Wednesday Investigations [2:14]: Blind spots
21 albums and a discovery system
Like many longtime music fans, I think a lot about “discovery”—how to come across music that’s new to me. I feel every music fan has their own personal discovery systems, and if you’ve been a music fan for long enough, you’ve seen them change with the times. For instance, I’m old enough that I can mistily recall the days when I discovered new tracks by trading mixtapes in the mail, or when I discovered new albums by some high school buddy passing me a 90-minute cassette with one album dubbed on each side. Over the years, though, I adopted other methods: a quick history of them would have to include things like poring over alt-weeklies and MP3 blogs, swapping CD-Rs, following other music nerds on social media (or, increasingly, subscribing to their email newsletters), browsing other people’s Bandcamp collections (this one’s a wild one), dialing up Spotify and seeing what “the algorithm” thinks I’m going to like this week, or even doing some small-time data-harvesting by using something like Glenn McDonald’s sadly defunct, Spotify-powered “New Releases By Genre” tool.
When you hear me talking about these discovery systems, though, you might note that I’m skewing them towards the present—they’re designed to catch what’s fresh, the “newest of the new,” instead of being content with surfacing the merely “new to me.” There are reasons for this, which I think are valid: I’m interested in how artists grow and develop over time (with a special interest in living artists, working now), and I’m interested in the ways the the boundaries of musical form are always being expanded, how the total field of “what music can do” is always being enlarged. If I really wanted to get fancy, I’d say that I’m interested in what Mark Fisher called “the capacity for nihilation […] producing new potentials through the negation of what already exists1.”
I think these attitudes are healthy, and I think they help me to stay engaged with the contemporary culture of music. Some of you might have seen the controversial Washington Post article from a few weeks ago that crunches the numbers on the experience of generational nostalgia—it ably describes a kind of mind-trap that, among other things, makes us think the best music ever made was whatever came out when we were seventeen. I like to think I’ve steered clear of that! But at the same time, I also think that too much bias toward the present might be keeping me from finding albums I would have loved if I’d heard them earlier in life. We live in an era where much of the history of recorded music is available at the literal press of a button, and I began to think that I could be doing a better job of making a thoughtful use of this abundance.
It’s not like I’ve never tried doing this before. Recently I’ve made some attempts to build up my sense of historical context in a few key areas (I made a dedicated dive into the Penguin Jazz Core Collection a few years back) but in the depths of the card index there are literally hundreds of albums that crossed my radar in some way or another, got jotted down as a note, but then subsequently went uninvestigated. Just for instance, I once filed away this photograph of Other Music’s all time top sellers. I’ve heard a lot of what’s on here, but probably not more than half:
So this summer I made a little project for myself, to listen in a semi-systematic way through albums I didn’t know well. The quick and simple ground rules were these: [1] I would start in 1972 (the year I was born) and work my way forward chronologically from there. [2] Each day I participated in this project I would devote to a single year—I could listen to as many albums from that year as I wanted, but at the onset of a new day I’d move to a new year. [3] Albums chosen for this project could be albums I was passingly familiar with, but they couldn’t be albums I’d ever owned in any format. [4] They didn’t have to be albums referenced in the note index, but albums referenced in the note index would get priority.
Over the past month or so I’ve worked my way through ten years, listening to 21 “new to me” albums. Here they are, along with some occasional commentary:
1972: Big Star, #1 Record
1972: Neu! (self-titled debut)
1973: Tony Conrad with Faust, Outside the Dream Syndicate
There’s a lot one could write about the long-running animosity between Tony Conrad and his former collaborator La Monte Young. The argument revolves around how much a massed ensemble drone can be said to be one person’s intellectual property, or, put another way, how much a single performer’s virtuosity or compositional acumen can count toward ownership of a sound which subsumes the individuality of any particular voice within it. Someone who has done the necessary deep dive on the topic is Patrick Nickleson, a professor of musicology, who sees their conflict as “a germinal dispute over the possibilities of collective authorship.” He’s written a long article about it and he even now has a book out, The Names of Minimalism: Authorship, Art Music, and Historiography in Dispute, which promises to be fascinating. Anyway, Conrad and Young had bad blood right up until Conrad’s death, and one could consider this collaboration to be a sort of thumb in Young’s eye. But even if you put all the gossip aside, this album absolutely slaps; highest recommendation.
1973: Jac Berrocal / Dominque Coster / Roger Ferlet, Musiq Musik
An oddball one, recorded in the crypt of the Church of Saint-Savinien in Sens, France, using instruments that Berrocal and Ferlet had collected in their global travels: “bells, muezzins, conches, shenaïs, cymbals, gongs” as well as unorthodox noisemakers like horns, whistles, a washing machine, and a chicken. This was the hardest one to find of all of these.
1973: Paul Motian (with Keith Jarrett / Charlie Haden / Leroy Jenkins / Sam Brown / Becky Friend), Conception Vessel
Released 1973, but recorded on my birthday in 1972.
1974: Joe Henderson (with Alice Coltrane), The Elements
I have Kieran Hebden (aka Four Tet) in the note index, saying of this album “Anyone who wants to get into that cosmic spiritual jazz, it's the perfect route in.” Not wrong.
1974: Brian Eno, Here Come The Warm Jets
I have a ton of Eno in my collection, and his fingerprints are all over the musical history of the 70s (and beyond2), but I still wasn’t quite prepared for what I found here. My note index just has two words on it—“idiot energy”—apparently a phrase from Eno himself, indicating what he was going for. Squint at it just right and you might end up concluding that Eno almost invented punk here.
1975: Parliament, Mothership Connector
1975: Fela Kuti & Africa 70, Expensive Shit
1975: Dave Liebman, Drum Ode
Saxophonist Dave Liebman “flanked by no less than eight drummers and percussionists.” ECM’s editorial description says “To listen to Drum Ode is to swim in waves of rhythms, cross-rhythms, polyrhythms, to be carried along by tidal beats.” It’s good, but it’s also probably the most 70s-sounding thing on this list. The Parliament, by contrast, sounds surprisingly contemporary. And the Kuti, of course, sounds timeless.
1976: David Bowie, Station to Station
1977: Jon Hassell, Vernal Equinox
1978: Wire, Chairs Missing
1979: This Heat (self-titled debut)
1979: Art Ensemble of Chicago, Nice Guys
I grow ever more interested in the Art Ensemble of Chicago and the organization from which it stems, the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, or AACM. Polymath George Lewis—who plays trombone on this recording—has written a book about the AACM that looks like rewarding reading. Also, please add to my wishlist this 21-CD box set compiling the major works of the Art Ensemble of Chicago “and associated ensembles.”
1980: Takehisa Kosugi + Akio Suzuki Duo, New Sense of Hearing
Takehisa Kosugi was a member of Fluxus, known for his conceptual scores: his 1964 Events contain instructions for eighteen pieces, some of which might yield sonic interest (“Wrap a live microphone with a very large piece of paper. Make a tight bundle. Keep the microphone live for another 5 minutes”) and others that might not (“Roll up a long cord”). A later instruction—“stay in Taj Mahal for 24 hours, then return”—led to the formation, in 1969, of the terrific itinerant psychedelic performance group the Taj Mahal Travellers, for which Kosugi played violin.
Akio Suzuki’s first performance, “Throwing Objects Down a Staircase,” was in 1963. The performance consisted of him throwing miscellaneous objects down a staircase at Nagoya Station, a major railway station in Japan, until he was removed by staff. Before you scoff, check out this video of someone rolling assorted bottles down stairs and tell me it doesn’t yield at least as much sonic pleasure as the last song you heard.
1980: Bauhaus, In the Flat Field
I was more of a The Sky’s Gone Out fan in my teen years, but this one is more danceable and more fun. Is it #HotGothSummer yet? Related: Melissa Gira Grant’s playlist “goths in their summer clothes.”
1980: The Soft Boys, Underwater Moonlight
I’ve been a Robyn Hitchcock fan for decades now—I wrote a bit about him in these notes for a playlist to accompany my most recent novel. But I’d never heard the band where he got his start. Entertaining.
1981: Glenn Branca, The Ascension
Music for massed guitar ensembles, including a pre-Sonic Youth Lee Ranaldo. Fun fact: Branca would also be the first person to release Sonic Youth material (a self-titled EP in 1982, and the first LP (Confusion is Sex) in 1983, both on Branca’s Neutral label).
1981: The Cure, Faith
Considered part of the Cure’s “gloomy” trilogy, along with Seventeen Seconds (1980) and Pornography (1982). Despite my well-documented goth pretentions, I don’t know any of these three albums well.
That’s it for now. I’m enjoying the project immensely, in part because I’ve heard some great “new to me” albums and in part because doing the research about what to listen to next is a whole lot of fun. I’m looking forward to carrying on, and I might even start over when I finally reach to the present day. If you want to follow my progress a little more closely, I’m tracking my selections over at Bluesky.
It can feel a little bit anxiety-provoking to do the work of filling in my blind spots publicly—I half-expect someone to come out of the woodwork and say “you never heard Chairs Missing?”—although this fear is mitigated by the fact that I’ve never really found much value in trying to pass myself off as the kind of record snob who was born knowing it all. Posing as that guy who already has “a compilation of every good song ever done by anybody” always struck me as a good way to foreclose on your own curiosity, and the whole point of this newsletter in the first place is to document my sustained attempts to do the exact opposite.
So. Drop me a line and let me know your favorite albums from the 80s and beyond, and maybe I’ll give them a listen. What do you think I’ve missed? Or—better?—let me know the albums you’ve wanted to hear, but haven’t heard yet, and we can play this game together.
—JPB, writing in the week ending Wednesday, June 12, from Chicago, IL
It’s worth noting that Fisher thought that music had lost its capacity for nihilation, and that music was now stuck in a “postmodern-curatorial simultaneity,” and that this is why we no longer hear music that feels genuinely “futuristic.” Others disagree.
Some of you might be interested in Gary Hustwit’s new documentary, Eno, which pays homage to Eno’s interest in generative art and chance operations in a fascinating way: “Hustwit and creative technologist Brendan Dawes have developed bespoke generative software designed to sequence scenes and create transitions out of Hustwit’s original interviews with Eno, and Eno’s rich archive of hundreds of hours of never-before-seen footage, and unreleased music.” I was gonna catch a screening of this at Chicago’s Music Box, but it sold out.
A great read — & really enjoying listening thru a chunk of these, too.