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 | Deep Voices 120 By 1210603825 Playlist |
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Los Angeles is still on fire. As I said this past weekend, I do not know what it is like to watch my house burn down, I do know what it is like to experience very sudden loss. Many people who have lost homes have set up GoFundMe accounts and L.A.-based publicist Judy Miller Silverman has put together a spreadsheet of links to the fundraisers for people in the music world. Consider giving to help ease the burden.
Welcome to Deep Voices. These weekly playlists and their accompanying notes and essays are always free. On the weekend, I send an additional Deep Voices just for paying subscribers. Those emails are thoughts on places where music bisects with the rest of life. Footnotes from a lifelong music lover. I wish there was a less earnest way to say it, but it's the truth. If you can afford it and you find use in Deep Voices, consider a paid subscription to Deep Voices as a way to keep this project going. Thank you.
Playlist notes: What is a Shpongle? New to the music of the absurdly named, pioneering psybient duo, it's a question I asked myself. I do not appear to be the only one wondering. In a 2020 interview, Billboard posed the same question to the group's Simon Posford. For a group whose ethos appear to be very much about achieving higher consciousness, I was surprised by the sheen of resentment in Posford's answer. "Shpongle is my band with flautist Raja Ram," he said. "Last year we sold out Red Rocks Amphitheatre in Colorado, in eight minutes. Yet nobody has seemed to have heard of us…"
What he means isn't that people haven't heard of Shpongle. You don't sell out Red Rocks in eight minutes if no one has ever heard of you. What he means is that people like me—tastemakers, critics, snobs, etc—haven't heard of Shpongle. It's not an unusual complaint, the popular artist bemoaning a lack of praise or conversation around their work. It's a cake-and-eat-it-too desire that is perhaps understandable but also makes me groan. Posford can wipe his tears with hundred dollar bills.
So, now that I've heard of them, I thought I'd turn a critical ear to Shpongle. The group's renown seems to be as much for their role as facilitators of DMT trips. Their marketing presents their events as circus-like environments with winking nods to psychedelics usage. Their success is tied to the selling of that experience, not just their music. So, taking away the bells and whistles, how does it actually sound?
In short: It sounds fine. A free floating mix of downtempo house, ambient techno, acid, and trance, and vague "world music" accents decorated with chipper flute runs. The song I included here, "Shpongle Falls," from their 1998 debut, Are You Shpongled, is good. The introduction has a crackling buildup before the song emerges with a man announces, "this is a circular vortex" and the trance keys start to agitate. Heavy The Matrix vibes. But the track takes a journey with a jazzy midsection leading into a sunny techno peak before the vortex man returns to lull everything out. It's maximalist but no parts overstay their welcome. I cannot say the same for the rest of the album, which is largely hokey. "Behind Closed Eyeballs," would be fun mixed in to a sundown rave set, but twelve minutes long is punishing. I have to admit I am pretty fond of the idea of just dropping all pretense and naming a song, "Monster Hit," but the track's dub bassline is not as entertaining as its samples of people coughing after ripping the bong. The flute is endearing, however.
Can you be this corny and successful and still be good? No, probably not. But who cares? In a different interview, Raja Ram spoke plainly about the band's mission. "We have a responsibility to get people high and happy and release something special we all can share." A noble purpose, just not one I'm interested in pursuing personally. But I did find my own version of the Shpongle experience enjoyable enough. I spent a while browsing the group's subreddit, where people were in fact releasing something special that we can all share. Many people posted art projects incorporating the mask on the cover of Are You Shpongled?, including carved pumpkins from Halloween. This 3-D printed version was especially impressive. But my favorite thing was the person who wrote about wanting to get a Shpongle tattoo. They said, with great sweetness, that, in memory of their mother, they, "Also want to incorporate a sea turtle." If I had a fan like that, one would be more than enough.
Moving on, there's some other electronic music on this week's playlist. There's a track from Sherrod Brown, better known as DJ Stingray and founder of Urban Tribe, under his one-off alias Mystic Tribe A.I. It's a sumptuous track, more slow and groovy than the taut acid of Stingray stuff. Wrecked Lightship is similarly slow but not as liquidlike, with heavy drums and wobbly keys. ESP has a really light touch, a lot of soft pad work and sparkly synths. Great background music. "Insel 2000" from Youandewan is an undeniable delight, a chipper bit of techno that I Shazam'd at the coffee shop last week. I've written here and elsewhere about Dot Allison and her group One Dove. If you've not listened to that group's sole LP, 1993's monumental Morning Dove White, definitely queue that up. Allison has a new group, a duo with Brian Jonestown Massacre's Anton Newcombe called All Seeing Dolls. They have an album out in February and late last year released a two-song single. "That's Amazing Grace" is fantastic. It's a dusky, dreamy song, with Allison's drifting away as she sings, "disintegrate in technicolor." I hesitate to use this word, lest I scare you away, but it feels like "mature" music. It's shoegaze as classic rock, expertly produced and performed. It doesn't have the adventure of One Dove, but part of that band's wildness came from them being young and doing a lot of drugs. Three decades later, Allison is making music powered by the ease you gain from experience. It's a different way of feeling free.
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