Day 1
Late morning on Saturday. The radio is switched on while the water boils on the hob. Whatever station is on is making a sound somewhere between an electric guitar and the buzzing of a fly over a steady drum beat. Eventually there arrive lyrics of a sort – “laid back” repeated over and over, and then the lyrics “over and over”. Quite rightly the song doesn’t identify itself when it’s done playing, just the station it’s playing on: Phantom. The next song I don’t quite recognise, but it sounds like Daft Punk, hardly much of a discovery.
I hit the “auto scan” button then crack two eggs into the boiling water while the radio heads off on its journey around the airwaves, “…two thousand mortgage holders…is dócha i tír beag mar atá…Caroline, you’re welcome to the show…” followed by distortion, followed by some vacuous Westlife-sounding pop music. Despite my efforts the eggs have scrambled rather than poached as the radio lands on 2FM, and what song do you think is playing only the exact same Daft Punk number that was on Phantom sixty seconds ago. And so the radio offers me my first failed attempt at discovering new music in the month of February.
***
Sometime last summer I made a musical discovery. Through the incomprehensible workings of fate, a Blu-ray copy of the first season of David Simon’s Treme found its way into my possession. It wasn’t long after I cracked that little egg open, and the sounds of Dixieland jazz, blues, zydeco, creole music, Indian traditional music and the crazy boogie-woogie pianos and marching brass bands of New Orleans spilled out, that I started questioning why it took so long to discover these incredible sounds. Or perhaps the real question was “why did it take a television show for me to find music this good?”
The influence television and cinema have over our listening habits is remarkable. Why, for example, when he had been making music in the early ’70s in Detroit, did it take 2012’s Searching For Sugar Man, for most of us to get into Sixto Rodriguez? His music was there for all of the forty years between the time it was released and the time it started getting any sort of radio-play in the West, so why the long wait? Similarly, why do we need O Brother, Where Art Thou? to introduce us to Americana? Or Paul Simon to introduce us to mbaqanga or Ry Cooder to introduce us to Cuban music or George Harrison to introduce us to Indian traditional music?
Once you start to see these middle men you want to cut them out, or even better become one of them. So for the month of February I’m stowing away my records and leaving my iPod turned off, and turning away from any musician or band that is in any way familiar to me. That means no Beatles, no Guthrie, no Coltrane, no Haim, no Howling Wolf, no Dylan, no Leonard Cohen. It means no Nas, no Wu Tang, no Metallica, no Bach, no Mahler, no Phillip Glass, Frank Sinatra, Arvo Pärt, Bruce Springsteen or Duke Ellington. Neither will it be an excuse to catch up on those few acts I’ve just not gotten around to yet, like Radiohead or Captain Beefheart or Frank Zappa. The goal is to discover something new that doesn’t have any presence or backing to speak of in this wee corner of the world.
So the first question that arises is “How do we discover music in 2014?” The radio is the traditional means, but as demonstrated above it is hardly a cutting-edge method of discovering new sounds when it’s as close to death as print media, or dub-step. Spotify is the obvious modern discovery tool of choice, but looking at its recommendations now it’s throwing up Carl Perkins, Pete Seeger and Carole King, hardly obscure, under-appreciated artists.
Presumably the sounds I’ll be looking to discover will largely come from that tiny little section of shelves you find in the record store; the one in the corner with “World Music” scrawled across a piece of cardboard in chalk; the sounds of that little neglected chunk of land between England and Los Angeles where about 85% of the world’s musical population plies its trade in spite of our obliviousness. The goal is to find some real gems, stuff that holds up in terms of composition to what’s being made anywhere in the world. There’s a chance that I might come to realise that undiscovered music remains undiscovered for a good reason, that it’s an inferior product to what’s being released in English-speaking parts of the world, and the reason we never hear any of it is not because those in charge of the money don’t know how to make a profit off it, but because it’s actually useless. It’s unlikely, but let’s keep an open mind.
Of course the streets of Dublin are currently alive with the sound of music, so maybe some unearthed treasures will turn up in my own back-garden. Outside of the rock/pop-focus of the Dublin scene that has turned out acts like Kodaline and Little Green Cars in recent years there must be a lot going on; international artists, classical composers, jazz musicians or even artists just below the main flow of things waiting to break in. Quality music can flow from the places that large money never touches, like it did with Americana and blues in the ’30s, so with great confidence in this premise I hereby promise you, the reader, one Sugar Man by the end of the month.
***
With nothing to listen to while washing the dishes except the inane ramblings of my own mind it seems like a good idea to make at least one musical discovery on the first day of this journey. In lieu of the funds to actually get up and travel to the places where this music exists I will instead do the modern equivalent and spin the Google Earth globe and see where it lands. Naturally it’s not responding.
Ah, the earth, I reflect, so brittle and insignificant as it spins away on my laptop screen. The cursor rotates as the earth spins and with a fateful left-click it lands on Chihuahua, Mexico. A search for “Chihuahua music” turns up unsatisfactory results. The first result for “Music from Chihuahua Mexico” is about a mariachi band called Los Tigres del Norte who were banned from performing in Chihuahua in 2012 for singing ballads glorifying drug traffickers, narcocorridos as they’re known. Banning is perhaps an understandable reaction in a country in which the drug wars have killed somewhere in the range of a hundred thousand people since 2006, Chihuahua being one of the worst hit parts of the country.
Los Tigres del Norte hardly meet my requirements for discovery with millions of records sold and five Latin Grammys to their name. Plus they’ve recorded with The Chieftains, so there we are, back home without having left the place five minutes. Some more in-depth research is necessary here.
After trawling through mountains of mariachi and nearly going mad listening to Mexican percussion ensembles the realisation began to hit: what if I didn’t find anything to listen to? No pleasant sounds to warm my feet by? No shelter from the storm? The fear of sleeping rough began to creep in and I’m ashamed to admit I started to panic. Maybe just one spin of ‘Pink Moon’ to keep me going ’til tomorrow…
But alas, Chihuahua did not disappoint. At a festival in the city last September a singer by the name of Ximena Sariñana performed. In 2008 she released an album ironically titled ‘Mediocre’ and it was like a candle in the window of some safe and comfy little cottage in the roaring wind of a dark winter’s night. It’s a pleasant kind of acoustic jazz-pop that repeatedly stumbles across the line between beautiful and twee, but wins out because of Sariñana’s voice and those ever-endearing Spanish syllables she sings.
The album is imperfect and the American style of Sariñana’s singing slightly grates with the Spanish lyrics at times, but it’s a largely endearing collection of songs, the most outright enjoyable perhaps being Normal, with its tone-perfect singing and piano-driven production. La Tina shows where the music falls down, featuring yet more gorgeous vocals, some nice simple strings and brass and a good guitar but a fairly corny bassline and a sprinkling of twinklyness over the chorus. Then a faux-sinister hip-hop middle-eight ruins the effect of the song. All is not lost for La Tina however, as Metronomy seem to have discovered Sariñana long before me, and produced a nice remix of it. This discovery is a harsh return to the seemingly inescapable British Isles but at this stage it’s just nice to be in out of the cold on such a miserable February night.
Raised in Guadalajara by her TV-producer/writer/director parents, Sariñana spent much of her childhood acting in Mexican telenovelas before releasing her debut album at the age of 22. Her second self-titled album is mostly in the god-tongue English and is more upbeat and poppy, but the word “sell out” won’t come to my lips this evening, so happy am I to have found some music to bask in that I would not be listening to without having abandoned the sounds I’ve grown accustomed to. She’s not my Sugar Man, and she’s not exactly challenging the satisfaction of the Tom Waits wave I was riding this time yesterday, but the discovery of Ximena Sariñana seems to be a good omen for the month ahead.