RECOMMENDED LISTENING
May 2020
by Margaret Welsh for Women in Sound
For music submissions, please email info@womeninsound.com.
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May 27, 2020
When you found forever
Painted zeros
Don Giovanni
Shooting the video for “Commuter Rage,” the first single from When You Found Forever, Katie Lau, who makes music as Painted Zeros, was hesitant. Director Jess Coles wanted it to focus almost entirely on Lau’s face, “which was just so unappealing to me at first,” she told the blog Adhoc, who premiered the video on March 11.
“But then I was like, you know what? Fuck it. No more fear.”
A couple of months later, that video feels oddly anticipatory of the way we now interact with the world. On Zoom calls, in our bathroom mirrors, reflected on our laptop screens while we watch TV, we’re all being forced to deal with our own faces. And worse -- there’s all the emotional stuff to confront too: our deep fears and resentments, the relationship traumas we let fester, the various unhealthy coping mechanisms (oh God, the coping mechanisms!).
When You Found Forever finds Lau a little ahead of the curve on that kind of processing, too. For one thing, a little after her 2015 debut full-length, Floriography, she got sober.
She addresses that directly on “Fuck My Life” which, at a joggy pop-punk pace, recalls some of Lau’s low points: “What a waste, I was wasted, I was so board with myself,” she sings, building to a cathartic bellow as the tempo drops: “I know one thing for sure, it’s bad, its bad!”
Floriography is a lovely collection of lo-fi fuzz-pop, but lolls in comparison to the jagged clarity of When You Found Forever, which sometimes feels like an emotional exorcism, or a slightly experimental off-Broadway musical.
Here, Lau’s voice -- and by extension, her feelings, discoveries, and damning proclamations -- are really meant to be heard, unburied by the foggy reverb that swallowed them on Floriography.
It’s not just that Lau got sick of getting fucked up. When she sings “I’ve grown tired of this charade,” over low drum beats and shimmery cymbals on “Glass Threads,” it sounds like a gentle confrontation of everything and everyone that has ever held her back.
Lau’s brutal honesty and slightly flattened vocals brings to mind Liz Phair (I guess everyone in indie rock sounds a little like Liz these days, and I certainly don’t mind). But Painted Zeros keeps true to its shoegazey foundation too, giving lots of textural zone-out space between sharp lyrical observations and hooky adrenaline.
But my favorite thing about this record may be the moments of cogent anger, delivered with the smiling bite many of us wish we could summon when faced with, say, the defiantly maskless (just a random example!).
“If I was socialized like these jerks who believe that they’re gifts from God/and my words and opinions were half as heard as yours” Lau sings on “Commuter Rage,” her voice bouncing along jammy, rumbling guitar lines, “I could transform this toxic culture to be your benevolent overlord.” We could do a lot worse.
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When You Found Forever will be released on May 29, 2020 through Don Giovanni Records. Pre-order it here.
May 27, 2020
UPPER LIMITS OF NORMAL (20th anniversary reissue)
Analog Tara
In the year 2000, Tara Rodgers released Upper Limits of Normal, a dense, groovy auditory experience that was informed by Rodger’s expertise in electronic sound and improvisational music as well as her experiences playing piano in New York jazz clubs in the ’90s. At the end of April she released a 20th anniversary edition of the record on Bandcamp.
There’s that well-known fashion rule: what’s “in” now will be back again in 20 years. As Y2K vibes crop up in everything from Lancome’s lip gloss line to discussions about past global crises, we can hope that Upper Limits of Normal -- now easily accessible -- will find its way to a brand new audience.
Rodgers, also known as Analog Tara, is a historian and accomplished academic as well as a self-taught musician and composer. Around the time she released Upper Limits of Normal, she launched Pinknoises.com, which promoted women in electronic music and aimed to make information about music production and recording more accessible to women and girls. A decade later, Duke University Press put out Pink Noises: Women on Electronic Music and Sound, which featured interviews Rodgers had conducted with women working in electronic music. It was the first work that looked beyond the mostly male, mostly Anglo face of the genre. But, Rodgers told fellow musician and academic Ted Coffey in a 2019 interview, the sustained impact of Pink Noises on artists around the world surprised her.
“When I was working on it, one of the main challenges was how to handle the subject of contemporary music technologies and practices in a way that would stand up over time and not become dated as technologies change,” she said. “That was one of the reasons why I used very open-ended questions in the interviews. Ten years on, it's nice to see that this maybe worked! The artists’ discussions of their creative processes are so rich and still relevant.”
Much of the same could be said for Upper Limits of Normal. Like any piece of art, it cannot be separated from a certain time and place, or from the technology of the time: for this record, Rodgers used a Yamaha A3000 sampler and an RMX1 sequencer to do, as she put it, “sample-based production on my own jams,” which featured piano, Hammond organ, synths, a drum machine and an electric guitar.
There’s an incredible amount of melodic variety on the record, and Rodgers is a master of layering and tension-building: the fun she had putting it all together is palpable and contagious.
For some, elements of Upper Limits of Normal will invoke nostalgia. Opening track “Defunkt (Take 3),” with its neon guitar wails and staticy, stuttering beats, feels warmly familiar, like the soundtrack to an old network cop drama, and calls up visceral memories of my first thrilling brushes with experimental art and underground dance parties.
But it remains futuristic, even now. And like her Pink Sounds interviews, the tracks have a feeling of open-endedness that keeps the record fresh and highly listenable. It ends up transcending time, because it seems to have been made just slightly outside of it. And two decades later, her creative process -- both then and now -- remains rich and relevant.
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Upper Limits of Normal, along with the rest of Tara’s digital discography, can be purchased here.
May 13, 2020
Myth of Equilibrium
C. Lavender
Editions mego
For most of us in quarantine, the things we miss the most are, at their core, energetic exchanges. The invisible transference that happens when you hug a friend, or when you’re in the same room as a person who is playing music. These essential, invigorating vibrations cannot, it seems, be properly transmitted through Zoom or Facebook live.
As a sound healer, Lavender Suarez -- who records under the name C. Lavender -- makes art that is seemingly characterized by this kind of dynamic interchange In addition to recording music (her new record, Myth of Equilibrium comes out May 15) she offers one-on-one sessions for people suffering from physical ailments (like the effects of chemotherapy, or chronic headaches) as well as harder-to-define maladies like emotional or creative blockage. Sound healing, as Suarez explained in an interview with Women in Sound in late April, “works with the idea that all sound is vibrational and has a psychoacoustic property.”
All sound interacts with your body, whether you notice it or not. “A sound healing practitioner,” Suarez says, “is using sound in such a way that they’re directing it towards a person’s body or creating sound around a person’s body. It’s about shifting things for the person within whatever their wellness goal is.” Since shelter-in-place began, Suarez, who is based in Brooklyn, has hosted online sound baths, and offers personal sound-healing remotely.
Myth of Equilibrium, recorded in a geodesic dome in the Catskill Mountains is, in a way, a snapshot of an unrecreatable event. I thought that, in contrast to the specific power of a live event or treatment, this record might feel relatively muted. But while a recording may never be a true substitute for an in-person experience, Myth is a testament to the potential power of recorded sound.
I listened to Myth a couple of times -- with headphones, as recommended -- while doing other things: cleaning, cooking, deleting emails. And as a purely musical experience, it’s compelling, beautiful, alive. Using her custom bass guitar and synthesizers, Lavender’s binaural recording builds un-sentimental soundscapes that hum and buzz like swarms of summer insects, at times building to rumbling, scraping, quasi-industrial noise. And as much as I tried to make it background music, Myth refused, gently (and sometimes not-so-gently) coaxing my attention from whatever else I was doing.
Practitioners of transcendental meditation compare the process of turning inward toward quieter thought (and, ultimately, increased awareness) to diving into an ocean. It’s easy, they say: all you have to do is take a proper angle and let go. So one morning I committed to listening to Myth in a similar way. I sat against the wall, hit play, and closed my eyes. As my mind slowly relaxed and the anxiety of stillness faded, my skin began to tingle. As layers of sound intensified I felt like I was gently falling, the way you sometimes do in a dream. My nose itched, my eyes watered. At the end I felt emptied out and emotionally raw, but also rested, a little more human, more connected to the rest of the world.
Myth may give you that, too, or it might give you something else. It might leave you inspired, or it might relieve you of your nagging headache. True equilibrium may be a myth, but it’s still possible to find some kind of balance. All you have to do is find the proper angle and dive in.
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Myth of Equilibrium will be released on May 15, 2020 through Editions Mego. Pre-order it here.
Lavender’s additional discography can be purchased here.
For sound healing appointments, visit lavenderhealer.com.
May 13, 2020
SONGS FOR JOHN VENN
Lou TURNER
Spinster Sounds
John Venn, the 19th century mathematician credited with creating the world’s most meme-able diagram, grew up in a religious household and for a time, before pursuing his ultimate calling, served as a priest.
Lou Turner relays this bit of trivia in her prose poem, “Will the Circle Be Unbroken,” a warm reconstruction of an afternoon spent with Nashville artist and musician Peggy Snow. Turner shows Snow a tattoo on her thigh, and Snow serves cheesecake which she tops with cherry yogurt “like a total genius.” Together they sing “Will the Circle Be Unbroken.”
“When I sing that song, I think of Willie Nelson, Benny and Joon and Venn Diagrams,” Turner tells Peggy. “She reaches over the table and picks up a beautiful wooden box with three intersecting circles painted on it and says, like this?”
Writing this record between 2017 and 2019, Turner developed a sense of kinship with Venn -- she, too, had grown up religious -- and his interlocking circles became a grounding symbol. “[T]he theme exists on this record in form as well as content,” she explains in the album one-sheet, “and the backing artists make up the form of my Venn diagram.” The record does feature a lengthy, overlapping roster of musicians and even more instruments: lap steel, pedal steel, omnichord, claranet, jaw harp, organ (to name a few) with Turner herself on guitar, flute, bass and percussion.
Finding root in Turner’s impressive songwriting skills -- itself rooted in American folk traditions and spiritual jazz (Alice Coltrane is one of her favorites) -- the arrangements unfold, petal-like, in subtly surprising directions. There’s the warm ’70s folk pop of “King Edward Avenue”; the golden-age-of-Nashville sheen of “Two Tributaries”; the rock ‘n’ roll swagger of “Measuring Tape.” “Flickering Protagonist” is full of trippy gear-shifts and psychedelic jazz-flute flourishes, but also flashes a bit of Turner’s punk cred (for more in that direction, check out Nashville free-rockers Styrofoam Winos, of which she is part).
But Turner’s most compelling gift may be her canny sense of detail. Personally, I’m hooked on “Alarmist Apology,” a bittersweet little tune that offers its own Venn Diagram of the idiosyncratic and conflicting emotions that come with fond memory: regret, longing, relief.
Growing up in Texas with a mother who was an avid hymn-singer, and a chronic harmonizer, Turner allows space for the mundane as well as the sublime, finding the overlap between the spiritual music of her upbringing and the flesh-and-blood current moment. Of “Flickering Protagonist,” she writes, “[i]t’s personal in the way it reclaims biblical references that I grew up with. I wanted to create my own narrative by juxtaposing and grounding those references with everyday present realities, like grocery shopping or replacing your car battery.”
In her poem, Turner asks Peggy if she remembers the verse in “Will the Circle Be Unbroken” about singing secular songs after being raised to sing hymns. “I tried to paraphrase it,” she says, “but I’ll include it here now.” She sings the verse which, in the context of the rest of the record, presents a false dichotomy. You remember songs of heaven / Which you sang with childish voice / Do you love the hymns they taught you / Or are songs of earth your choice?
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Songs for John Venn was released on April 3, 2020 through Spinster Sounds “on professionally dubbed FerroMaster C456TM cassette tape in a limited edition of 200, and on digital platforms.”
Lou’s additional discography can be purchased here.
