Weekly Dance Break: Drop (Chloe x Halle)

This duo has been getting a lot of love on social media from the Knowles sisters and Willow Smith, bona-fide starmakers, and with good reason. Their sound is unique, haunting, and unforgettable.

 

 

Artist Spotlight: Leggy

By B.C.

Leggy is a dreamy surf rock/lush punk trio from Cincinnati, Ohio, all about friendship, chill vibes and inclusive ‘posi’ rock ‘n’ roll with a little party sprinkled in. They are currently on tour in the UK with legendary all-female Japanese pop punk group Shonen Knife, whose 90s alt prowess is in the same ranks as Nirvana, The Ramones and Sonic Youth. Leggy is on the rise too, having been featured in publications such as Noisey and Stereogum, and quickly gaining a fan base far beyond its home circles. We spoke with the members while they are on tour:

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Weekly Dance Break: Blue Horizon (Cokejazz and Hoody)

On tap this week: a korean track full of langurous, relaxing vocals and dreamy scenery. This is the song that would play at the end of that movie starring you and your friends, coming of age under the summer sun, as you drive off into the horizon.

Give it a listen, give it a watch, take a deep breath. 

Big Sound Saturdays: Sonic Zoo Vol. 2!

One very great thing about crafting a “sonic zoo” of old-time Americana is the unpredictable ways that animal songs flit between hyper-realism, innuendo, religiosity, and symbology—so convoluted that you can’t even begin to pull the song apart. O what a tangled web we weave:

Big Sound Saturdays: E Mama Ea (Old-Time Women’s Voices)

I do feel like I’ve tempted fate too long, shying away from the prewar revenants that I love so much, so this mix sits squarely between 1916 and, ok, a little post-war, 1950. E Mama Ea is a mix dedicated to the fact that while “female musicians” is emphatically not a genre, the dexterity, tremor, and occasional audacity of the metaphoric and actual female voice is always, emphatically, worth celebrating.

As is my wont, these songs are mostly American, gospel, blues, and game song-centric. “Rolled and Tumbled” is Rose Hemphill’s rendition of a well-worn delta blues later popularized by fellow Mississippi resident Muddy Waters, recorded here in 1959 by Alan Lomax in the same session that first captured the voice of Mississippi Fred McDowell. The penultimate track, a prewar white gospel number also recorded by Alan Lomax and named, here, “The Airplane Ride”—“The Heavenly Aeroplane” elsewhere—is a wonky paen to God and technology that calls out to the Nugrape Twins’ even wonkier “There’s A City Built Of Mansions,” an ode to the difficulty of thinking through largesse without thinking through capitalism.

And then, the opposite, A.C. Forehand and the delightfully-named Blind Mamie Forehand’s “Honey In The Rock,” sotto voce with triangle. Washboard classic “Worried Jailhouse Blues,” from the voice who immortalized “Some Cold, Rainey Day,” the great Bertha “Chippie” Hill. The robust and quite honestly, kinda sonically phallic talking tuba call-and-response, Sharlie English’s “Tuba Lawdy Blues.” The sweet soft hand-game song, “Little Girl, Little Girl,” recorded here in 1936. Parchman Farm inmate Mary James’ foot-stomping invective, “Make The Devil Leave Me Alone,” backed by a chorus of prisoners in 1939 and collected by the unduly obscure Rosetta Reitz on her Rosetta Records label roughly forty years later.

I’m pleasantly surprised at how intimately these songs sing together, Cleoma Breaux’s Cajun rendering of “When You Wish Upon A Star:” “It’s A Sin To Tell A Lie,” recorded thirteen years before Disney was to release Cinderella, out of Lata Mageshkar and Saraswati Rane’s performance of “Jab Dil Ko Satawe Gham,” which I pulled directly from Sargam, an Indian film from the year 1950. We hear from hot jazz bandleader Thelma Terry (and her Playboys!) two songs after the Turkish “Soyledi Yok Yok,” sung by Neriman Altindag (with both released on separate albums by the deeply hip label Dust-to-Digital). I mined the Ethiopiques archive for Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrau’s “Homesickness,” and Florida Atlantic University’s amazing Judaica Sound Archives 78-rpm Sound Collection for turn of the century New York Metropolitan Opera singer Sophie Braslau’s “I Love You Truly.” And still, at the beginning, the piercing “Light In The Valley,” by ladies L. Reed and T.A. Duncans, followed by the perplexing and lovely “E Mama Ea.”

“E Mama Ea” was recorded by Mme. Riviere’s Hawaiians to a 78 rpm disc before the year 1948. Because a prewar Hawaiian music discography doesn’t seem to exist, I can’t find the year of the recording, the label, or the location. I do know that it was first picked up in 1981 by the now-obscure Folklyric imprint, then again by Portland-local Mississippi Records for “I Don’t Feel At Home in This World Anymore” in 2007. Less obscure—though not by much— than the recording details is Madame Riviere, a French woman who formed a band with Hawaiian steel guitarist Tau Moe and his wife, Rose, when she was sent to study in still French-colonized Tahiti in the 1920s. “Ea,” from what I can tell, is multiply-signifying, political at heart: Hawaiian sovereignty, but also breath, respiration, spirit, and rising up, becoming erect and powerful. I wonder if Mme Riviere, a colonizer whose face is lost to us, knew it?

Big Sound Saturdays: Working For the Man

It’s apt that Working for the Man is out today, a Saturday, because it was on a Saturday that Labor Day was originally celebrated. Actually, Labor Day started on Saturday, May 1st, 1886—“May Day,” “International Worker’s Day”—as a strike, in demand of an 8-hour work day.

Big Sound Saturdays: Sonic Zoo pt. 1

When the Beach Boys recorded the dense, meticulous, and perpetually indefinable Pet Sounds in the period between July of 1965 and April of 1966, recording technicians captured front man and musical ingénue Brian Wilson asking studio engineer Chuck Britz to add to the dog-whistles, organs, double-cellos, and coca-cola cans, a horse:

“Hey, Chuck, is it possible we can bring a horse in here without…if we don’t screw everything up?…Honest to God, now, the horse is tame and everything!”

Brian Wilson’s startling request is set, amongst other surviving clips from the now colloquially-named “Dog Barking Sessions,” to the tune of his two dogs, Banana and Louie, barking excitedly. His request didn’t make the cut on Pet Sounds, but the same two dogs did make it onto the end of “Caroline, No,” one of two singles released before the album itself.

Incorporating the incidental aura of his soundscape into his music is par for the course in Brian Wilson’s oeuvre, but the dogs themselves are specific for their expert ears—lyricist, singer, and Beach Boys co-founder Mike Love, in fact, was said to call Wilson “dog-ears” for their shocking sensitivity. We might consider, with this relationship of happy accident in mind, what the relationship between our “pets” and our “sounds” actually is.

Animals have been imitated in musical compositions for years. I think immediately of Camille Saint-Saens’ Carnival of the Animals from 1886, though I’m sure that in vaudeville, minstrelsy, and other popular entertainments, the tradition is much older. Catalyzed at least in part by John Cage’s “4’33” (four minutes and thirty-three seconds of any combination of instruments resting, silent, while the intended audience listens to the ambient noise of their surroundings), the inclusion of animal sounds in rock and roll might similarly serve to blur the distinction between art and the everyday, drawing attention to the textured sounds of the recording environment.

It might also, a la Donna Haraway, query the foundational relationship between human and animal. Since A Cyborg Manifesto, Haraway has expanded her conversation about the intersection of human and technology in this, our technofuture, to one that considers our inter-species relationship with dogs. Understanding our relationship to dogs, for Haraway, helps us to understand our ethical relationship to our natural environment. How, then, do we listen to, and hear, this nature, and how does it talk back?

Obviously, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’ rapturous “Alligator Wine” isn’t an intentional contribution to zoomusicology (an entire discipline about inter-species musical collaboration!). The endless stream of musical innuendo—rep’d here most overtly by Hasil Adkins’ nasty proto-punk “Chicken Walk” (an innuendo I started to explore in C-H-I-C-K-E-N, Vol. 1), PJ Harvey’s “Snake,” and the Cramps’ “Swing the Big Eyed Rabbit”—is similarly irreverent. Still, the sheer breadth of songs about animals does point to our fascination with animal soundings and symbologies. What is that freaky, low-down “Camel Walk”? What makes the “Milk Cow Blues,” recorded live, here, by the Kinks for their BBC Sessions in 1965, so persistently coverable? How amazing is it that Bikini Kill wrote a song about female self-sufficiency called “Star Fish”?

I’m very into all the tunes on this, the first volume of Sonic Zoo. It’s a loud, weirdo Noah’s Ark, and each song treats its animals differently. Come for Moondog, Daniel Johnston, King Kahn & BBQ and Fred Neil, leave with the dogs, cats, star fish, regular fish, cow, chicken, rabbit, camel, alligator, snake, rat, duck, dolphin. All with Wayne Coyne signing us off: “I thought I’d free the animals all locked up at the zoo.” An ongoing series of animals unchained! 

Big Sound Saturdays: Hot Meat (Songs To Bake To)

 

 

I guess it’s probably true that even if there are things in the world that are inherent goods, weather isn’t one of them. Winter people confuse me and I don’t want to talk about it. Fall and spring people make sense, opinion-wise, but the whole thing seems ultimately kinda milktoast; why not just go for it? I’m for the summer, and not just its beginning—the long haul, California’s dry desert heat, New York’s simmering trash swamp, Virginia when it feels like the literal surface of the sun. I like that body-bake feeling that makes you want to lie down and toast forever in the sun rays, I never want it to end!

 

Finding the best jams for deep summer proved trickier than I thought it’d be. No formula for vibes, I guess. Inspired by my best friend in California, who covers herself in literal olive oil when we lay coast-side and bakes her body like a big pasta, by ghost towns swimming in desert people and ants, swampy crocodiles and livid punk rock, noble pups panting in the sun, lazy Sundays and The Hawaiian Craze, I couldn’t decide on a single sound so I put them all together. Riding into the sun with Lou Reed (no truer words than “it’s hard to live in the city”), Hot Meat comes from Bjork’s early punk band The SugarCubes’ eponymous title—this mix is truly of Songs To Bake To.

 

Listen here, then, for Shadow Music from Thailand, Hawaiian tunes from Kalama’s Quartet, Kenyan guitar jams from the Mombasa Swingsters and country guitar twangs from Speedy West, Cambodian Bodega Pop from Touch Saly, soul-crushing reggae from the Soulettes, heavy rock from Pavement and swamp pop from Rod Bernard and Myron Lee & the Caddies. Hot jazz from the Nite Owls! Detroit R&B! Kurt Vile! The late and ever-great Townes Van Zandt! In truth, this mix is a little bit of an excuse to make public once more TVZ’s gut-wrenching and ever-so-small “Don’t Let the Sunshine Fool Ya,” but Hot Meat, in its thrust for sounding deep summer, sings the opposite, too. I kinda like getting duped by the summer. Maybe it’s a good exercise in letting yourself go.

 

 

 

Weekly Dance Break: First Love / Late Spring (Mitski)

Sometimes I turn off my kpop (sometimes) and listen to things my friends recommend. This time, it’s indie-rocker Mitski, by way of my dear M’s recommendation. Mitski’s voice makes you feel like the protagonist of an indie romance, but not, like, a dumb or cheesy one (no manic pixie dream girls here). Step light through the streets of Portland or Brooklyn or Austin to this.

Big Sound Saturdays: Strange Love

When I was a teenager I dated a boy who put his pillow in the freezer so we could stay cool when we snuck into his bed in the California summer. In the beginning of college, a guy who spent his spare time tightrope walking and hanging with his dad’s pets. After him, one with a shadow mustache who’d lean against his junked-up soil-brown car and smoke a cigarette in plain view of my parents, which, honestly, still “gets” me. A guy who projected PBS’s live reenactment documentary about the Carter Family across the entire face of a ten-story building. A sweet man, now, who prowls like a wolf and sleeps like a caterpillar. There are through-lines in my romances, but they’re mostly wildly different from each other. Even my woozy nervy feeling morphs. Lately, I’ve been feeling it big enough to make a mix that sounds the thick of it.