
14. Robbie Băsho – Call on the Wind
I’m 20 years old, leaning against a window of a train from London to Edinburgh. The two other guys I’m traveling with, young producers with MacBooks and MIDI controllers in tow, are sprawled out in the seats across from me, eyes closed, dead to the world. At the start of that year, I had put out an LP (my first) of music I had felt unsure of, spent nearly every weekend of my sophomore spring semester in a different city, spun into a whirlwind, eventually dropping out of college to tour full time. Now it’s summer and I’m abroad and unready, unable to slow my racing mind. Instead, I retreat into my headphones, staring out at the passing Highlands in all their viridescence. In my ears sits a lone voice over a tranquil bed of strings, the ghostly hum of a vibrato circuit on a guitar amp lurking: “step right up / something’s happening here.” Sleeplessness becomes body high as the sun starts to rise.
This is how I fell in love with Laughing Stock. That record, and later Spirit Of Eden, became instant companions through the months of endless travel and alienation that followed. The music of Mark Hollis would only hypnotize; it would help me process the change in direction of my life–a pointillist’s attention to detail, a fluidity I dreamt of possessing, a texture thick to the point of becoming a security blanket. Listening repeatedly, you feel as if you’re walking through an aviary of disparate songbirds, much like those depicted on the artwork, improvising in full awareness of their impermanence. In the midst of mental illness or writer’s block, I always use these records to recalibrate. To me, they’re sound of earth and sky meeting; above all, they taught me to embrace solitude through silence.
That silence is elevated even further on Mark Hollis, the solo record I arrived at later, quietly released seven years after Talk Talk disbanded. All electric instruments and studio magic are eschewed – instead, two microphones are placed at the front of the room, leaving the musicians in pursuit of their proper place in the stereo field as it was in the beginning of recorded sound. What we get, then, is that intimate, transcendental purity found in the films of Bresson or Tarkovsky or the music of Nick Drake or Morton Feldman–existing totally outside of time. Rather than utilizing chance and accident like the two preceding records, everything here was written down and scored–and somehow still, the music appears loosely structured, out of thin air, delicate as stained glass. Woodwind textures spurt, a harmonium breathes deep, cloistral voices whisper soft invocations. Often Mark’s voice will barely rise above the creaking of his chair or a ticking watch. You couldn’t find a quieter pop record if you tried.
In her essay The Aesthetics Of Silence, Susan Sontag describes art as “a deliverance, an exercise in asceticism.” She says:
…Formerly, the artist’s good was mastery of and fulfillment in his art. Now, it’s suggested that the highest good for the artist is to reach that point where those goals of excellence become insignificant to him, emotionally and ethically, and he is more satisfied by being silent than by finding a voice in art.
Of course, the relationship Mark Hollis had to silence was never limited to sound–he withdrew completely from the public eye to focus on his family shortly after this record was released. He would claim that the work behind him was so close to how he imagined music that he couldn’t possibly dream of how to move forward from it. Many of us held out for one more record, one more sign of life. It would never come, and even as heartbroken as I am now that he’s gone, to ask for more would be selfish. One listens to these records at least once a week and still learns from them.
A little over twenty years later, the music industry has eaten itself. As a discovery platform, streaming services reduce even the most unorthodox music down to exclusive, rudimentary listening contexts– dinner parties, “mood boosters,” “lo-fi beats to study to”–as if it wasn’t bad enough that they barely compensate. Young artists online hardly thrive, if ever, on transparency and instant validation–to keep your work close to the chest is somehow to become estranged; we assume the role of “wearing” our music beyond simply letting it sing for itself. At the time of writing this, I’m holed up finishing a project that I struggle with keeping a secret. I’m sometimes so swept up in considering how and where it’ll be placed–contexts that I can’t control, try as I might–that I forget to be honest with myself. I listen to the work my hero left behind and I hear a vision of sound uncompromised, a commitment to the organic, an atmospheric intuition, and those troubles are kept at bay. I’m forever indebted to the standard Mark Hollis set and am inspired to stay true to all of the grey areas. I only hope the people introduced to his work for the first time this week will stumble upon a similar solace.
If this is your first listen, wait for a quiet moment to press play. In his words, “You should never listen to music as background music.”
Very much a quiet “wow” record. Warm, dusty, honeyed Chicago private press folk pop. The only release from the group, which included Katherine Parsons, Kathryn Davis, W. Wilson, T. Shiek, J. Bill, and K. Peterson. Bare-bones, baroque-pop harmonies over simple guitar parts and percussion, pegging them on first listen as Bacharach-tinged lo-fi bedroom folk contemporaries of Peter Paul & Mary (fittingly, “Rich Man, Poor Man” is a cover of a Peter Paul & Mary song, originally released in 1968). But! there’s more–there’s an unsmilingly blunt closeness to the vocal quality that reminds me of Marine Girls, The Roches, but also sounds much more antiquated than what I associate with 1969–it reminds me a lot of the tones that I’m used to hearing in recordings from the 50’s, or even the 40’s–though maybe that’s just degraded recording quality coloring my perception.
These swooning, girl group harmonies will definitely work for fans of Quarteto Em Cy, but these are more baroque in sensibility, and not just because there’s a gorgeously on-the-nose version of “Scarborough Fair.” Though this record is roughly half covers, and though there are so many direct reference points, it still feels extraordinarily like its own world. Deeply golden-toned, which is perhaps what makes it feel like such a balm in the wintertime. I’m not sure if this turns everyone else into a pile of goo in the way that it does for me, but I will say that if it’s for you, it’s definitely for you. Anyone have a nice FLAC rip of this that they’d like to share?
Tracklist:
1. Margo Guryan – Think Of Rain
2. Javier Somarriba – Contigo Llegaron Los Colores
3. Joni Mitchell – God Must Be A Boogie Man
4. Wendy & Bonnie – Children Laughing
5. Nadi Qamar – After Glow
6. Maki Asakawa – ふしあわせという名の猫
7. Once – Joanna
8. Affinity – I Wonder If I Care As Much
9. Linda Cohen – Arroyo
10. Mariangela – Memories of Friends
11. The Cyrkle – The Visit (She Was Here)
12. Judee Sill – The Archetypal Man
13. Quarteto Em Cy – Tudo Que Você Podia Ser
14. World Standard – Loving Spoonful
15. Robbie Basho – Orphan’s Lament
16. Psychic TV – White Nights
17. Colin Blunstone – Smoky Day
18. Mary Margaret O’Hara – You Will Be Loved Again
19. Pat Metheny, Lyle Mays & Nana Vasconcelos – Estupenda Graça
Gossamer folk ballads and cinematic string arrangements from musician, singer, and songwriter Doji Morita (stage name). Born in Tokyo, Morita-san began her musical career after the death of a friend, and made seven records in the span of her eight year long musical career. An intensely private person, Morita-san chose not to perform often or in large venues, and though she was signed to major labels, she avoided exposure and increased commercialization wherever possible. She wore a wig and sunglasses in most photos and live appearances, and eventually stepped away from music completely to focus on her domestic life. Sadly, she passed away a few months ago at the age of 65.
The records of hers that I’ve spent time with, such as the also excellent スカイ = きみは悲しみの青い空をひとりで飛べるか (Mother Sky), are all colored by her intense melancholy and nostalgia, and A Boy ボーイ is no exception. Spanish guitar, swelling and cinematic string arrangements, and hushed, forlorn vocals. I imagine that in addition to her folk contemporaries, Morita-san was heavily inspired by Brazilian, Portuguese, and even Cape Verdean musical traditions, with a lot of her instrumentation, vocal lines, and vocal inflections strongly suggesting morno (though she also nods to American folk and country in “君と淋しい風になる,” before submerging us in another particularly dramatic bath of strings). I suspect she was an Ennio Morricone fan as well.
Interestingly, at several points throughout the record songs cut off abruptly and are followed by snippets of what I assume are field recordings–the flapping of a bird’s wings, or rushing water. It’s a motif that appears on her other records, too, and I’d imagine it’s a textural nod to her interest in baroque folk and pastorality. This is a high drama and high reward record, and feels peak autumnal to me, so I hope you enjoy it.
Please enjoy this Halloween special of Getting Warmer for NTS Radio. Featuring overtones, appalachian folk, Tibetan chant, a Delia Derbyshire side project, baroque psych, Kwaïdan, Throbbing Gristle, and lots more. You can download an mp3 version here.
Just a note that there are some things in here that are startling and disturbing, or at least I think so, so if you don’t like listening to scary things I would suggest giving this one a pass.
Tracklist:
1. Buffy Sainte-Marie – Poppies
2. David Hykes & The Harmonic Choir – Gravity Waves
3. Dorothy Ashby – The Moving Finger (excerpt)
4. White Noise – Love Without Sound
5. Karen James – Ghost Lover
6. Throbbing Gristle – Hamburger Lady
7. Ghedalia Tazartès – Une Voix S’en Va
8. Syd Barrett – Golden Hair
9. Monks of the Monastery of Gyütö – Sangwa Düpa (excerpt)
10. Geinoh Yamashirogumi – Osorezan (excerpt)
11. Tōru Takemitsu – II. Yuki (The Woman of the Snow)
12. Anna Homler & Steve Moshier – Sirens (excerpt)
13. Lead Belly – In The Pines
14. The Caretaker – My Heart Will Stop In Joy
15. Dead Can Dance – Wilderness
16. Dorothy Carter – Along The River
17. Jean Ritchie – The Unquiet Grave
Apologies for a few weeks of silence–I fractured a finger in a bike accident recently, and while I’m happy to be otherwise unscathed it’s made typing a nuisance. I’ve also been feeling so depleted by and sad about our ongoing Supreme Court drama that I haven’t had it in me to think about much else. But, it’s fall, which means I’m listening to Robbie Băsho, and maybe you should too.
Though Băsho’s life was tragically cut short by a freak chiropractic accident, he accomplished so much in his twenty years of making music and left us an impressive catalogue to celebrate. He went to military school, then pre-med. He painted, sang, played trumpet, played lacrosse, lifted weights, wrote poetry, and changed his name to Băsho after the Japanese poet. He went through phases of cultural and musical obsession, including Sufi, Buddhist, Hindu, Japanese, Indian classical, Iranian, Native American, English and Appalachian folk, Western blues, and Western classical “periods.” He “used open C and more exotic tunings and he developed an esoteric doctrine for 12- and 6-string guitar, concerned with color and mood. He spoke of ‘Zen-Buddhist-Cowboy songs’ a long time before Gram Parsons mentioned his vision of Cosmic American music.” He studied under Ali Akbar Khan. He pushed for a broader appreciation of the steel-string guitar as a classical concert instrument. He made 14 studio albums in 19 years. He wrote “a Sufi symphony” and another for piano and orchestra about Spanish and Christian cultures coming to America. He’s considered one of the geniuses of American folk and blues, and yet his name often gets lost in conversations about John Fahey, Leo Kottke, and Sandy Bull.
Visions Of The Country was recorded at what was arguably the peak of his musical power, two years before he played the concert recorded in Bonn Ist Supreme(you’ll notice some of these songs show up there as well). It’s a sprawling love song to America, and it seems to exist fully outside of 1978, with Băsho’s voice and sensibility looking both backwards, to early Americana folk and blues; and forward, with his explicit borrowing from global music traditions. He contributes some gorgeous whistling, most notably on “Leaf In The Wind,” and his whistle is every bit as theremin-like and expressive as his singing voice would suggest.
This is a potentially blasphemous thing to say about such a singular guitarist, but my personal standout is “Orphan’s Lament,” which features only Băsho accompanying his signature quaver on a slightly out-of-tune piano being played with the kind of abandon you might expect to hear after a few drinks. I love that the piano part alternates between a very pastoral folk melody and sounding almost like a hammered dulcimer. His voice is at its most brutally effective and emotively pure here, which is to say, blast this in headphones if you want to do some real ugly crying: “Born for love and nothing more/Given away cause we was poor/Will you wait, will you wait for me?” Băsho himself was orphaned as a baby, and the liner notes dedicate this song as follows: “To all the little orphans of the rainbow; and may they find the gentle hand of the Creator.”
Still, though he gives airtime to piano, strings, voice, and whistle, he never lets us forget what he can do with a guitar. I love that Visions of the Country houses a few bare bones guitar parts that feel more in line with what a 2018 audience might associate with “folk music”–“Blue Crystal Fire,” for example, could hardly be more simple, and yet it’s broken wide open by, yet again, that plaintive and tremulous voice. Elsewhere, we hear more classic Băsho guitar construction: long builds of dazzling finger picking with big, cascading crescendoes, and always so much warmth. I’m reminded of his assertion that nylon-string guitars were suitable for “love songs,” but that steel-string guitars could communicate “fire.”
Take this for an afternoon walk if you’re able. I hope you enjoy it.
“My philosophy is quite simple: soul first, technique later; or, better to drink wine from the hands than water from a pretty cup. Of course the ultimate is wine from a pretty cup. Amen.”
