December Goings-On

(originally posted to Substack)

Hey all. After a real busy November, we’re settling into a chill December here. Receive has a couple shows this month, but mostly we’re getting on with writing the next album, as yet untitled.

1. Public engagements
2. Maybe I’m a music reviewer now?
3. That’s quite enough

ONE: TWO SHOWS THIS MONTH

Firstly, we’re playing on Thursday the 18th with our bud Gilah and Ded En. Our first time over at Sleepwalk, just a few blocks from our studio space. Tickets are here if Dice is your thing. Come thru!

The next day, we’ll be over in Long Island, playing a Ballpark Figure show at Lithology Brewing, with There Are No Tigers, Screaming from the Gallery, Anna Altman, and Book Spirit. Very stoked for this one!

TWO: SOME THINGS I’VE BEEN INTO

Carrier – Rhythm Immortal

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!

There’s a lot of rhythm in this record, but you pretty much can’t nod your head to it. One reviewer says it sounds like he’s rewriting the laws of physics. That’s one way of putting it. To me our waking world of cyclical, pulse-based rhythms feels strongly implied rather than stated outright, and we’re left wandering through this dreamlike collection of, I almost wanna say “propositions,” or I don’t know, echoes of dance music. (The guest vocals from Voice Actor do a great deal to push it further in that direction. If you didn’t catch her four and a half hour release [?!] Sent from My Telephone in 2022 it’s never too late.)

I don’t really hang out in dance music, but I def lurk a bit and love to catch occasional outliers like this. This one’s really hitting for me right now. Out on Modern Love.

Teppana Jänis, Arja Kastinen – Teppana Jänis

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.

Claire M Singer – Gleann Ciùin

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.

THREE: ALRIGHT ALRIGHT

Thanks for reading all this. Hope you’re all keeping warm and are set to have a chill holiday.

take care,
B