Outside the Honky Tonk Dream Syndicate, Vol. 2
featuring Jim O'Rourke, Talk Talk, Jay Glass Dubs & more
Welcome back to my monthly newsletter delving into the music I’m playing on my Beloved radio show Honky Tonk Dream House. We’ve got a new name now (shoutout to Tony Conrad & Faust, both of whom will surely be featured on this show some time in the future), which is great because I was really dreading having to think of a new name for every mix I did. This mix is a combination of highlights from some of my all time favorite albums alongside some newer stuff that I’ve been really excited about.
Steve Eliovson & Colin Walcott - Venice
I found out about this record through a tweet by Frozen Reeds, whom I interviewed for my Roland Kayn article last year and whose music recommendations, particularly on matters related to ECM, never disappoint. Colin Walcott, who played percussion and sitar, was a somewhat ubiquitous figure on ECM, putting out a number of classic albums as a group leader and as a member of Codona alongside Don Cherry and Naná Vasconcelos. In contrast, South African-born guitarist Steve Eliovson was a completely obscure and elusive figure. Eliovson recorded Dawn Dance after sending a demo to ECM and getting signed to a recording contract. Apparently a second album was lined up, but after a serious leg injury Eliovson disappeared from music entirely. The only other thing I can confirm about him is that he passed away a few years ago. Subsequently, Dawn Dance has always been a somewhat overlooked album, which is a shame because it’s fucking brilliant. Eliovson is an endlessly dazzling guitar player, and the interplay between him and Walcott is phenomenal. Definitely seek this one out.
Jim O’Rourke - And I’m Singing
It’s crazy to me that, after having hosted this show for half a year now, I haven’t played anything by Jim O’Rourke, who is probably the musician that’s had the greatest influence on me as a listener. A good chunk of the music on this show comes from artists whom I might not have been aware of had I not read somewhere that Jim was a fan. More than perhaps any other musician in the experimental orbit, Jim’s discography calls to mind that of Bowie or Miles Davis in the amount of different phases it encompasses; there’s his early tape music, his work as a guitar improviser, his famous Drag City releases, and, today, the ongoing Steamroom series. I’m Happy, and I’m Singing, and 1, 2, 3, 4 comes from a period in which Jim was a frequent collaborator of Peter Rehberg and Christian Fennesz, creating laptop glitch music that, in retrospect, threw down the gauntlet for much of the experimental/computer music to come in following decades. This particular track could have easily been released yesterday and no one would bat an eye; I can hear a lot of this record in recent releases by labels such as Moon Glyph and Hausu Mountain, for example.
Talk Talk - After the Flood
Considering that Talk Talk’s Laughing Stock is one of the most lauded and influential albums of its time, and that a lot has been written about it already, I’ll do my best to not say anything that hasn’t already been said. I first heard it when I was only just becoming a music obsessive, and I understood that this, and its predecessor Spirit of Eden, were Important Albums. Still, I had trouble picturing the music in my head just from reading about it, and so I didn’t really know what to expect when I first gave it a listen. To say it completely changed the way I understood music would be an understatement, and it’s been one of my desert island discs ever since then. Having listened to it a million times since then, and with a lot more perspective, I can say that this is music that takes the implications of Miles Davis’ electric period - deep, brooding atmospheres, the coupling of longform improvisation with studio editing that almost acts as an instrument in and of itself, etc. - and does something completely new and radical with it. It’s often considered the first “post-rock” album (still impossible not to cringe every time I type out that genre name), but it’s hard to think of any first album of any genre that perfects it from the get go. And I haven’t said it already, because it really goes without saying, but good lord, Mark Hollis’ voice is just the most moving, haunting sound there ever was. The album is a world of its own, and I always listen to it all the way through, but in that context “After the Flood” feels like a world within said world. It’s the centerpiece of the album, and there’s a subtle tension throughout the track that makes it feel like it could explode out of nowhere at any point. But instead, the track chugs along at a steady groove for nine minutes or so, and the end result is as hypnotic as music gets, in my eyes. Obviously this album is very important to me, but it’s always particularly resonant during hard times. October 23’ has obviously just been a fucking living nightmare, and explaining how painful and numbing it is to witness the genocide happening in Gaza in real time would demand a lot more space than just a brief aside in a newsletter about my dumb radio show. But this past month I’ve found myself returning to this album a lot, just as I listened to it a lot during the peak of the pandemic. I can’t fully explain why - maybe it’s the fact that a lot of the album feels process-based, in a way that I can relate to the process of grief and confusion and depression and anger, or maybe it’s just a beautiful fucking album that encompasses the full scope and mystery of human emotion in a way that no other album really does. Either way, I’ll keep listening in the future.
Jay Glass Dubs - You Would Love Me Now
One of the most exciting trends in the past few years has been the resurgence of ambient dub-based music. 2023 has had no shortage of psychedelic, deeply textured dub that takes reverb and echo to delightfully weird new places. You Would Love Me Now is the just-released new album from Greek musician Jay Glass Dubs, who is one of my favorite people making this kind of music. The title track from his new album is, to me, a perfect synthesis of the darker, heavier textures of artists like Scorn and the psychedelic, sound design-informed elements of contemporary artists like Georgia or CS + Kreme. The beatwork is really ominous and trippy, and the warbly synth melody is trance-inducing. I’m definitely eager to hear whatever Jay Glass Dubs has in store for 24’.
Weather Report - Waterfall
This was actually kind of a random, last-minute addition to the mix. I felt like I needed some prime fusion in the mix, so I went back to the first Weather Report album and found this track, which the previous Jay Glass Dubs track randomly transitions into perfectly. For years I had the impression of Weather Report as a really cheesy, commercial fusion group who paved the way for smooth jazz, an impression that has a kernel of truth but can mostly be attributed to grumbling jazz curmudgeons. At some point I heard people say that the early Weather Report albums were more reminiscent of electric-era Miles, which is obviously some of my favorite music of all time, and I’m always desperate to hear more music from that era that fits those lines, so I listened to them and I instantly fell in love. Today I have a much deeper appreciation of Weather Report, even when they get further from that electric Miles sound in the mid-to-late 70s. It’s just hard to go wrong with classic fusion, especially if Wayne Shorter is involved. Weather Report’s self-titled debut album sounds a lot like Miles’ In a Silent Way, which is never a bad thing. “Waterfall” is definitely driven by its rhythm section; Alphonse Mouzon gracefully dances on the cymbals and Miroslav Vitous’ bass work on this track is, to me, exemplifies the increased melodic role that the bass took on in the fusion era. This all provides a perfect context for Wayne Shorter to do his thing, and his soprano sax playing soars all over this track. The piece was composed by Joe Zawinul, who has an introspective style as a composer that I’ve always been captivated by. This track is wildly different from, say, Cannonball Adderley’s “Mercy, Mercy, Mercy,” another Zawinul composition, but they both share his sensibilities. His playing on the fender rhodes is a perfect extension of these sensibilities, and as easy as it is for jazz snobs to look at bands such as Weather Report as a bunch of sellouts, it’s kind of impossible for me to imagine Zawinul playing anything but the fender rhodes (even having heard his work with Cannonball).
Autechre - Cfern
Autechre are yet another group where I’d have to strain to think of things to say about them that haven’t been said already. They belong to a special class of musicians - one that includes Derek Bailey, Roland Kayn, and Miles Davis, who, yes, I realize I’ve namechecked a lot in this newsletter - whose recorded outputs feel less like one artist’s discography and more like a an ever-shifting galaxy of music. Given how prolific Autechre have always been, the extreme length of their recent releases like elseq and The NTS Sessions, and the plethora of live recordings they’ve been releasing lately, it feels like I could keep listening to their music forever and keep finding new things, which is a beautiful feeling. One of the things I love about their music is that it realizes Hip-Hop and Electro as part of the same experimental lineage as Pierre Henry or Bernard Parmegiani, something that many of the more academic-minded people in New Music have failed to understand. Confield is often thought of as the album where they transitioned from complex ambient techno to hyper-complex polyrhythmic experimental music. “Cfern” has elements of ambient music, particularly in the very warm-sounding synths, but this provides a contrast to the frantic, hard-hitting beats, which layer and shift time in a way that makes my head spin.
Angus Maclise - Humming in the Night Skull
Where to begin with someone like Angus Maclise? If you aren’t already familiar, Maclise was a member of La Monte Young’s Theatre of Eternal Music, which connected him with John Cale. Cale invited Maclise to join a little band he was starting called the Velvet Underground, and Maclise was their percussionist. Maclise never showed up to anything on time, and he quit the band after they started playing paid gigs, which to Maclise was apparently a betrayal of artistic integrity. From there, Maclise wandered around for a while until dying of malnutrition in Nepal at the age of 41. Completely obscure in his lifetime, Maclise’s recordings began to surface in the late 90s thanks to the efforts of fellow percussionist Tim Barnes. This is from the first of those releases, titled The Invasion of Thunderbolt Pagoda, and much of the album is as violently psychedelic as you would expect from someone who probably did enough acid to make the CIA jealous. Maclise’s intense, shamanic percussion playing and the swirling, reverb-laden sound of the recording calls to mind the No-Neck Blues Band, or even World of Echo-era Arthur Russell, both artists who are already idiosyncratic on their own. This particular track, the last on the album, is something of a comedown after a pretty intense album, but it still has a jittery, dizzying dancing-in-your-head feel to it.
crys cole & Oren Ambarchi - Burrata
Oren Ambarchi’s Black Truffle label is probably my single favorite label putting out music today. It has pretty much everything I would want from a label: a unique, unified aesthetic, incredible sound production and attention to detail, and a well-curated catalog that isn’t merely “experimental,” but genuinely way out of left field. I fell in love with Oren’s music after hearing his classic Grapes from the Estate album, and when I subsequently heard his work with Jim O’Rourke and legendary guitar behemoth Keiji Haino, I could tell he was someone with unreal artistic range. It was through the album Hotel Record that I became aware of the work of his collaborator and partner crys cole, a Canadian sound artist who works primarily with field recordings and has been a part of a number of excellent recordings over the years. The two artists have completely different styles, but they come together perfectly on this album. “Burrata” in particular is a bubbling, colorfully psychedelic track that immediately makes me feel like I’m adrift in some liminal space. crys cole speaks through a vocoder on this track, in a manner reminding me of the text-to-sound work of composer Paul Demarinis. This track is at once beautiful and almost humorously peculiar and quirky, creating an intoxicating effect.
CV & JAB - Lands of Permanent Mist
Closing out this mix is a short track from the duo of Christina Vantzou and John Also Bennett, two of my favorite ambient musicians working today. Both musicians, together and separately, have the ability to evoke the kind of dreamlike landscapes that most ambient musicians are just grasping at. There’s an interesting degree of musique concrete and cut-up techniques in their music, but it's always in service of very lush, unapologetically pretty sounds. This track is like a pillow made of clouds, putting one at ease and then leaving as soon as it arrives.