My latest mix for NTS Radio is a chilly, moody descent into winter: minimalist avant-garde, icy synths, a David Sylvian sandwich, echoey whistles, and another surprise Bono cameo. I hope you like it–and if you do, you can download an mp3 version here.
Tracklist:
1. David Sylvian – Preparations For A Journey
2. Dory Previn – Mama Mama Comfort Me
3. Muslimgauze – Sapere Aude
4. Viola Renea – Chariot of Palace
5. Mabe Fratti ft. Claire Rousay – Hacia el Vacío
6. Edson Natale – Nina Maika
7. Lucille Starr – Wooden Heart
8. Larry Chernicoff – Woodstock, New York
9. Svitlana Nianio & Alexander Yurchencko – Prologue
10. Unknown Artist – Siciliana (comp. Ottorino Respighi)
11. Daniel Lentz – Midnight White
12. Uakti – Montanha
13. John Cale – Please
14. Chas Smith – October ’68
15. Osnabrücker Jugendchor – Tibi Soli (comp. Gregorio Allegri)
16. Passengers – A Different Kind of Blue / Beach Sequence
17. David Sylvian – Silver Moon Over Sleeping Steeples
Here’s my most recent episode of Getting Warmer for NTS Radio–pleased to realize that it’s my 48th episode, meaning that this show recently turned four years old. Sharing this show has, in all sincerity, been one of the most rewarding and pleasurable things I’ve ever done, so I’m grateful to all who have listened.
As I was putting this mix together I was thinking about the million people we’ve lost to COVID-19, a fifth of whom were Americans. Many of them died alone, with no family or friends present, and many of them still haven’t yet been given funerals because of travel or safety restrictions. Here in America, there has been no national mourning, reckoning, or even acknowledgment of what we’ve lost. Our president trivializes the disease and its impacts, and he belittles and dismisses the 210,000 lives we’ve lost to it, every day. It feels incredibly difficult to move through collective grief when our leadership has not only learned nothing from its mistakes but is actively denying that mistakes were ever made or are still being made.
This is my dedication to those who’ve died and to those who loved them: music that, to me, feels otherworldly, reverent, and resonant with the gravity of loss. It’s mostly Russian choral music, which I love for its dark, watery awe, though it there are also a few moments of Japanese medieval futurism. It also includes two of my favorite choral pieces, Rachmaninoff’s “Bogoroditse Devo” from his All-Night Vigil and a choral adaptation of Bach’s “Komm Süsser Tod.” I hope you enjoy it–you can download an mp3 version here. Sending love, and thanks as always for being here 💙
Tracklist:
1. Yoko Kanno – Aqua (Cello Version)
2. The USSR Ministry Of Culture Chamber Choir – Hymn Of The Cherubim (Excerpt) (Comp. Tchaikovsky)
3. Osnabrücker Jugendchor – Amplius (Comp. Gregorio Allegri)
4. This Mortal Coil – Song To The Siren
5. MDR Rundfunkchor – Bogoroditse Devo (All-Night Vigil, Op. 37 “Vespers”) (Comp. Rachmaninoff)
6. Erik Westberg Vocal Ensemble – Komm Süsser Tod (Come, Sweet Death) (Comp. Bach)
7. Yoko Kanno – Aqua
8. St. Petersburg Chamber Choir – Chorale (Comp. Josef Ketchakhmadze)
9. Bulgarian State Radio & Television Mixed Choir – I Have Chosen The Blissful (Comp. Alexander Gretchaninov)
10. Geinoh Yamashirogumi – Falling As Flowers Do – Dying A Glorious Death
11. Choir of King’s College – Nyne Otpushchayeshi (Nunc Dimittis) (All-Night Vigil, Op. 37 “Vespers”) (Comp. Rachmaninoff)
12. St. Petersburg Chamber Choir – Alleluia, Behold The Bridegroom (Anonymous)
13. The Cambridge Singers – Libera Nos, Salva Nos (Comp. John Sheppard)
14. Unknown – Russian Cathedral Bells
Here’s my most recent episode of Getting Warmer for NTS Radio. It’s two hours of late-summer ambient and ambient-adjacent sounds, meant to capture the hazy, humid, golden quality of August and September, featuring field recordings, sunbeams, and bugs. It’s ideal for mid-day napping. (It’s also kind of a sequel to this mix from two Augusts ago, if you’re curious!) A modified one hour version of this was broadcast live on the air last week, so this extended two hour version is a director’s cut of sorts. Thanks as always for listening and being here; I hope this can serve as a moment of quiet in what, to me, feels like a very loud time. You can download an mp3 version here.
Tracklist:
1. Richard Burmer – Riverbend
2. Jean C. Roché – Nightingales: In A Waste Ground Beside A Stream In Provence, June
3. CFCF – Lighthouse On Chatham Sound
4. Finis Africæ – Ceremonia Màgica En El Estanque (Magical Ceremony In The Pond)
5. Elicoide – Mitochondria
6. Takashi Kokubo – 満月の木陰
7. Notte & Bush – Wake Up In Baby’s Room
8. Steven Halpern & Daniel Kobialka – Pastorale
9. Toshifumi Hinata – ミッドサマー・ナイト (Midsummer Night)
10. Hiroshi Yoshimura – Green Shower
11. The Durutti Column – Vino Della Casa Bianco
12. Susan Mazer & Dallas Smith – Kalimbo
13. Haruomi Hosono – Wakamurasaki
14. Joanna Brouk – The Space Between (Excerpt)
15. Goddess In The Morning – 14
16. Virginia Astley – It’s Too Hot To Sleep
17. Constance Demby – Om Mani Padme Hum
18. Michael Stearns – As The Earth Kissed The Moon (Excerpt)
19. Ghostwriters – Slow Blue In Horizontal
Here’s my newest episode of Getting Warmer for NTS Radio, also marking my show being three years old! I tried to get slightly out of my wheelhouse with this one and be a little braver about mixing genres and moods, but it still feels very airy and spacey and summery to me. I hope you like it. Mp3 download is here if you’d like it. Flyer image by Eric Epstein.
Tracklist:
1. Sandy Salisbury – Come Softly
2. MJ Lallo – Before Brazil
3. Goddess in the Morning – Ucraine
4. UCC Harlo – Ceres
5. Yumi Murata – TOKIの音
6. CFCF – Closed Space
7. Enno Velthuys – In the Royal Woods
8. Annie Haslam – If I Loved You
9. Kissing the Pink – How Can I Live
10. Mouth Music – Hoireann O
11. Matt Bianco – Half A Minute
12. Masashi Kitamura + Phonogenix – ヴァリエイション・III
13. All In One – Rich Man, Poor Man
14. Sth Notional – Yawn Yawn Yawn
15. Björk – Come To Me
Another favorite collection of compositions by Saint Hildegard von Bingen (1098 – 17 September 1179), a German Benedictine abbess, writer, composer, philosopher, poet, doctor, visionary, Christian mystic, and polymath. She founded the practice of scientific natural history in Germany, lived to the age of 81 at a time when the life expectancy was early 40s at best, and wrote the oldest surviving morality play (sometimes called the first musical drama). Despite having no formal musical training, she was responsible for some of the most hauntingly beautiful and enduring music to come out of medieval Catholicism. Her compositions broke many of the existing conventions of plainchant, using extremes of register, dramatic leaps of pitch, melismas and flourishes to express rhapsodic, overflowing emotion.
Canticles of Ecstasy is performed by the venerable early music ensembleSequentia, who have been active since 1977 and are known for contributing original research about the music that they study and perform. While Feather on the Breath of God featured the organistrum (aka hurdy-gurdy) drone on several tracks, Canticles of Ecstasy also includes gorgeous medieval harp and medieval fiddle arrangements. It’s also exclusively female voices, both solo and ensemble (#nunsonly). It’s also…profoundly beautiful? And it’s an ideal too-cold-to-leave-the-house shut-in soundtrack.
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.
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.”
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
Another dear favorite from Penguin Cafe Orchestra, a project spearheaded by UK-born composer and musician Simon Jeffes. Jeffes saw PCO as the ongoing soundtrack to a dream he had had while suffering from food poisoning in the south of France, as well as a vessel through which to explore his interest in “world” folk music, particularly African percussion. The project that didn’t exactly suffer from under-exposure, if their dozens of commercial song placements are any indication. Still, I think the music very much belongs here. Plenty of ink has already been spilled by much more knowledgeable people about the group, so without attempting to poorly explain what makes this music great, I’ll say that what I love about this record, as with much of PCO’s catalogue, is the way it challenges and subverts what background music is and what it can do.
Though the exuberant “Music From A Found Harmonium,” named after the discarded pump organ upon which it was composed that Jeffes found in an alleyway in Japan, is easily the record’s most famous track, I’m a huge sucker for more pared back moments like “Prelude & Yodel,” which milks little more than three string instruments for far more than the sum of their parts; and the heartbreaking “Isle Of View (Music For Helicopter Pilots).” Elsewhere are hints of reggae (“Music by Numbers”); baroque, as per usual (“Sheep Dip”); and the perfect Latin jazz riff “Heartwind,” co-written by none other than Ryuichi Sakamoto. Lofty, nostalgic, and unabashedly sentimental, but with enough warmth and playfulness to keep it precise and never saccharine. Razor sharp and meticulous musicianship from a group of musicians who, by this time, had fully locked into the ethos of what they were doing and how best to play with each other. I hope you have a great time with this.
Another one from the understatedly brilliant Soichiro Suzuki, aka World Standard. This is a completely different beast from the last of his records that I posted–it’s effectively lyricless, and is less a pop record than it is a somewhat anonymous amalgam of different folk traditions (though there’s plenty of Japanese folk in here). Hosono provides production and sounds; Hosono would later go on to release Soichiro Suzuki’s also excellent World Standard II on his then new FOA label.
This record is deceptive, heartbeaking, and again, understated–I think I probably heard it two or three times before I properly listened to it. It doesn’t command attention, but once it gets its hooks in you, they’re stuck. A slew of string instruments from all over, very tasteful percussion, and gorgeous wordless vocal layering courtesy of Pizzicato V (!) and Sandii (!). Alternately playful (opener “太陽とダァリヤ,” which, in perfect Hosono form, has an abrupt Beach Boys-esque reverb vocal harmony breakdown), moody (“逝ける王女のためのパヴァーヌ” is an appropriately cinematic version of Ravel‘s “Pavane pour une infante défunte”), and deeply emotive (“水夫たちの歌声” has left me in tears a few times). There’s something reminiscent of Penguin Café Orchestra–the music is pastoral and very evocative, but it’s not totally clear of where or what, and it feels oddly timeless. Weightless and heavy-hitting. If it’s for you, it’s definitely for you.
