Today’s show is very special to me. I suppose I say that about every edition of SOUNDWAVE but this edition is particularly special to me.
When COVID-19 hit the U.S. and we all went under self-quarantine I found that I couldn't listen to music. All the bands and musicians I used to enjoy no longer spoke to our new reality. They sounded vapid and out of touch. The only music I found that I could listen to or gave me solace was ambient, classical, experimental and instrumental music. There were no lyrics to distract me and I could impose any meaning I wanted.
At the time I was listening to Warren Ellis’s now defunct podcast and reading his newsletter. Ellis turned me on to Paleowolf earlier in the year so I trusted his taste in music. When he recommended Acoxaca’s album, In Abeyance the Devouring Flame album I did not hesitate to buy it and listen to it immediately.
In Abeyance is a quietly sublime album.
It’s a mournful album that resonated with what I was experiencing in my insular world. And somehow in that mourning I felt a spiritual and emotional release from my woes, if only for a little while. And I clung to that respite like someone clinging to a life raft. I played that album over and over and over again.
It’s also a minimal album but the more I listened to it the more I heard. I remember one listening experience deep into the night I thought I heard a car alarm. But it wasn’t a car alarm. It was a wailing sound buried deeply in the mix. I kept finding things like that in In Abeyance.
In Abeyance was released on the Other Forms of Consecrated Life music label. I was so on love with the album that I purchased every album from the label. Like In Abeyance, each album is a singular experience and one that I revisited repeatedly.
When I launched SOUNDWAVE I reached out to E & S at Other Forms and asked if they’d put together a mix for the show. I wanted to share the music that got me through a difficult stretch of the lockdown. Maybe you’ll find solace in it, too. And if you love the music you hear on today’s show I encourage you to purchase the albums and share it with anyone you think needs to hear it.
E &S will share their thoughts on today’s mix below.
Join us next week when our guest deejay will be Daniel McCagh.
See you then!
This mix is a small label sampler for Other Forms of Consecrated Life, a platform for experimental artists with an interest in audiovisual phenomena, hypnagogia, or dissociative states. The mix begins with low, pulsing drones from the archive of Lynette Sandholm Evvers, a chromesthesic, whose work has been favorably compared by Disquiet to Éliane Radigue. It then continues with the choral, eremitic musics of The Penitential Station and Acoxaca, before concluding with the more abrasive sounds of Tepe Gawra and Elizabeth Cottern, the latter whose album was described by Brainwashed as an ‘instant classic’.
- Lynette Sandholm Evvers “Photism”
- The Penitential Station “The Powers of the Soul and the Manner of Her Working”
- Acoxaca “In Abeyance the Devouring Flame”
- Tepe Gawra “Tholoi, C”
- Elizabeth Cottern ”Akoasm I”
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