ephemera

This album has really been a jolt for me, and has had me rethinking my whole listening situation. God, where to start.

It’s such a soundy record. It reminds me of how little time and space I have carved out in my life right now for focused hi-fi listening. A lot of my listening time is a) while I’m working on stuff at my desk (high fidelity, but half attention), or b) while I’m on my way somewhere (full attention, but earbuds intermittently drowned out by the city unless I’m listening to pop or band music at near max volume). So like, I don’t really have a lot of time or space right now to just luxuriate in music like this. It’s fucked up.

There’s an anxiety and a neurotic urgency in knowing this and stumbling on a record that has all the signifiers of something I know I’d be really into. It’s spare, weird, ambiguous, dark, sensual, both a cold wind and the glow of a night out. I see reviewers mention Photek as a touch point—which, yes, but somehow torn and smeared, made strange.

Part of me keeps reaching for this record over the past weeks just because I haven’t really fallen for a whole album—not really—in a long minute. I’d really like to. My listening habits have been all breadth and no depth these past few years. Part of the deal with grownup life I guess. Fuck that!

A unique and delightful and really very wholesome recording of some old melodies and tunes for the kantele, a Finnish zither instrument. In 1916, a folk music researcher set out to record Teppana Jänis, a blind kantele player in his 60s who supported himself by playing at dances, schools, and by going door to door. Those sessions yielded 14 wax cylinders and 22 transcriptions.

By modern standards, wax cylinders are pretty unlistenable, sending the music they’re storing into a kind of dormancy. So another kantele player, Arja Kastinen, gathered the recordings and transcriptions, learned the tunes, and put together an album that weaves together the original recordings with her own from 2020.

What you hear in these tracks is the songs themselves flipping back and forth between a modern recording and one from a hundred years ago—same tempo, key, dynamics, etc. Sometimes the two recordings will even play on top of each other for a bit before one or the other takes the foreground again. It’s a really beautiful and profound effect. I can play this album over and over.

listen on bandcamp

Given the explosion of interest in recent years of composers writing for church organs, one throughline in most of the recordings I’ve heard is a kind of stern, sound designy, “new music” vibe. Do not get me wrong, I love it. And, I understand: This instrument carries some of the heftiest cultural weight than an instrument can. Messing around with it in a modern, secular context can require some drastic reframing, not just in the writing itself, but even in the recording techniques—our traditional perception of the sound of this instrument is the actual literal sound of whatever church it’s built into. To write music that is no longer toward God feels like a wrenching of the instrument from its spiritual and literal home. (Fine by me, but it is what is.)

So, it’s nice to hear something that feels like it’s taking a different direction with that reframing, that assumes it as a starting point, even. This album, out on Touch, feels like it sits well on the shelf next to Azusa Plane, Sigur Rós, Celer. It is deeply sweet music, the kind that I imagine being somewhat at odds with the new minimalists and sound artists. Never one to refuse dessert, I really dig this record.

listen on bandcamp

I’m halfway through this book now. I first encountered this story via the 2020 film adaptation, which I recommend very highly. (It’s the only full-length directed by Jóhann Jóhannsson, who you know as the score composer for Mandy and Arrival). The movie was adapted from a 1930 British novel, written as a 250 page future-history book spanning hundreds of millions of years. Its first pages recounting the 20th and 21st centuries are delicious for what the author can’t know will happen (WWII, computers). Thereafter it’s delightful for it’s total lack of grounding in anything other than deep time. You turn the page and he spends scarcely a full breath on the ends of cities, continents, species of mankind. I love how humanity as a whole is treated as the central character, going through rise and fall after rise and fall. This book is pure flight.

wikipedia

If you don’t know Nils from Sleepytime Gorilla Museum and Idiot Flesh, you are in for a treat diving into that world. Sleepytime has been back for a minute now and the live situation has always been top tier. But meanwhile, Nils has been plugging away at a broadcasting project of his own, named after an Idiot Flesh album from the early 90s: The Nothing Show.

I’ve been listening through the shows in order – a mixture of biography & oldhead tales, interviews with friends who do cool things & think cool thoughts, and readings from his favorite books (Foucault, Lispector, Burroughs, et. al.). As gifted an orator as he is a composer and singer, each episode is a joy, and I find myself reaching for my pen and notebook several times per episode, eager to garden the page myself. Definitely check out the Patreon.

This was a little minute ago now but seeing Charles Curtis play was a delight. Like probably many others, Curtis’ solo cello work hit my radar through his work with Éliane Radigue and the 2LP set that Saltern put out in 2020. (Come to think of it that album may be how I was put on to Terry Jennings as well, whose tunes I’ve been deeply enamored with for some years now.) Anyway the show was great. It was one of the last hot nights of the summer, and the audience was packed into what looked like a sculptor’s studio near Washington Square Park. The program was Feldman, Wolff, Lucier’s Glacier, and Alison Knowles’ Rice and Beans for Charles Curtis. The Lucier piece stood out for me (one twenty minute glissando, let’s fucking GO), and I see there’s a nice video of him playing this piece a decade ago, but obviously seeing it on a screen surrounded by a bunch of distracting shit is way different than sweating it out in silence with a sold out room full of people. A gift.

Altogether, these findings are leading us to an extraordinary conclusion: Whales may possess a communication system more intricate than our own, one that possibly predates human language by tens of millions of years.

Could do without the “guys, give AI a chance” stuff, but it’s fun to learn of Project CETI‘s existence.

ny times / archive.ph

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