I’m very excited about today’s show because our guest deejay is Adrian Utley!
Most likely you know Adrian from Portishead, the band that put trip hop on the map late last century. Or you many know Adrian more recently for the work he did with Will Gregory for the soundtrack to the motion picture Arcadia, which I featured on the first episode of SOUNDWAVE. Adrian is a man who cares deeply about his craft and his love of sound and music is expressed in any project he is involved with.
I want to give special thanks to Charles Hazelwood for putting me in contact with Adrian. After Charles’s mix for SOUNDWAVE went live I asked him who he knew personally who might be interested in participating in the show and he suggested Adrian and Hannah Peel (who will be our guest deejay on next week’s show). It’s little things like that that make this show feel special and more intimate. At least to me, anyway.
Okay, time for me to wrap this up. My family and I are going to take a little but much needed vacation and get away from the wildfires and earthquakes that have wracked California.
I just got back from a 4th of July party with my wife’s unit so I’m going to keep this short and sweet.
If you’re new to the show, I launched SOUNDWAVE to help cope with the stress of the first month of the lockdown due to COVID-19. Ambient, classical, experimental and instrumental music was the only music I could listen at that time. If it was helping me, I imagined it would help others.
Today was the first time in over four months of the lockdown I’ve been around this many people at once. It was great! It felt completely normal. And it gave me a charge. But I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that I was a little uneasy. Four months will do that to you.
If you’re in the U.S., I hope you had a fine holiday. For everyone in the world, I hope you’re having a lovely weekend.
We just got home and we’re winding down and this is the perfect opportunity to jot down today’s show notes. Our guest for today’s show is Gert De Meester of Distant Fires Burning.
I met Gert when I reached out to David Newman, founder of Audiobulb Records to participate on the show with a mix. David took pass but suggested I contact Gert and Kirk Markarian. I owe David because Kirk’s mix was fantastic and I’ve been waiting impatiently to take Gert’s mix live. I know you’re going to love it!
Gert’s going to rap with you about his mix below. Before I go, please join us again next week when our guest deejay is Carmen Rizzo. You’re in for a treat.
See you then!
Gert De Meester
Our first track is Autistici’s “Wire Cage For Tiny Birds.” Something that allways has attracted me to Autistici’s music, is the sense for new sounds and intricate sounddesign. This has allways been reflected in my music. I am quite happy with the fact that David has released my last album on his Audiobulb label. It fits there perfectly.
“K & J” is the opener of my last album. You hear a Jazzbass processed through ableton and a stockload of effects, basically my livesetup. “K & J” are the two most important people in my life.
Our third track is Taylor Deupree’s “Northern”. Taylor has allways been of great influence on me, besides Tim Hecker and Biosphere. But in Taylor’s music, I really find beauty, reminiscence, maybe a bit of wanderlust. It’s that freedom that speaks to me, that encounter with the new, but allways the hint at nature and down to earth noises.
“Scrape To Touch” is by Neuro… No Neuro and is one of my best labelmates and I saw him grow immensely in music making. His music really cought me by surprise as I host a Spotify playlist and i listen to all Audiobulb albums to give them a fair chance of getting included (me and David get along quite well, musically). But Kirk’s music really caught me on a permanent level.
“Geomagnetic Disturbance” is one of the first tracks where the Jazzbass got incorporated in my music. It was an outtake of 2010’s album Build on Me on U-Cover CDR Limited, but it got picked up by these great people of Consouling Sounds for this compilation. Quite a lot Hecker inspired, but hey, everybody’s got to learn sometimes…
Our last track is Svær’s “Broken Waltz Of Fukushima”. (Such a great 2019 discovery. He played as support of Tim Hecker in Brussels in 2019. What a great show that was, connected with him on Facebook, discovered he was a fellow Belgian too. And all of a sudden I got a message he released his debut album, the rest is history…
Let me rehash some stuff with you before we got to today’s excellent show featuring a lustrous mix from Sean Horton.
I launched SOUNDWAVE because it was my way of coping with COVID-19. My wife is away for the next month with her unit and our kids our with their dad for the foreseeable future. It’s just me and my dog. Work keeps me busy during the day but at night it gets lonely. I found myself listening to a lot of ambient, classical, experimental and instrumental music and I decided to share it with my friends and created the show you’re listening to now.
My intention was to release a new show once a month. After the first show I decided I would release SOUNDWAVE weekly until the stay at home order ends. But then it occurred to me that pretty much everyone else on the planet is also stuck at home so I invited friends, deejays, musicians, producers, etc to participate on the show. And that brings us to our first guest deejay, Sean Horton.
I interviewed Sean Horton for solipsistic NATION to talk about Decibel Festival, an annual music and digital arts festival in Seattle that ran from 2004 to 2015. Decibel Festival was unique platform for exposing attendees to leading-edge multimedia art from around the globe. With a focus on live performance, interactive multimedia art, state-of-the-art sound and technology based education; Decibel solidified itself as one of the premier electronic music festivals and promotional organizations in the world. In 2014, Sean was named #43 on Rolling Stone’s “50 Most Important People in EDM.”
Sean also records under them name Nordic Soul where he distills his love for techno, house, hip hop, jazz, soul, industrial, ambient and dub. As Nordic Soul, Sean has shared the stage with an eclectic mix of musicians from Grimes to Moby to The Orb to Major Lazer to… well, the list goes on. Sean has also performed at several major festivals world-wide, including Dimensions (Croatia), MUTEK (Montreal) and Communikey (Boulder). Nordic Soul has released music on a wide variety of labels including K Records, Buttermilk Records, Peloton and basic_sounds.
Given all that, you understand Sean was one of the first people I invited to join me and SOUNDWAVE. Funny thing, Sean and I have struck up a friendship online which moved from talking about music to our favorite books, tv shows and movies and then to living under COVID-19. An unexpected and welcome development of the pandemic. I look forward to meeting Sean in Los Angeles after this dies down a bit and hoisting a pint with him. From a safe six feet, of course.
Sean has crafted a beautiful mix, but I expected no less from him. Prepare for an emotional journey and see where it takes you. I’ll let Sean introduce his mix below. I know you’re going to love it just as much as I do.
I’ll see you all next week when we are joined by our next guest deejay, my old and dear friend, Steven Howard.
Sean Horton
During this time in isolation I’ve been rediscovering my love of ambient music. I first discovered ambient music working at Harmony House records in Detroit my junior year in high school in 1992. It was the early days of the Rave Movement and Detroit was a hot bed for warehouse parties and Techno Music at the time. This was also a remarkable time where nearly every Rave would have two rooms, a “Dance Room” and an “Ambient Room.” I was an “Ambient Room” individual largely in part because I fell in love the music.
Out of all of the ambient music albums I’ve encountered over the years, the two that I come back to the most are the first and second ambient albums I ever knowingly experienced, Brian Eno’s Apollo: Atmospheres and Soundtracks and Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works Vol. 2. This mix features two of my favorite selections from each album.
Historically ambient music has predominantly been characterized as synthetic, but over the past fifteen years or so there has been growing movement of more organic forms of ambient music and film scores which are often referred to as neo classical (i.e. Nils Frahm, Max Richter, Ólafur Arnalds, Hauschka, Jóhann Jóhannsson , Hildur Guðnadóttir, Stars of the Lid, etc.). Where Ambient music fueled my teen-early 20’s love of electronic music; neo classical music fueled my love of melody and organic tone. I firmly believe that both ambient and neo classical music can and should co-exist.
This particular mix evolved out of a playlist I put together in late March 2020 featuring some of my favorite ambient and neo classical artists and songs. As common with a lot of ambient music, these selections are all void of rhythm and nearly void of all voice. That said, this is an ideal mix for reading, writing, sleeping, meditation, yoga, etc. My hope is this mix will instill a sense of calm and mental clarity with the listener.
Last night my girlfriend watched I T2 Trainspotting. I haven’t seen Trainspotting since it was released back in 1996 and I thought it’d be fun to revisit those lovable junkies and hooligans from the first movie. And it was fun. The dialogue was whip-smart and the cinematography was was breathtaking and the actors were fantastic. But it was fun in a Trainspotting sort of way because it you remember the first movie it was about a bunch of Gen X kids who use heroin because they’re lives have been hallowed out by Thatcherism, consumerism and boredom. In T2 Trainspotting we get to revisit those characters except this time they’re older, a little thicker in the middle and they’re nostalgic while at the same time they’re considering they’re mortality.
I’m a Gen X kid. I’m older. I’m a little thicker in the middle. I think about my mortality. But I’m not nostalgic. The 90s were just another decade for me and then I moved on. Each decade had it’s peaks and valleys and some friends dropped out of my life but they were replaced by new friends. But the 90s were special, special to me, anyway, because I was a young man with a bright future ahead of me and my life was so vivid because I was experiencing everything for the first time. I got to fall in love as an adult for the first time. I also got to experience my first heartbreak as an adult. I got to meet friends for the first time that I’ll probably know until the day I die. Or until they die. Hopefully they go first.
And I was always listening to music and the first five songs you’ll hear on today’s show were part of the soundtrack to my life at that time. The stuff is heavy. As usual, I listened to a lot of different kinds of music back in the 90s, everything from hip hop to avant-garde jazz, but hardcore and industrial was the music that I really responded to. Can you blame me? America was fighting in the first Gulf War and it was clear that it was going to come back and bite us in the ass further down the road. The Republican and Democratic parties were just starting to become recalcitrant and hyper-consumerism was becoming a cultural value.
I’ll see you again next week. I promise it won’t be as heavy as today’s show. See you then!
Today’s a special show because this will be The Weekly Mix’s first broadcast on Bondfire Radio!
Bondfire Radio is an internet radio station our of Brooklyn. I first heard about the station when Macedonia from the Both Sides of the Surface podcast started spinning there a year or so ago. Macedonia has exquisite taste in music so I figured anything he was involved in and was passionate about was worth listening to, so I tuned in. And loved what I heard. So much so that when I launched The Weekly Mix I approached Keisha and asked if she’d be interested in carrying my show. I’m thrilled that I’ve been invited to be part of their family and rather than try and tell you what Bondfire Radio is all about I thought it would be easier, and more fun, to have Keisha talk about the station.
You can tune into my show on Bondfire Radio every Friday at 11:30 AM, Eastern Standard Time.
I’m constantly contacting record labels to send me promotional CDs so I can deliver to you the finest in all genres of electronic music. Recently I received a batch of experimental electronic music CDs from Accretions, an artist-based independent music label with an ear towards experimental, improvisational and global sounds. When I checked the mailing address I was surprised to find that they are based in San Diego, California.
I regard San Diego as a patch of paradise in the US. The city is absolutely beautiful. The weather is always clement and the people are warm and friendly. But San Diego is definitely not a metropolitan city. In fact, San Diego is often referred to as a big city that think it’s a small town, so you can appreciate my wonder that San Diego is also the home to a record label that offers some of the most innovative and exciting music out there.
I asked Accretions’ Marcos Fernandes to join us on this week’s solipsistic NATION to talk about the label and play select tracks of music from their roster of artists. Prepare to have your mind blown!
I’ve touched on ambient music on solipsistic NATION in the past but I thought it was time to have an entire episode dedicated to this genre.
Ambient music is ambiguous and open-ended in scope, including everything from Erik Satie‘s Trois Gymnopédies suite to Brian Eno‘s atmospheric On Land album. My own definition of ambient music is a bit narrower in that I don’t think of pieces like Satie’s Gymnopédies as ambient music. While Gymnopédies is certainly a work of quiet genius I consider it more of an instrumental piece.
I think of ambient music as music that is near formless, something that is amorphous and nebulous. It’s more about sounds that evoke a mood than a series of rhythmic patterns.
Hello to all of you in Berlin who tuned in for today’s show.
In the early eighties there was a punk band called MDC and they frequently changed their name to a different acronym with every new record released. Some of the names included Millions of Dead Cops, More Dead Cops, Millions of Dead Children, Multi Death Corporations, Millions of Damn Christians and Missile Destroyed Civilization. The woman I was dating at the time and her friend would come up with their own acronyms for MDC and one them that struck me was Master of Dead Contortions. If there was ever a more appropriate name for today’s mix then Master of Dead Contortions is it.
I’ve noticed that a lot of electronic music podcasts are usually 30 minutes in length while my shows usually clock in an hour. Even without the interviews that sometimes occur on Solipsistic Nation I feel that I need an hour to really take you on a journey.
So here’s the question: would you prefer 30 minute installments of solipsistic NATION or do you think the show should continue to run for an hour? You can post your answer at solipsisticnation.com or email me at solipsisticnation@gmail.com.
