Music that evokes feelings of unease, anxiety, terror, discomfort. Lots of drone music as I associate quite a bit of it with this feeling - I'm confident I could've filled the entire chart with more drone / noise. Idea came whilst relistening to Radio Amor.
Also, I have a weird ambivalence towards a lot of these where I can simultaneously find them calming and terrifying. Drowner by Yellow Swans is an album that I've put on to dissociate to or relax to, just turning it up on my speakers and lying face-down in my bed. It's calming in the way that ambient music can be...it's like an evil version of ambient music actually.
I refreshed the Spiritual pop and Secular drones playlists on the Blue Tapes Soundcloud that act as a sort of primer to the different hemispheres of the label.
Spiritual pop encapsulates the lighter, more playful side of our work, with contributions from Katie Gately, Tashi Dorji, Henry Plotnick, The Library of Babel, Stuart Chalmers and Taming Power, Hey String, Richard Youngs, Bulbils, Ashtray Navigations and Dane Law.
Secular drones summarises the darker, noisier end of things: Threes and Will, Father Murphy, Jute Gyte, Trupa Trupa, Unfollow, Mats Gustafsson, Ratkiller, Cadu Tenorio and Gultskra Artikler.
Click the links in the first para to explore!
Holy fucking SHIIIIIT. Jute Gyte has to be one of if not my favorite solo-black metal project, black metal, project, fucking whatever cool experimental stuff he does I love.
The main thing that Adam Kalmbach's project Jute Gyte is known for is its use of Microtonal Music. If you don't know, western music is generally split (super simplifying here) into half tones. So you have A and then A Sharp and then B, C, then C sharp, D, D sharp. So it progresses in these half steps. In Middle eastern Music and south asian music, and many other cultures outside of the western school of music theory. There are many many more. So there could be a note between d sharp and E that is just like D sharp sharp, or maybe D.78 or D.92 depending on how specific. Essentially Jute Gyte is playing notes, chords, and scales that do not exist within western music canon. If you've never listened to music outside of that space (which includes everything from Justin Bieber to Darkthrone to WuTang to Mozart to Elvis to Miles Davis to Taylor Swift) then this is going to sound insane to you. Even out of tune, it isn't. This is just that cool ass experimental music.
This whole album, once you get into the sound he's going for, is such a slow and particular burn filled with incredibly dense riffs and noise orchestration. The guitars prick and and pop almost sounding like metallic crashes or high pitched banging to fit in with the noisey sampling and electronic soundscape. They float between almost recognizable sounds by incorporating notes that aren't within the western canon but are a similar space apart between familiar chords / scales (for instance playing in D.75 Major scale). This playing with familiarity makes everything feel uncanny and uneasy, yet still beautiful. Each song has it's low quieter moments that build into epic, high intensity climaxes that are so dense and well constructed that even after a few listens there will still be details, notes and references.
An absolute fucking experience. Jute Gyte is one of the best to be making music right now.
Toronto-based multi-instrumentalist Colin Fisher is on a constant quest for the ecstatic through sound. His journey has taken him in many directions, from the math-rock inspired group Sing That Yell That Spell, to the fiery free improvisation duo Not the Wind, Not the Flag. As a band leader, his free jazz quartet released the white-hot Living Midnight for Astral Spirits in 2020, about which Derek Taylor wrote, “Passages of ruminant restraint alternate with excoriating blasts and outbursts, but the means always remains intelligible and momentum driven whether full-steam or incremental.” Solo, Fisher has recently wafted in a more contemplative direction that might see him associated with the new age revival, but this work is as exploratory and engaging as his most spirited improvisational outings. Here, he lists some of the pieces within which he experiences the sublime.
Jean-Pierre Leguay — Chant d’Airain
Some of my first experiences with the sublime in music were in church. I abhorred being in church (and would even attempt to hide to avoid attendance) but at the end of service the organist played as the congregation filed out. The selections were usually secular and I can remember my rapt attention. Not because of some aesthetic taste but because I was having a physical/biological response to the sounds. Being in the resonant chamber of the cathedral provided a fully immersive experience. Rather than suggest whatever music was being played at the time I’m going to fast forward to my mid 20s… While in the same church, I heard the principal organist of Notre Dame improvise with some Messiaen-symmetrical ideas that lifted me out of my corporeal form and left me sobbing in a church pew at the very church I would have done everything in my power not to be present in as a child. The organist was Jean-Pierre Leguay.
Ravi Shankar — At Monterey Pop
An early transmission from what seemed like outer space at the time, as a young child I heard the sounds of Ravi Shankar and Alla Rakha live at Monterey Pop (my parents had this and the record with Yehudi Menuhin.) Ravi is far from my fav Hindustani musician or sitarist, of which I have innumerable favorites now. But I’m particularly enamored with Vilayat Khan after reading his biography, The Sixth String of Vilayat Khan, a couple of years ago. Pandit Pran Nath is also a huge inspiration.
Polvo — Cor-Crane Secret
Without sifting through the rubble of my punk/hardcore teens (which was totally legit inspirational beauty, from Minor Threat and straight edge to grunge, etc.) I want to highlight a band that literally changed my life in my mid to late teens. When I first heard Cor-Crane Secret by Polvo, I didn’t realize that music like this existed. It gave me permission to go on long wonky improvisational explorations — endless melodies and whammied chords that would go on for hours sometimes. I also got to see them on the Today’s Active Lifestyles tour when I was 18, totally life changing.
Ornette Coleman — The Shape of Jazz to Come
The next stage I’ll focus on has a little more girth: my introduction to jazz/free jazz/improv/fusion. I think I first discovered this music by accident. I remember seeing a clip of Monk on the news the day he died. I was much younger, and I thought to myself “this music is like an alien transmission!” But I put that away in the vaults for a couple of decades. I also remember seeing a clip on TV of a soprano player at a jazz fest in Toronto, playing the craziest shit I’d ever heard (once again on a news program,) but had little-to-no context. The clip lasted probably 10 seconds but felt longer and I remember thinking something like “this is more punk rock than punk rock!” hahaha. So, there was a hunger there that I needed to satiate. But I had no access to any recordings where I lived. I remember reading books at the library about jazz history and the only CDs I could borrow were Manteca or big band music. I had to imagine what Song X sounded like for the time being. Ornette’s The Shape of Jazz to Come was one of the first albums I actually bought, and it was more magical than any description could possibly illustrate. As pedestrian as this may seem to everyone now, it was another life changer for me. I can remember late nights sitting by myself, probably super high on good weed, listening to “Lonely Woman” and weeping.
John McLaughlin — Extrapolation
In my early days of discovering jazz, I also came across the music of John Mclaughlin, initially via Mahavishnu Orchestra. His whole profile as a guitarist was incredibly inspiring for me — someone who had an equal footing in jazz, Flamenco, Indian classical music and fusion — a model for what I could become as a player (although I don’t think our styles are really even that comparable.) One of his albums that I think is maybe overlooked in his career is Extrapolation which has an incredible lineup and the compositions are incredible.
John Coltrane — Interstellar Space
In considering this list I’m realizing there’s no way I can touch on all the music that has shaped me. But there is an album that’s shaped a great deal in terms of how I play and in what seems to be my favorite type of collaborative setting — the duo. Interstellar Space is an absolute masterpiece. Everything feels raw — the intensity, the interplay, the emotion. As much as I love so much of John Coltrane’s music, there’s something about this record that was akin to hearing punk music for the first time. There’s an immediacy to expression and interaction. And it was something that felt available to me (certainly not his virtuoso chops, which felt otherworldly — an unscalable monolith.) The direct communication between two people was a revelation and the content of this music felt like something I could mine for the rest of my life.
The Ivo Perelman Trio — “Cantilena”
Fast-forward another few years or more and I had travelled with some good friends to NYC for I think it was the JVC Jazz Fest. We wanted to see MMW play (of whom I still think Friday Afternoon In the Universe is a perfect album.) While we were there though, we saw so much beautiful music that blew me away. The most significant for me though, was catching the last 10 minutes of a set by the Ivo Perelman trio in Tribeca somewhere (the trio was with Jay Rosen on drums and Dominic Duval on bass, who I played with several years later. RIP). It was electrifying. I was moved enough to go and talk to him after and he gave me an unmarked demo tape of Seeds, Vision and Counterpoint. There’s a track on the album called “Cantilena” and it really drops into this heavy space for around 10 minutes that gives me the chills every time I hear it. There is this free lyricism that is still absolutely elating to me. I love his playing and he’s still probably my favorite living saxophonist.
Marilyn Crispell — Vignettes
Masabumi Kikuchi — Out of Bounds
Using lyricism as a segue it brings me to the music of Marilyn Crispell, especially her albums Amaryllis,Nothing Ever Was Anyway, Vignettes and many others. She has a mode of free ballad playing that is absolutely transcendental. I will also mention Masabumi Kikuchi in the same breath. I find the desire more and more to play with a similar intention even though I rarely find myself in the context to do so.
Jute Gyte — Birefringence
A total shift from this narrative of discovery and development is metal music. Something I’d been listening to since my teens and getting hip to some cool thrash music through Canadian band Voivod, particularly the album Dimension Hatröss. I've continued to follow the music and all of its various subgenres and have so many favorite picks, but I’ll choose just one and it’s a total mindbender. Jute Gyte’s Birefringence actually eclipses easy category and you really just need to experience it.
Giacinto Scelsi — “Uaxuctum”
Catherine Christer Hennix — “Blues Alif Lam Mim In The Modes Of Rag Infinity/Rag Cosmosis”
My last pick is another double pick (I know I’m cheating) because it relates to the power of music and ties it into the first selection. Another current, among many, of musical obsessions is “new music.” But when I heard Giacinto Scelsi’s music for the first time it surpassed all of my previous notions about what was possible with composed music — it felt like music from an ecstatic vision. Even as I listen to the track now, it immediately accesses some occult realm of sublimity that feels similar to the music I first heard in church but with an unbridled intensity and depth.
Another more recent selection that fits into this category — but that is different in that it embraces a sort of stasis rather than dynamic movement — is the music of Catherine Christer Hennix. If you don’t know her, she’s a deep well of musical/mathematical/spiritual inspiration for me. Another music without a real equivalent in this day and age — something that echoes ancestral currents as well as the vibration of the cosmos itself. Thanks for reading/listening. Peace be with you. xoxo
