Monday April 4 2022
The ten JD Twitch mixtapes on Optimo Music’s Bandcamp page create a sublime fifteen hours of music if you scronch them all together. Tones of winter into Jamaican cover songs into unknown psych? Look in my Respecting Eye and I say you have Chosen Well. Big problem: they’re sold out. So seek them out but do not despair if seeking things out is not your way. The JD Twitch SoundCloud page has many more mixes, all available for free download. Pick the genre you know the least about and start there.
Sam Valenti IV of Ghostly had me participate in one of his Herb Sunday posts. Contains: him saying nice things about me and, also, the playlist he asked me to make (which is sick). Also contains: me revealing my obvious wife guy tendencies.
It me, the EML Electrocomp 101 player.
Have you ever wished that Dr. John was a little less chopsy and bit more lost in the hardware store? Did you wish that Ben Sidran played with homemade instruments? Maybe that’s what David Michael Moore did between 1994 and 2015. There are only three songs from these sessions linked there, but they’re great and the full album is zoned. Floating in a cilantro mercury bath! Eric Deines of Ulyssa writes: “David Michael Moore, 71, is an artist and woodworker living in Rosedale, Mississippi. Moore makes his own instruments—zithers, harps, wooden drums, buzz boxes and dog bone xylophones. Using these ‘perverted,’ hybrid instruments—along with regular ones: piano, synths, drums—Moore makes ecstatic music that twirls amid zydeco, Sufi mystical music, and the prepared piano compositions of John Cage.”
I loved What About The Rest of Your Life by Sung. You can find them on Twitter. This books begins somewhere between drugs and dissociation and rockets away from there. Beautiful and weird and visceral.
The most beautiful and weird and visceral? That is Moses Sumney. We saw him at BAM on Wednesday. I accidentally made this GIF by using the photo function inside Twitter itself. A night of lessons and blessings.
At some point, Sumney said it had been five years since his last show. He said it a few times. It turns out that the last time he played Brooklyn, we were there. I think what I thought then, times nine hundred. Don’t take my word—Moses himself posted that it was “perhaps the best show I’ve ever played.”
A friend asked me how to describe Moses and I was kind of at a loss. What does anyone need to know? The physical beauty, the musical virtuosity, the combination of regal radiance and actual humility. The music (that’s a playlist of Moses I made for you) follows his voice and touches on so many different things I instantly feel stupid writing down “R&B” or “folk.” Very amazingly, you can watch all of Blackalachia on YouTube, which is the film Sumney made, or rather the staging he created for songs from both albums, which he then filmed in the Blue Ridge Mountains. That was the same staging he brought to BAM, slightly modified. Watch Blackalachia—seriously.
Molly Young’s Tell Me What To Read spreadsheet is also free. It will tell you what to read. I’m not kidding!
