Issue #11 ~ Oct 2021
Issue #11 ~ Oct 2021
Woulda Picked Something More Debonair
As I bide my time until the next paid gig, I’ve been working on this lil’ passion project and reading Having And Being Had by Eula Biss. It’s a wonderful book. A gentle-yet-incisive meditation on the emotional experiences of living within capitalism. A chapter on the idea of consumption really struck me, so I thought to share an excerpt here:
“A metaphor is all it really is,” David Graeber writes. He means consumption, which was once the name for a wasting disease, and is now the word anthropologists use for almost everything we do outside of work-- eating, shopping, reading, listening to music. Consume, he notes, is from the Latin consumere, meaning “to seize or take over completely.” A person might consume food or be consumed by rage. In its earliest usage, consumption always implied destruction…
What is destroyed when we think of ourselves as consumers, Graeber suggests, is the possibility that we might be doing something productive outside of work.
click on the covers to listen or go your own way ~~
Ahmed Ag Kaedy - Alkaline Kidale (2019)
Over the last decade, awareness around the desert blues of North/Western Africa has exploded. The first time I encountered it was through Wallahi Le Zein!, a compilation of raw-as-hell, blown-out scorchers from Mauritania that I was admittedly not quite ready for upon release in 2010. In the intervening years, acts like Mdou Moctor and Tinariwen have introduced a more polished modernized Tuareg rock music to international audiences. The music on Alkaline Kidale, by contrast, returns to the roots of Tuareg guitar music as a political folk movement of the 1980s. It’s a somber collection of songs calling for peace and unification amidst the ongoing strife of civil war in Mali. The instrumentation is bare and intimate, Ag Kaedy’s vocals plaintive and heartfelt.
Shelley Short - Pacific City (2017)
I’ve been carrying this album around in my pocket for a couple years. Apart from my partner and kid (who hear it basically every day this time of year), I don’t know anyone else familiar with it. Pacific City is an unassuming folk record of great subtlety. If you can imagine a fairy tale character by the same name of the artist in question, then picture her strolling through an Oregon forest, wandering a field plotted with valley tassels, and eventually arriving at the edges of a rugged coastline where she encounters noted West Coast composer and Erased Tapes stalwart Peter Broderick. It’s a spellbinding comfort.
Mary Lou Williams - Mary Lou Williams (1964)
I was floored the first time I heard ‘St. Martin de Porres’, the opening track of this absolutely vital jazz record. Instead of yammering on here, I’m going to encourage you to read this short NPR piece called Shocking Omissions: Mary Lou Williams' Choral Masterpiece. It includes many, many incredible biographical and contextual elucidations. And a quote from Duke Ellington saying, “Mary Lou Williams is perpetually contemporary. She’s like soul on soul.”
Larry Chernicoff - Gallery Of Air (1983)
When Incidental Music reissued this LP from the upstate NY composer + vibraphonist in 2018, the press release said that Chernicoff’s “ensemble delivers both a high level of kinetic energy and moments of meditative peace, while holding your attention with completely accessible sounds”. Which is all well and good and true. But for me, what sets this music apart from others’ of a similar ilk is that it’s not dramatic, it’s not heady, it’s not romantic, it’s not pensive: it’s just really fucking nerdy. Like, it ~sounds~ nerdy in a very delightful way. If this doesn’t entice you, at the very least I implore you to check out the artist photo on the Bandcamp page so you can get an eyeful of the adorable, beaming nerds who couldn’t possibly be happier than when they’d wrapped recording for this album.
billy woods & Kenny Segal - Hiding Places (2019)
On paper, most things about this quote-unquote rap rock LP don’t suggest ‘career breakthrough’ or ‘evocation of emotional nuance through social commentary on par with Steinbeck’ but… here we are. For a specific set of underground hip-hop fans, the blur-faced emcee known as billy woods (small caps) was already a G.O.A.T. when Hiding Places dropped. For the rest of us, who’ve seen his star shine bright over the last three years, this album was an expertly chucked knuckle-ball. In the words of producer Kenny Segal, “People have been trying to combine rock tropes into hip hop since the 80s often with some pretty disastrously wack results. Once I got it in my head that I wanted to incorporate distorted guitars and psych rock timbres into this album's sound I was definitely conscious of that perilous legacy and hopefully was able to add something new to that conversation.” What Segal and woods ended up adding to that legacy is, IMHO, one of the best hip-hop albums of the last 20 years. Just listen to the album’s cinematic halfway mark, ‘A Day In A Week In A Year’, cranked in headphones with your eyes closed. Now tell me woods’ images don’t give you goosepimples.
Amália Rodrigues - The Art Of Amália Rodrigues (1952 - 1970)
Amália Rodrigues aka Rainha Do Fado (The Queen Of Portuguese Fado) began her career in her teens at the very tail end of the 1930s. It wasn’t long before she was well-enough-known regionally to be receiving scathing reviews from fado purists as an artist who was wantenly deforming their precious musical traditions. The term fado stems from the Latin fatum which means roughly ‘fate’, ‘death’ and/or ‘utterance’. That alone should give you a good foothold into understanding the mood of this gripping music. Fast forward a decade or two, three, four and Rodrigues is now effectively a classical monument to the music, having redefined and subsequently become fado incarnate. *Liner Note: I learned of Rodrigues through this totally zoned set of modern reimaginings of her work from 2020, which I covered in the very first edition of this newsletter.
Dead Moon - Stranded In The Mystery Zone (1991)
The purest punk rawk from anywhere. But specifically: the centre of nowhere. Deadbeat reflections and dirt mound, mother lovin’ politics. RIP Dead Moon. Happy Halloweeeeen suckers!! 🎃 👻 🧙♀️🐺
I’m super interested in feedback / dialogue / suggestions. If you have ideas about the newsletter, want to share music with me, have specific questions / requests, please don’t hesitate to get in touch. And please: share this newsletter with a pal if you feel so inspired!
Yrs.,
Andrew P.
andrewdanielpatterson [at] gmail [dot] com