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
My newest episode of Getting Warmer for NTS Radio is a harp special, featuring some of my favorite harp moments from across a slew of different genres. I realized while I was putting it together that if I ever do a follow up harp episode it should probably be focused on harp-heavy Russian classical moments, as there are so many exceptional ones, but for now please enjoy this mix featuring Harold Budd, Alice Coltrane, and the melodic origin of one of my favorite songs, “Stranger In Paradise” from the opera Prince Igor. You can download an mp3 version here. Cheers, and happy harping :}
Tracklist:
1. Joel Andrews – Introduction
2. Raul Lovisoni – Hula Om (Excerpt)
3. Philippa Davies & Thelma Owen – Bugeilio’r Gwenith Gwyn (comp. John Thomas)
4. Kelan Phil Cohran & Legacy – White Nile (Excerpt)
5. Unknown Artist – In A Landscape (comp. John Cage)
6. Erica Goodman – Nocturne No. 2, Op. 9 in E Flat (comp. Frederic Chopin)
7. Daniel Kobialka – Magnetic Unity (Excerpt)
8. Joanna Newsom – On A Good Day (Live)
9. Erica Goodman – Polovtsian Dance No. 17 (comp. Alexander Borodin)
10. Leya – Flow
11. Unknown Artist – Harp Sonata, Op. 68 III (comp. Alfredo Casella)
12. Alice Coltrane – Turiya
13. Harold Budd – Madrigals of the Rose Angel (Excerpt)
My newest episode of Getting Warmer for NTS Radio is a very slow and drippy soundtrack to snowmelt season. Normally this time of year I make mixes that are explicitly springy, full of bird sounds and optimism. I’m definitely feeling some optimism–I imagine most people are, after the grimness of the past winter. But it’s difficult not to feel a little suspicious of that impulse, when everything seems like such a wash. So: this mix is drippy, with a few small green things poking out, but there’s plenty of mud in it too. I hope you like it. You can download an mp3 version here.
Tracklist:
1. The Seekers – I’ll Never Find Another You
2. Sundari Soekotjo – Bengawan Solo
3. The Sweet Inspirations – Why Am I Treated So Bad
4. Mojave 3 – Love Songs On The Radio
5. Scott Walker – It’s Raining Today
6. Eileen Farrell – Beau Soir
7. The Crystals – Please Hurt Me
8. Esther & Abi Ofarim – Oh Waly Waly
9. Woo – It’s Love
10. Connie Francis – Half As Much
11. Barbara Lewis – Baby I’m Yours
12. Céline Dion – Falling Into You
13. John Foxx & Harold Budd – Stepping Sideways
14. Ziemba – Brazil
15. Gordon Fergus-Thompson – Suite Bergamasque: III. Clair De Lune
16. Craig Armstrong ft. Elizabeth Fraser – This Love
17. The Roches – Losing True
I wrote about this record in 2015, very briefly, and while I’m delighted by the opportunity to revisit it at greater length, I wish it was under different circumstances. Musician, composer, and poet Harold Budd passed away yesterday at the age of 84 from complications caused by COVID-19, and with him we have lost a giant.
It was jazz that first inspired musicianship in Budd, or, as he put it, it was “…Black culture that freed me from the stigmata of going nowhere in a hopeless culture.” He was drafted into the US army where he drummed in a regimental band alongside the highly influential free jazz saxophonist Albert Ayler. Budd repeatedly credited Ayler with granting him the freedom to abandon time signatures, a freedom which stayed with him throughout his career.
Budd was notoriously resistant to genre classifications, so much so that I feel a bit sheepish using genre tags on this post: “The word ‘ambient’ doesn’t ring a bell with me. It’s meant to mean something, but is, in fact, meaningless. My style is the only thing I can do well,” “When I hear the words New Age, I reach for my gun,” and, at greater length in this excellent 1986 interview:
I’ll tell you very frankly that this whole ‘new age’ business is very distasteful to me. I don’t like being even considered in that category and I have almost no respect for it at all. To me it’s a kind of arrogant philosophical point of view where music has a metaphysical or biological function. I agree that music has a metaphysical function but when that’s your whole point of view, when it isn’t just a thing that happens out of the normal course of events, I think it becomes arrogant and rather precious. It smacks to me very much of science fiction religion and that’s not me. It’s very lightweight and very bothersome to me. ‘New age music’ is a marketing ploy and I don’t think it has anything to do with the actual truth about the meaning of the music. The only thing that rings my bell is serious music and music is that way when it’s impossible to analyse: ‘new age music’ is easily analysed.
But new age or not, Budd’s music has a consistent quality of brushing up against an experience of the divine.
Harold Budd with Hiroshi Yoshimura, 1983
Perhaps part of his resistance to being labeled as “ambient”–a term which, by definition, suggests something incidental and negligible–is that much of his music isn’t actually optimal background music. (I would argue that the category of “music to fall asleep to,” which Budd is frequently cited as–presumably to his chagrin–is also not necessarily background music.) I’ll go ahead and plagiarize my 2014 post about The Moon and the Melodies, which Budd made in collaboration with Cocteau Twins and which began his decades-long collaboration with Robin Guthrie. While not all of these observations apply to Pavilion, there is most certainly a slipperiness and synergy that the two records share, as do many of Budd’s other works:
It’s an uncategorizable work, one which far exceeds the sum of its parts. It’s egoless. It’s a fluid, restless record, moody and aloof–it peaks several times, ecstatically, only to retreat back into itself. Startling synergy between these masterminds means that ambient and new age fans will find a lot to love here–it’s Harold Budd, after all, and there are long stretches of huge, hulking instrumental tracks. But the record is darker than typical new age–it feels like climbing through a cavernous skeleton, and the instrumental tracks (like “Memory Gongs”) are echoing and sometimes sinister. It’s not as effusive as Cocteau Twins, and perhaps not as immediately gratifying–many tracks fade out right when you want more the most. It’s not daytime music, and it’s not background music. Clocking in at just under 40 minutes, it’s a perfect on-repeat record, folding in on itself like water.
Harold Budd with Satoshi Ashikawa, 1982
Budd began Pavilion in 1972 after returning from his “retirement from composing” with “Madrigals of the Rose Angel,” of which he said, “The entire aesthetic was an existential prettiness; not the Platonic τόκαλόν, but simply pretty: mindless, shallow, and utterly devastating.” Though the piece’s debut was at a Franciscan church in California conducted by Daniel Lentz (!), it was the piece’s subsequent live botching that led Budd to take up the piano in earnest in his mid-thirties:
Madrigals of the Rose Angel…was sent off for a public performance back East somewhere. I wasn’t there, but I got the tape and I was absolutely appalled at how they missed the whole idea. I told myself, ‘This is never going to happen again. From now on, I take full charge of any piano playing.’ That settled that.
Here’s what I wrote about The Pavilion of Dreams back in 2015:
Twinkling, lazy jazz-scapes for new agers. A dripping, humid, reactionary piece of anti-avant-garde. Budd refers to this as his magna carta. Gavin Bryars on the glockenspiel and celesta, Michael Nyman on the marimba, Brian Eno production.
To this I’d like to add that I can think of few records which can so immediately shift the feeling of the room in which they are played in the way that Pavilion does, literally within seconds. It’s the sonic equivalent of taking a few deep, elongated breaths: the pulse slows, the jaw unclenches. It’s an opiated smoke drift in which, once again, everything Budd touches feels weighted with spiritual potency. The worldless, meandering glissandos sung by Lynda Richardson, though clearly delivered in a Western classical style, start to suggest Eastern devotional drone and chant traditions. The occasional chime from the glockenspiel begins to resemble bells used in meditation. And most thrillingly, at times you can hear the creak of the harp against the floor, the crack of a knee, the scrape of a chair. When music is this willfully shapeless, rolling through space like a liquid, it becomes that much more consequential to be reminded of solid objects, human bodies in a room. Everything becomes sacred. Perhaps this is what Budd was after with his commitment to “existential prettiness” at the deliberate expense of meaning. Perhaps this is why critics and listeners still can’t help but try to pin him down with a label: it’s difficult to hear this much reverence without trying to name it in service of something.
My most recent episode of Getting Warmer for NTS Radio is an organ special. While I’m sure many of us are looking for music that’s relaxing, reassuring, or generally positive during this high-stress time, I should give you a heads up that this mix isn’t really any of those things. It does, however, feel like an appropriately hellish soundtrack to the apocalypse.
I recently had the pleasure of hearing the second piece in this mix, the Finale of Jean-Pierre Leguay’s Sonate I pour Orgue, performed live at Saint Thomas Church by Nicholas Capozzoli. As easy as it is to sometimes feel jaded about the possibility of total musical novelty, it was a truly life-changing experience to hear it in the acoustics of a cathedral, to feel it reverberating in my chest, to let it properly melt my face off. I didn’t know that organ music so deeply avant-garde and strange existed–it was easily the craziest thing I’ve ever heard.
I don’t think the internet needs another personal narrative about how this current global crisis is affecting somebody, but I will say that I’m grateful that my last concert experience for the foreseeable future was this one, seated next to a friend I’ve been missing recently, in a church full of strangers. I’m currently scrambling to get as much work as I can while it exists, but once that work dries up I hope to get back into blogging here, as I’d love to be able to share more music in this chaotic time. In the mean time, please enjoy this mix, which you can download an mp3 version of here. Sending love to all, everywhere.
Tracklist:
1. Olivier Latry – Improvisation (Trois siècles d’orgue à Notre Dame de Paris)
2. Olivier Latry – Sonate I Pour Orgue: Finale (Jean-Pierre Leguay)
4. 3. Terry Riley – A Rainbow in Curved Air
5. Jean-Pierre Leguay – Deux improvisations: No. 1, Improvisation I
6. Palestine / Coulter / Mathoul – Schlongo!!!daLUVdrone Revisited #3
7. Peter Michael Hamel – Organum Part 3 (excerpt)
8. Unknown – Toccata und Fugue d BWV 565 (J.S. Bach)
Peak dark ambient. The first of two solo records from German trance and ambient musician Thorn Hoedh, who passed away in 2003. Equally lauded as a holy grail of the genre and bemoaned as an overlooked masterpiece, Hymnvs manages to be both sprawling and claustrophobic; cinematic and lo-fi; inorganic and classical. If you’re not paying attention, these seven long-form tracks (or hymns) might appear like a flat and unchanging expanse of black tones, but a few seconds in headphones proves otherwise–there’s actually a great deal of intricate movement happening beneath the surface, so much so that tracks like “Das Geistige Universum” seem to actually evoke the nausea of being pitched around in a boat in choppy water. Elsewhere, ringing overtones and expansive, bending pitches, as on “Hoedh (Sonnenklang)” are completely sonically disorienting. There is, in short, a lot going on here.
I love the anonymity of the instrumentation–it’s frequently unclear whether we’re listening to an acoustic instrument that’s been modified, or to a synthetic interpretation of an instrument. Still, the sounds are warped around the edges in familiar ways: “Heilige (Mantra Der Rotation)” has the gape of wind instruments in a massive tunnel; other tracks feature synthetic remnants of strings, piano, horns; but always we feel a certain kind of crackling closeness that can’t simply be attributed to lo-fi production (though there is a distinct feeling of of well-worn vinyl). It’s as if the sounds have had tiny shading details painted onto them by very meticulous hands.
It seems as if listeners have consistently ascribed a deep and impenetrable melancholy to Hymnvs, and it’s true that it imparts a feeling of descent, or even of disassociation. But if listening to this record is the sensation of slowly sinking backwards into water while looking up at the receding surface, then inevitably there are beams of light penetrating the surface, sun-dappled and speckled with dust motes, which is to say that Hymnvs is flecked with joy, with optimism, as the best hymns are. For fans of The Caretaker, Gavin Bryars, William Basinski, or, uh, Wagner.
Another progressive and very beautiful collection of compositions from undersung genius Daniel Lentz. Missa Umbrarum, or “mass of shadows,” is named in part for its use of 118 “sonic shadows” in the title piece, produced using a 30 second tape delay technique. It was originally written in 1973, and a first version of “O-Ke-Wa” was written for eight voices in 1974, so I’d assume that “Postludium” was written around the same time. Though it includes a singing of the Agnus Dei, the piece explores similar tonal territory to “Lascaux,” which appears on his excellent On The Leopard Altaras well as on some later releases of Missa Umbrarum.
A mystical invocation of the Christian Last Supper, much of the titular mass employs a severe, fixated kind of devotional singing that makes me think of Geinoh Yamashirogumi, though it also includes wine glass resonance, with the pitches shifting as the singers drink. On the first repetition of a phrase, the lowest notes of the segment are played, and then the singers drink from the glasses before adding the next layer at a higher pitch. Though there are only eight voices in the piece, between this layering technique and the use of the tape delay “sonic shadows,” we eventually end up with a very large choir, cut through with the weightless ring of the glasses. Lentz has long been interested in both the sonic and aesthetic value of wine in performance–please refer to this bananas interview for more information.
The other two pieces are gentler, more pillowing explorations of vocal dialogue, the soft bubbling percussion of Native American bone rasps, and an even more expansive wine glass resonance that very much evokes a cathedral full of sound. When asked about the closing piece in an interview, Lentz had this to say:
Interviewer: “O-ke-wa (North American Eclipse),” a piece for multiple voices, drum, bone rasps and bells, is based on the O-ke-wa, the Seneca Native American dance for the dead. Ritual appears to be implicit to this 1974 piece in terms of structure and explicit in terms of performance.
Lentz: In [both versions of “O-ke-wa”], each singer is a soloist having his / her own text and melody. The melodies become the harmonies via the singers extending the notes of each of their melodies. It’s to be performed with the performers moving around the listeners, allowing individual lyrics and music to always be somewhere else when it sounds again. It is also how the original O-ke-wa dance was done in the Seneca Native American death ceremony – usually from dusk to dawn for them. The ritual element of this piece is very important to me, as it is for “Missa Umbrarum.” I am a small part Seneca, briefly a Catholic as well. The piece works best in a resonant environment.
Tracklist:
1. Michael Tanner & Alison Cotton – Masts of Rown-Tree
2. Bongwater – The Drum
3. Kraftwerk – Tanzmusik
4. Paul O’Dette, Andrew Lawrence-King and David Douglass – The Glory of the Sun
5. Palace Music – West Palm Beach
6. Julianna Barwick – Adventurer of the Family
7. Zbigniew Preisner – L’enfance
8. Richard Youngs with Alasdair Roberts ft. Donald WG Lindsay – Kinning Park
9. Sonic Boom – Ecstasy in Slow Motion
My newest episode of Getting Warmer for NTS Radio is a two hour long late summer ambient special. Long, lazy instrumentals with river sounds, crickets, cicadas, and bees. Ideal for heavy, thick weather, and for mid-day napping in it. If anyone remembers the two hour mix I made for LYL Radio awhile back, this feels like the more summery counterpart to it. You can download an mp3 version here.
Tracklist:
1. Hiroshi Yoshimura – Time After Time
2. David Casper – Green Anthem
3. Masahiro Sugaya – Straight Line Floating In The Sky
4. Roedelius – Wenn Der Südwind Weht
5. Yutaka Hirose – In The Afternoon
6. Inoyama Land – Glass Chaim
7. Haruomi Hosono – Wakamurasaki
8. Gabriel Yared – Un Coucher De Soleil Acchroche Dans Les Arbres
9. Maurice Ravel – Miroirs: III. Une Barque Sur L’ocean (Paul Crossley)
10. CV & JAB – Hot Tub
11. Virginia Astley – Summer Of Their Dreams
12. Satoshi Ashikawa – Still Park Ensemble (excerpt)
13. Ernest Hood – August Haze
14. Harold Budd & Brian Eno – A Stream With Bright Fish
15. Alice Damon – Waterfall Winds
16. Jansen / Barbieri – The Way The Light Falls
17. Yoshio Ojima – Mensis
18. Toshifumi Hinata – End Of The Summer
19. Carl Stone – Banteay Srey
20. Gervay Briot – Science
For a torrential spring. I love Ravel for his humidity and his drippiness–swerving, suffocating greens, sometimes saturated and vibrant, sometimes murky and choked with algae. It feels appropriate for this time of year in New York, with bursts of spring euphoria, violent last gasps of winter, and water.
I’m not completely sure of all of the details surrounding this collection of tracks, but as best as I can understand it, these were recorded in 1994 from a series of reproducing piano rolls made between 1913 and 1933. The rolls were mostly played by Ravel himself, with at least five of them performed in London on June 30, 1922 on a Duo-Art reproducing piano. (For context, here’s a picture of a refurbished 1929 Duo-Art Steinway with a roll in the playback mechanism.) Though this wasn’t the first time Ravel had been able to listen back to himself performing, it was one of a small handful of known instances of such “recordings,” and as I understand it, there might be some suspicion that not all of the rolls attributed to him are actually his performances. There are four tracks by other prominent pianists of the time, and just to make this even more confusing, I’m using the album art from a 1965 collection of recordings, presumably from some of the same rolls, because I can’t find the art from the 1994 collection included here.
Regardless of the details, it’s pretty special to hear this collection (which includes some of my favorite Ravel compositions) performed in a way that we can assume is more faithful to the styles in which they were originally written than many more recent recordings, and it’s even more special to imagine Ravel himself tearing through some of the more torrential moments. Happy spring!
