NPR Music - The Contenders, Vol. 17: The songs we can't stop playing this week

Episode Date: September 24, 2024

We update our running list of the year's best songs with a slice of pop perfection from Oso Oso, harrowing sounds from Colin Stetson, a blissful journey with composer Christopher Rountree and more.Featured songs and artists:1. Oso Oso: "dog without its bark," from life till bones2. Christopher Rountree: "Almanac," from 3BPM3. Colin Stetson: "Hollowing," from The love it took to leave you4. Emily D'Angelo: "Freezing," from Freezing5. Lia Kohl: "Tennis Court Light, Snow," from Normal Sounds6. Gabriela Ortiz: Kauyumari, from Revolución DiamantinaQuestions, comments, suggestions or any feedback at all always welcome: [e-mail] pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

Well, Tom, we have worked together for, I don't know what, 20 years or more? 24 years. And I only just learned that you and I share a love of, well, kind of almost a hobby, but a love for recording sounds of our world. Oh, God, yes. I do this all the time with my iPhone, just recording whatever. I'm just so in tune with whatever ambient sounds are going on. Not only recording, but just.

paying attention to it in everyday life. Yeah. I mean, things as monotonous as pile drivers. And I think I know when you recorded this, was this in the old building when they tore all those buildings down outside? No, those were, there were some good ones there, but this is right, not long after we moved into this building, and they tore a building down.

And the beauty of pile drivers is if you can get one that ricochets off a couple of nearby buildings, because then, the rickishing has this phase shifting effect that creates its own kind of minimalist repeating rhythm

that is just amazing Well I remember when the pile drivers were happening at the old building I think I've told this story before I came into work

and I could hear that percussive sound and there's a frequency in there that's a tone in there as well and I thought what is Lars Gottridge listening to

I thought it was some industrial rock or something and I realized, oh, no, wait, it's the construction crew outside working on the buildings. I don't want to get too deep into all of this because we're actually going to talk more about found sounds and whatnot and how they find their ways into music. In fact, most of what we're going to play today are instrumentals. Some would fall under the ambient category.

But I actually, I want to start with one outlier of the week. It's from the band Oso-O-O-So. So this is a band from New York, from Long Beach, New York. They've got a new album out. It's called Life Tell Bones. And let's just hit this cut that I want to play. It's called Dog Without Its Bark, and then we can talk more about it after. All right.

Boys a sucker for little sounds that suddenly emerge at the end of a song that maybe we're there the whole time, which you weren't paying any attention to. Talk about the sounds of the world around you that you're just not paying any attention to. I love this song so much. This is very post-COVID music sharing, but we've got a Slack channel for the NPR music team. where we all share music with each other and turn each other on the new stuff. And not long ago, Lars posted a note about this band from Long Beach, New York, called Oso Oso. And he said something along the lines of, you know how you get a new record from Phoenix and maybe half the songs are great and the other half or just, you know, they're just okay. He said, this band Oso Oso has a new album that's like Phoenix, but where every song on the album is great.

And what's amazing about that note from Lars is I had just thought that exact same thing earlier that very morning because I had just discovered the record and put it on. I was like, wow, this is just like Phoenix. And there's like no skips. Right. No, it's definitely Phoenix-ish. And I thought of Jimmy Eat World, too, actually going back even further. Or, you know, maybe if Andy Schoff joined the emo pop band. Oh, Andy Scha.

Yeah. Definitely kind of a summertime Windows Down rocker musically. At least. I mean, lyrically, it's a little bit darker, but I think it's also kind of a masterclass in how to write a good pop song. I mean, it's so economical. Yeah, it's, it is perfect pop. So also is basically one guy, Jade Lillitree. And as you say, these songs, they feel so good. So catchy, but they do get into some pretty weighty stuff. He used to work with this guitarist named Tavish Maloney, who died after they put out their previous album in 2022. That record was called Sore Thumb. Is that not his brother? I think it's his cousin. Oh, it's his cousin. Okay, I thought it was a family member. Yeah. And, you know, even the name of this album, Life Tell Bones, he's asking questions about and reflecting on mortality.

And, you know, he sort of considers the purpose of life and how he choose to spend the time we have and whatnot. Well, and then this song, too, it's kind of a shattered summer daydream of love where the protagonist is casting himself as kind of helpless. and vulnerable and, you know, he'd like to be with this person, but then the daydream kind of bursts. And then there's this line, you know, where he's kind of like metaphorically bleeding out in a park, just a dog without its bark and putting himself in kind of a vulnerable position. Yeah, a sense of certainly grief and loss, but also of being trapped and unable to sort of escape the situation that you're in. But, man, it never sounded better.

I love this whole record. Everyone should check the whole thing out. Life, tell bones. And that song was Dog Without Its Bark, again from Oso Oso. Okay, now, Robin, are you ready for something totally opposite from a Windows Down summer rocker? Well, I mean, normally I keep all my windows up. So with the air conditioning, Craig. That's right.

So I'm always ready for the opposite of whatever Windows Down is. The outdoors for Robin Hilton is when you crack the window a half an inch. I actually love being outside. I just don't like this. Oh, well, this is music by Christopher Ruffington. And we're going to hear just a section from a half hour piece called 3BPM or 3 beats per minute. And what we're going to hear is called Almanac. And Christopher Roundtree is probably best known as the founder of this new music group from L.A. called Wild Up.

And they're pretty widely known now for their series of records resuscitating the music of Julius Eastman in these completely joyful, jubilant, in-your-face performances. But don't take my word for it. They did a tiny desk last year. As you know, you can go online and see that. And there are members of Wildup that are on this album, along with violist Nadia Sorota from Y Music and this piano duo called Hockett, more on them later. But I thought we just hear the very opening of the full piece.

The first few seconds of the full piece, so we get a sense of how this kind of voyage begins. There's this insistent tolling piano and then a whoosh of air that kind of usher us into the piece. So the album is called 3 beats per minute and it's like a half hour long piece and this is just the top of it?

Yeah. For me, this music is a journey. You know, it's through usually calming spaces. There are a few little episodes of euphoria. And you know, if you're looking for influences, there are whiffs of Brian Eno's

ambient music here, just kind of wafting around in the air. Also, this exuberance of Julius Eastman's music. But I think Roundtree really is creating a language of his own here. And when we get to Almanac, the section we're going to hear in its entirety, you've just been through this really joyous passage with these keening saxophones and thundering piano. And then all of a sudden, these misty, gently rolled piano chords that for me

are kind of like some portal opening in your mind that after this 30-minute journey, you've now traveled beyond yourself. I listened to this, and I think this could go on for an hour, and it would never stop being as transfixing as it is. It's Almanac. It's a section of a longer work by Christopher Roundtree, and I just love how it's recorded in between, that husky warmth that Nadia Soroda gets out of her viola,

kind of interweaving with a duo pianist. It's just radiant and serene and rapturous all at once. the piano is very closely mic to hear the mechanics ever so slightly of all the, you know, workings of the piano. And the way they recorded the viola as well, you can hear the bow, just the texture of the bow scraping against the strings. Oh, it's beautiful. So nice.

There's a terribly sad coda here, though, that we should just mention that this final music from 3BPM Almanac that we've just heard also seems to... This closes out the... This closes out like this half-hour piece. It's kind of a fitting space and even a send-off for one of the pianists that we just heard on the album, Sarah Gibson, one half of the piano duo called Hockett. She died July 14th of colon cancer two days after this was released. She was 38. She was also a composer, and it was just an extraordinary gut punch for the new music community, especially around L.A.

many people still deeply grieving this loss. So get a colonoscopy, people. I mean, it's earlier and earlier, too. It's just 38. Oh, my gosh. But it's also, I was just sharing some emails with a composer recently, and I said that it was a beautiful way to remember her. And he said, absolutely, this is what I'm going to remember her with.

I was going to ask if you wanted to get geeky about how he composed it, because it is kind of interesting in that it's, whole open-ended thing. I always want to get geeky about how things are recorded, Tom. I'm going to read you what he said because he says here, each bar of music spans the unusual distance of one entire line of the score, and each line marked with a duration of exactly 20 seconds. And at the end of each 20-second increment of the piece,

we hear an expansive pulse, one gentle envelope of hiss and breath from a modular synth. and this sound, a pulse at three beats per minute, that's where the piece gets its title, 3BPM. It serves as a conductor, he says, a judge, a reminder, a foundation to teach the musicians how their perception of time differs from reality. Wow, okay, so that makes sense then

if it takes 20 seconds to play one bar of music, but this is because he's playing it actually at only three beats per minute. We're going to have to write him a letter. That would be one, that would be one, one beat per 20 second bar. But I think his concept of beat is got to be different because there are sections of the piece that I was referring to earlier where there are, where it's much faster pace, there are saxophones screaming at each other, this thunderous piano and everything. And that seems to go a lot faster. And again, that record is three BPM beats per minute.

And that's round tree, not round tree. R-O-O-U-N-T-R-E. That's right. Roundtree, Christopher Roundtree. Tom, do you like horror movies? Are you a horror movie fan? Do you like scary movies? Not exactly, although I'm very picky about them.

So The Shining is my favorite, but, you know, I haven't seen... That feels, that's a great feel-good movie. I haven't seen all the Texas Chainsaw Massacres or all the Freddie Kruger movies. Oh, God. Now, I don't do, I really do like scary movies, but I don't do slasher movies. That's like a ground rule. So I haven't seen any of those. No, I'm not watching any of that stuff.

But I love a good, creepy, ghost story or supernatural kind of story. And I have found, at least for me anyway, you know, I really love film scores. I listen to so many film scores. And my favorites tend to be from scary movies. You talk about The Shining. Wendy Carlos' score for The Shining is incredible. But one of the best horror movie scores in recent years for me was the one for Herald. Hereditary that Ari Aster film, and the saxophonist Colin Stetson did it.

It was such a surprise to hear this incredible haunting score from him. Truly terrifying. You've seen Hereditary. I have not. What? But I have to tell you, I'm not surprised to know that Colin Stetson is scoring movies because I've always thought his music is perfect for that. It's instrumental. It's intense.

It's in your face. and it's multicolored and there's a lot of emotion going out. Yeah, and he can do so much with the instrument. He has a new solo album out now that is not for any film, but I also think it is very creepy album. It could be for film. It certainly could, because it is still very cinematic. It's very unnerving, I think.

It's called The Love It Took to Leave You. And the song I want to play from it is called Halloween, Halloween. And going into it, just know that everything you, hear in this song is happening in real time. There's no multi-tracking, no overdubs, all the rhythms, all the sounds, everything you hear. It's from Colin Stetson, all in one take. So you hear that, you think, how is it possible that one person could be doing all of that at the same time and there's no looping and no overdubbing and no multitracking, no special effects, no plug-ins, no pedals, nothing.

And I love that percussive galloping effect he gets from tapping super hard on the valves of the instruments. This relentless thing that goes on through two-thirds of the thing and then all of a sudden it stops like we've fallen off a cliff. Right. Then what takes over is this cry of a feral beast in pain. It's horrifying. Which is him yelling through the tubes of that contra-based clarinet that he's playing.

It's unbelievable. It's incredible. He has, I sent a note to him asking him exactly, because I wanted to confirm that this is in fact happening in real time and there's no other trickery. He said he has 36 microphones, 36 microphones inside and around the saxophone. And he has a contact microphone on his throat, plus two little microphones by his nose. And he does all of this with this circular breathing technique. And I thought maybe, Robin, if we could just play the opening of another track on the album, which is called Green and Gray and Fading Light,

which has a different lighter, floatier feel than what we just heard, notice this big breath he takes at the very beginning to kind of launch this continuous stream of sound. And we should note that circular breathing, if you don't know what it is, It's this technique where you're actually inhaling and exhaling at the same time. I do some scoring work, and I wrote this piece for Woodwinds one time, and someone looked over it, and they said, well, you've got to leave room in here for them to actually take a breath. You've got to, you've got to pause at some point. They've got to take a breath. Not when it's Colin Stetson.

You don't. Just get him to play this. And supposedly, he learned how to do this in one afternoon. I don't know if you know this, but... Really? It's impossible. I just... I studied and performed a traditional Indonesian music in college, and we had a guy in our group, a gamelan orchestra,

who played the suing, the flute. And he tried to teach some of us one afternoon. He was a circular breather, and he tried to teach us how to do this one afternoon. And it was just, it's impossible. Yeah. Again, the album from him is called The Love It Took to Leave You. What a title.

Like, I have just... meditated just on the name of this record a lot. And the song that I played is called Hollowing, and then that one that we just heard, green and gray and fading light. Oh, what an incredible record. Well, Colin Stenson uses his voice in a very unconventional way,

like kind of yelling through all those tubes of his saxophones and clarinets and whatever. But I love the voice in any way, shape, or form. And especially when you come across, you ever come across a voice that just kind of like throws you back and you're like, oh, my gosh. Yeah, I mean, and honestly, it doesn't happen very often. It does not.

I mean, where it's just like, what is this? Yeah. And that happened to me a couple years ago with this singer, this mezzo soprano from Toronto named Emily DiAngelo. She released a record two years ago that was just dynamite, one of my favorite records of the year, and she has a brand new one out called Freezing. And I thought we'd listen to the title track of that. It's music by Philip Glass with words by Suzanne Vega. And you might be familiar with it if you know Philip Glass's. album from the 80s called Songs from Liquid Days where he teamed up with different songwriters.

Laurie Anderson. Paul Simon and stuff like that. But here's a new version of it, rearranged for a small group of instruments, and just listen to not only the regal warmth and deep, dark, lavender color of this voice, but just how her phrasing is just so perfect. Her voice is extraordinary, and I want to talk more about it, but I have to say, that electric guitar that comes in in that last quarter or so. Scorching.

Oh, it is so good. So, yeah, I mentioned the Philip Glass record, and on that record, the song Freezing is sung by Linda Ronstadt, and Emily DiAngelo put it on her new record, along with a lot of other non-operatic things, folk music from Ireland and Scotland, a Randy Newman song. And, you know, there are a number of threads that run through the record,

and one of them is there are songs. that she has sung since she kind of began her singing as a young person in a children's choir. And one of the songs that she sang was by the Hungarian composer Zoltang Kodai, a very simple song called Evening Song. And I thought maybe we'd just listen to the first few bars of that, just to give the listener a sense of what the voice sounds like in another context. And here's an example of where less is more. This was a choral piece, and now it's just Emily DiAngelo's voice and a piano, and it just sounds so gorgeous.

Peaceful words, the dusk descending. Oh, it sounds so nice with just the piano. Yeah. Oh. And every phrase is just so natural, but it's, you know, when you get down to it as the nuts and bolt of being a singer, they are exquisitely constructed phrases. They are so perfect. And yet they don't sound manipulated or manufactured. And that is a work of art.

Very beautiful. Have you heard her sing full on opera? Like, can she just go all out when she wants to? Like, yeah. She has a huge career in Europe, not so much here. But last night, she opened the Met season in a new opera written for her called Grounded, which I saw during its first run here in Washington, D.C., at the Washington National Opera. So I can't wait to just follow this voice into its maturity because it's just a splendor.

Yeah, same. Freezing, again, is the new album from Emily DiAngelo. So let's go back to what we were talking about at the top of the show and our love of ambient sounds. Oh, yeah. You sent me some recordings that you've made on your phone, and one of them that I just absolutely love. You say you recorded at a family cabin, where is it, up in upstate Michigan? Yeah, we have a 60 acre, a cabin on 60 acres, a deep. in the woods of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan

that's been in my family since 1960. And if you're lucky and you're there on a full moon night, you will hear wolves and you will hear coyotes. And there's a huge difference between the two. Sometime I'll bring you a coyote recording, which is you would love it because we were speaking about horror movies. Oh my God.

It's like wild goblins ripping through flesh. But the wolves are opera. It's so amazing. amazing how songful and everything they are. I cannot tell you how jealous I am of this cabin. It's like, it just sounds like heaven on earth to me. And then when you sent me this recording of the wolves, I thought, oh, my gosh, I would just absolutely love to spend a night there and listen to all those sounds.

There is this new album out that NPR Music's Azel Sills turned me onto by an artist named Leah Cole. She's a cellist and a sound artist and, you know, a sound collageist. She has this new album called Normal Sounds, which is a perfect title. Great title. Normal sounds. And the songs are made up in part of field recordings like you grabbing just this recording, well, of the pile driver or whatever sounds are around you. And it's not really hard to place the sounds that she recorded. And she included on this record just based on the names alone, like there's a cut called Ice Cream Truck Tornado Siren, Airport Fridge, Self-checkout. There's another song called Car Alarm, Turn Signal, and those are the sounds that you hear in those songs.

And for someone like me, this is just the best ear candy in the world. And what she does with these sounds is just so beautiful. I want to play a cut from this record, Normal Sounds, from Lea Cole. The song, and it's a song, the song is called Tennis Court Light Snow. This is true poetry. You know, Leah Cole calls this whole album a love letter to the part of her brain that just can't stop listening to everything all the time. And man, do I get it. Oh, I know.

I had not heard of Leah Cole before you turning me on to this for this session. And I just thought, the first thing I thought when I started listening to her music is, oh, man, I so want to meet her. Yeah. Because she's an artist after my own heart. Yeah. As someone who's played a lot of tennis at night under lights. The buzz of buzz lights. I just love how delicately she teases the music out of the buzzy frequency of the tennis court lights with harmonics on her cello, this inquisitive bass and some swishing synths.

And then later you get that crunch, crunch, crunch of walking on through crisp snow. It's just so, it's so beautiful. Yeah, yeah. You know, what's interesting to me is that she uses these sounds sort of in the raw, you know, as they are unmanipulated. Like a lot of artists will take field recordings and turn them into sample-based instruments and tune the sounds. Right. You know, so that you can play them on a keyboard. Which is cool, too.

Yeah, I mean, it's very, very cool. But she finds the music in the natural sounds themselves. In fact, on that song we heard tennis court light snow, she is playing in tune with the buzz of the tennis court lights. And I wasn't quite sure what it was. I put a tuner on it to listen. And I think the whole song's basically in the key of E. And that buzz is in E. I think that's basically the frequency she's playing with.

You know, I think the bigger lesson is I used to teach at New Mexico State University. I taught an introduction to radio production class. And the first day of every class, I played for the students, John Cage's 4 Minutes 33 seconds. And I said, what do you hear? And most often, you know, they'd say, I don't hear anything. I don't hear anything. Because if you don't know, 4 minutes and 33 seconds is a famous John Cage piece where the pianist or whomever it is goes up. And then nothing happens for 4 minutes and 33 seconds.

It's supposedly silence. But, of course, everything is happening. So they said, I don't hear anything. And then I'd point out like, oh, well, there's the buzzing of the fluorescent lights. There's a distant slam of a door. There's people talking outside the window. There's the ticks and pops of the vinyl album, all just to try to like fine tune their hearing to get them to realize that these quote unquote mundane sounds or noises. It's to respect them as a sonic language.

Yeah, 100%. I am so tuned in with all the little sounds, and I love all the little sounds, too. You know, like, we've got this really squeaky door latch. My wife's like, when are you going to replace that? And I was like, there's no way I'm replacing that latch. I love that squeak of that. There's no WD40 in your house. No, absolutely not. Or, you know, like, that door creaks. When are you going to fix that creaky door? I'm like, I'm not fixing that creaky door. I love that creaky door. So, yeah, I just love it.

But this, yeah, this Leah Cole record, this is my jam. I mean, honestly, if I were stranded on a desert island, give me this to listen to. It's truly wonderful music. Well, you know, there's another way to wield natural sound that comes from just like about 125 instruments. It's called a symphony orchestra. I've heard of this. You've heard of those? Yeah, I mean, I, you know, I read. One of the people that I think is really an exciting, rising composer who really knows how to wield a symphony orchestra is this composer named Gabrielle Ortiz. I know if you've heard of her, she's from Mexico. No. She's having a moment. She's just starting this month, her year-long. residency at Carnegie Hall as the composer in residence, so there'll be a number of premieres of her works. And just in the last four years, she's had 10 major orchestral world premieres of amazing pieces, most of them championed by conductor Gustavo Dutamel and the L.A. Philharmonic.

So she's in very good company, and he's a champion of her music. And there is a record of three of her orchestral pieces that just came out in July. The record is called Kayumari, and I thought we'd listen to a little bit of the beginning of it, just to get us into the music because it starts out as this very quietly, like a primordial world awakening. There's a low gong called the Tom Tom, a shaker, a little bass drum with heart plucking in the very low register, in the low grown of double basses, and then a pair of trumpets set aside the stage. They're not in the back of the orchestra.

She puts them off to the side, and they give us the theme. So let's listen to that. And then we'll listen to what happens to that theme later. That's the opening of Cayamati. And over the course of seven minutes, this theme that we just heard in the trumpets undergoes a whole lot of costume changes. the music just kind of blooms in its intensity

and the theme is actually an old melody from the Huichel people, from the Halisco state of Halisco in Mexico over on the Pacific coast. And it represents the blue deer, which is a spiritual guide used in the peyote ceremonies where you can try to get in touch with your ancestors. Well, I had read that,

I didn't know that about the peyote. part of it, but I had read about the Blue Deer as being sort of a spiritual guide, and I thought that seems so appropriate because this song really does take you on a journey. It is just a breathtaking range and evolution from where it starts to where it ends, and we're going to hear that. Right. Let's move up about three and a half minutes or so, and you can really hear kind of how wizard-like Gabriel Ortiz orchestrates this very large symphony orchestra and things really get into a wonderful groove with Duda Malian conduct.

the LA Philharmonic. There's this wild harp glisando that kicks off this next iteration of this whirling theme. So we'll go out on this from Gabriella Ortiz. The piece is Cayumari. Thanks so much, Tom, as always, for just hanging out and turning me on to some great music. Always a joy, Robin. And for NPR music, I'm Robin Hilton. It's all songs considered.