Day 11
It turns out discounting the mediums of film and radio wasn’t really the right thing to do in the spirit of musical discovery, and with that in mind I have yet another coincidence to recount, this time centred on the American independent film-director Jim Jarmusch. He’s best known for his films Coffee & Cigarettes (featuring the likes of Iggy Pop, Jack White, Steve Buscemi, Alfred Molina, Steve Coogan, Cate Blanchett, Tom Waits etc.) and Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai. The latter film features a soundtrack by the Wu Tang Clan’s RZA – who was one of the ’90s most interesting and singular hip-hop producers – but his long creative relationship with Tom Waits was what originally garnered him a lot of cred in the music world.
But RZA and Waits are well established artists, their stories are irrelevant to this one. What is relevant is Jarmusch’s latest film Only Lovers Left Alive. As we’ve grown to expect from Jarmusch the film features an incredible soundtrack, wildly appropriate to the story being told on the screen. One particular scene features the music and performance of a Lebanese singer called Yasmine Hamdan. After last week coming across the music of Meiko Kaji and discovering that even though she featured in the Kill Bill films I didn’t take note of her when I first saw them, I thought it was time to take note of this particular non-English music, and not let history repeat itself.
On my first musical discovery piece I got a comment recommending I check out the PBS Melbourne radio station, particularly the show ‘Flight 1067 to Africa’. The latest archive show was from 2nd of February and one of first artists played was Mulatu Astatke – a long-time practitioner of Ethiopian jazz – with a recommendation for his latest album ‘Sketches of Ethiopia’, one of the programme’s highlights of 2013. Cue a trip to Spotify to find his most popular tracks, which leads to the discovery of a particularly familiar sound in Yèkèrmo Sèw, followed by a Google search. That’s where I knew it from: Bill Murray driving aimlessly across the United States in the film Broken Flowers, directed by Jim Jarmusch.
Lesson learned: always trust a great filmmaker when it comes to music. Well allow me to get the jump before Only Lovers Left Alive gets its official release here. The music of Yasmine Hamdan is some essential listening and I’ve been listening to her album ‘Ya Nass’ repeatedly. It has a beautiful balance between the tense atmospheric stuff that suits this particular Jarmusch film and the more relaxed pieces such as Samar which feels familiar and modern yet exotic and original.
It doesn’t take a huge amount of research to discover that Yasmine Hamdan does not conform to our idea of what it means to be a woman from the Middle East. Having based herself in Paris in recent years, she has the freedom to be sexually expressive in her live performances, as she is in her appearance in Only Lovers Left Alive, but proves to be just as sceptical of the Western media’s obsession with the sexualised female image, which comes across in some of her other performances.
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After nearly two weeks of exploring music from across the world I’ve rapidly started jumping from one country to the next in the space it takes to click on another song. The internet’s obliviousness to political borders or geographical locations means you can communicate with your housemate upstairs exactly as easily as you can with your emigrant friend on the opposite side of the globe, and in exploring music the geographical separation is stifling to obey.
The first thing about this radio programme ‘Flight 1067 to Africa’ that’s interesting is that it broadcasts from Melbourne, a city that (through my own ignorance) never struck me as a particularly musical part of the world until about three weeks ago when La Blogothèque started posting video after video from Melbourne Music Week. As good as these videos are however the pinnacle of this recently discovered musical oasis is Courtney Barnett, who featured in a La Blogothèque video from two months ago. Now obviously I watched that video over two months ago and so was familiar with Courtney Barnett outside of the statute of limitations I set up for myself, the whole “no listening to music I was familiar with before the 1st of February” thing. But what, you think the conquistadors didn’t retrace their steps once in a while when they were trying to find El Dorado? And if they didn’t retrace their steps sure that’s probably why they never found it.
When you hear Avant Gardener the first time you don’t know what’s happening. The second, third, fourth, fifth and sixth time you hear it you’re probably on board. The languid droning sound of the guitar and the singing and the lyrics seem to contain that kind of therapeutic looseness that was only ever really perfected by The Shaggs. But unlike The Shaggs you can like Courtney Barnett’s music unironically because while the music is loose and drawling it has its own tone, humour, melody and intelligence. It’s genuinely brilliant.
But then from Melbourne we take Flight 1067 to Africa and land on the ’60s sound of S.E. Rogie. He was a Sierra Leonian who played a style of music known as “palm wine” which is another brand new discovery. His album is called ‘Palm Wine Guitar Music: The 60’s Sound’ and there’s a clear link with the early ’60s sound of Californian surf rock but with its own unique improvised production quality. For a group with such a tenuous position in the music world during the ’60s The Beach Boys really are the act who best epitomised the sound of that decade, and if S.E. Rogie and in particular Twist With The Morningstars best approximate the Californians’ early output then an artist called Margo Guryan is another discovery who captures the latter part.
Guryan had one of those reactions to her record company’s demands that some people will say proves what a great artist she is while others will say it makes her a fool. In 1968 she released ‘Take A Picture’ but refusing to get herself a booking manager, an agent, a lawyer and basically refusing to sell herself to a bunch of industry heads her album faded into obscurity and she never emerged from behind the shadows of all the greats of that age, particularly The Beach Boys who directly influenced her sunshine pop most explicitly.
Proving the influence of the sound and ideas of the 1960s to this day I come across a French band called The Liminanas, whose sound and lyrics draw heavily from things like the French New Wave, Serge Gainsborough and Ennio Morricone. The band is definitely too aware of its influences and takes no pains to hide it, even going so far as to list them in Votre Coté Yéyé M’emmerde, which is a particularly Gainsboroughian thing to do.
Back to Africa, and now I’m listening to Flight 1067’s best of 2013 feature when the music of Malick Pathé Sow & Bao Sissoko floats out of my speakers like some sort of divine thing. The music has that standard repetitive melody that’s specific to music from Senegal and Mali but Sissoko’s playing of a harp-like instrument called the kora and Sow’s incredible smooth high singing voice lift a beautiful melody into something transcendent, and this is the standard for their album ‘Aduna’.
I post this song to my Twitter and get a positive comment from Wyvern Lingo, a great Irish group in their own right, who in turn recommend me an album by Samuel Vas-Y who’s based in Dublin, but sings in English, French, Spanish…It’s an absolutely perfect recommendation following Sow & Sissoko with its minimal set-up and dreamy confident tone (and a reminder that if you really want the scoop on who are the best unknown acts in a particular part of the world then a musician is the best person to ask, because they meet hundreds and always remember the best). West, Always West and Coucou are the recommendations, but for me it’s the brilliantly simple guitar work on Millionaire of Hours that is the real highlight.
More recreational PBS listening culminates in the discovery of the endlessly danceable Bannaya Foly by Noumoucounda Cissoko, a long seemingly aimless six-minute number that goes upbeat suddenly and kind of breaks your heart by ending. And with that recommendation you can consider yourself filled in on the sudden avalanche of incredibly good music that rained down on me in the past little while. Take a look at the playlist below, eight tracks from across five continents (sorry South America), but featuring only one song from that great big musical black-hole between 1969 and last year.
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Day 12
When I first decided to give up my music for the month of February I was sure I would be dying for a hit of ‘Graceland’ or ‘Blonde on Blonde’ twelve days in, but the opposite has proven true. I can’t seem to discover new music fast enough. And while you would assume that my attempt to fill the empty space left by the absence of my iPod and record collection would mean I’d be willing to listen to any old crap to get by, it’s actually the case that I feel more discriminating than before. If I can’t enjoy the first twenty seconds of a song why would I enjoy the following five hundred? It’s amazing how much music starts with a long electronic hum that eventually breaks into a toneless nothing of a song, stuff from all over the world. Move on to the next one, I’m confident now that there’s enough great stuff out there that I don’t have to settle for something that doesn’t really feel much of anything.
The overriding memory of my music collection is the disproportionate amount of time I spent flicking through my records or hitting “next” on iPod shuffle trying desperately to hit upon a song that best approximated how I felt in a given moment, usually falling well short, probably ending up throwing on ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’; the fail-safe. It’s hard to remember being as satisfied by recorded music as I was when listening to that Samuel Vas-Y album straight after Malick Pathé Sow & Bao Sissoko or that Courtney Barnett track before that. It feels like actively engaging with music again, not just having it on my headphones for the sake of not having to listen to the chaotic sounds of the world.