NPR Music - Viking's Choice: The year in catharsis and calm

Episode Date: December 31, 2024

NPR Music producer Lars Gotrich turns us on to lesser known corners of music from 2024: blooming drone-folk, richly textured jazz, Somali garage-rock, medieval metal and a bittersweet farewell from a beloved Athens psych-pop band. You can find more adventurous music and mixtapes via Lars' newsletter, vikingschoice.org. See 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

You know, Lars, we were talking before the show, and if there's a theme for this episode, maybe it should be purging because that's what you've been doing all year long, right? Yes. I've been getting rid of, I have too many records, which is actually a problem. Do you, though? Yes. Can you ever have, yes. Your basement, you're one of those people who have, like, stacks from floor to ceiling of records in your basement. I've got record shelves, but I've also got, you know, there are just boxes of things that don't have at place to put them.

And so I'm just trying to sell off or give away a bunch of records. And it's actually been really nice because you get to talk to people. And so we have a really nice conversation about music. And I will, you know, not hard sell them, but soft sell them on something that I, maybe they will. You don't have blonde on blonde? No, it's like, you don't have this weird, obscure drone record from 20 years ago. What is wrong with you? How could you not have this band, no one's heard of it?

Right. So how many records have you gotten rid of and what has been your best sort of deal that you've done? I haven't really counted, but somewhere between 5 and 700 records that I've sold this year. Wow. And a lot of them I sold for cheap. But the thing that I would be doing is that I would sell you a mystery box. Isn't everything that comes from you as far as music goes, a mystery? I think so.

It is to me. But basically, I would tell you one record you would get. Okay. And then there would be two or five more records sort of in that vein, and I would sell it to you for, you know, not too much money. Well, maybe this actually is an appropriate thing for this year, purging because purging can take on many forms, and we're going to talk about all the songs that stood out most to you this year

that sort of brought you catharsis and calm and escape. Yeah. Let's do something that's maybe a little bit of both. There's this duo from the UK, Arian Rich Churchman and Benedict Drew, they are both visual artists, and together they decided to take on a bunch of traditional folk songs from the UK and blow them up. This is a track called Down by the Green Groves, Sing Sing So Green. I've spent a lot of time this year trying to figure out why I'm such a sucker for music that has sounds of the natural world folded into it, particularly chirping birds as this one does.

And the only thing I can come up with is that it makes music sort of holistic in a way. If music is life, if I find meaning and purpose and a higher power and all that in music, it's sort of the language of the universe to me. And when all the sounds of the universe come together in the music, as gorgeously as it does on this track, it is just such a, I don't know, complete experience. There's something to vote because there's the, idea that folks like John Cage and Pauline Olivero's put forth where all sound is music. Yeah.

And all the birds chirping and cars honking and everything else. That's part of the life soundtrack. And so here's the symphony of our lives. Yeah. So here's a song that keeps the window open while they're playing this gorgeous folk song. And as the track grows, it keeps adding. on nice little drones and it sounds like a thousand flowers blooming at once, you know, like a Terrence Malick kind of like visual, you know?

You're checking all the boxes, Lars, Terence Malick, Field of Blooming Flowers, like maybe time lapsed or something. Right, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, this is really gorgeous. And this music actually, it also reminds me a little bit of what the band Olivia Trimmer Control would do. And we're going to talk about them a little bit. later on the show. But I'm curious if you hear that too, just that sort of, it's ramshackle and

lo-fi and earthy and a little trippy, but really beautiful. Very homemade but cinematic at the same time. That's it. Yeah. Yeah. Perfect. So that's from an album called May. May. And many of the songs on this album, double album May are about songs about spring. All right, Lars, you've taken us by the hand here. Where else are you going to lead us? Brazil had sort of an incredible year. 2024 in particular, there was just kind of an explosion of creativity from that country. But I want to highlight maybe an artist that a lot of people haven't heard of called Negro Leo.

He's brand new to me as well. He's made all sorts of different records. He's made like a psychedelic rock record. He's done a lot of electronic and dance records and psychics. Dahlik and everything else. He came out with a record kind of at the end of the year called Rela, that I think it's like clicking into a few different things I've noticed about my taste in music this year where they are often sketches. And in order for the sketches to make sense, you kind of have to take the whole journey and not just like a track, but we're going to just listen to a track. This is a song called Nisina A Tite, my Portuguese.

That was really good. Spot on. May Encina, Atte Castigar. I think that's actually correct. I think the way you set this one up really helped me connect with it a little bit more, hearing it again. The idea of it being sketches. But it's not just sketches. It's a lot of sketches that are kind of overlapping and all happening at the same time.

Well, you know, it's interesting because I was listening to your episode about the best albums of 2024. And you went to back for Tyler the Creator's chromocopia. I feel like Negoreo is kind of doing something similar but different, where I've always thought that Tyler the Creator was a prog rock artist. His songs are very long and epic and take a lot of twist in terms but are very layered. Negoleo is putting all of that into two-minute songs. Well, you know, when I first put this on, I didn't know what to make of it. And it kind of just left me scratching my head a little bit. I like your Tyler, the creator, sort of touchstone you're using there. Maybe you're just baiting me because you know how much I love that new record. But now that you say that,

I can't hear this any other way, this Negro Leo any other way. I am hearing those sort of twists and turns and this just collageist sort of approach to songwriting. That's another layer of all the music that I generally love, but that I also heard this year is that there are several ways to hear things and that there are several ways to pick apart the ways that you hear things. And this album kind of goes every other way. There are moments on this record where he just repeats the same words over and over and again. There's a song called Date My Age, and that's just all he says. Date My Age. Date My Age.

I think he's poking fun at himself, or maybe he's poking fun at himself. fun at a friend or something like that. And then there's one where it's like, got to please, got to please. And so it's like, oh, okay, he's a people pleaser. But he's kind of like taking from the house and jungle music where a set of words can change its meaning even within 30 seconds when you repeat them enough, you know.

So Negro Leo, the album, Rayla. Okay, Lars, what Sonic Adventures do you have for us next? I think I want to stick with sketches. Okay. Ula and Ootrfog. Is a duo Ula Strauss, who's based in Berlin, and UltraFog, who is from Japan. And the name of the album is called It Means a Lot. Yeah, it's a great title.

Almost as good as the title of the song I know you want to play, which is also great. Which is called Room Core, which, as you're about to find out, yes, this is Room Core. I think the actual theme of this show, Lars, could be music you won't find in Robin's email inbox. I mean, we do our own digging. Sure, we don't just rely on the emails we get. But I get like 400 emails a day from bands and labels and publicists and everything. And so the first thing I always do is just search my inbox. Well, what have I gotten about this?

And none of your picks, nothing. I've got nothing from any of these. Which means so essentially I'm starting from ground zero here. with my research, which I did on this one. And best I can tell, UltraFog is the name of a fire extinguisher company. Okay. Yeah. You mentioned a band, but everything I can tell, and if you don't mind, I mean, I have some info here I'd like to just,

because I want people to know I do my research. UltraFog is a leading manufacturer of high-pressure water mist fire suppression systems. Okay. You know, this is established in Sweden in 1990. And, you know, it's been providing approved fire suppression solutions to projects all over the world for like 30 years. So, good pick. MPR is underwritten by an old book. Exactly.

As I said, they're two separate artists, single artists. And I believe this record was recorded distantly between their, they sent files back and forth. Oh, yeah. And I just love how you can pick up on that voice that's echoing in our ears. And then there'll be these ripples of guitar, glitched-up guitar out in the side. And a lot of this music feels like they are collapsing the between. Does that make sense? Because there's a lot of music that I love, sometimes I'll refer to as between music,

because it's slipping between sounds and textures and genre or whatever. But this one seems to be like we're going to collapse them together. We're going to collapse all these different sounds and these ideas, and we're going to make them miniature. Yeah. Well, it's interesting you say that it's all collapsing together because one of the things I clocked pretty early on listening to this cut is how it kind of comes and goes.

it'll there'll be just this exhalation, this sigh of a sound. Yeah. And then everything just kind of disappears for a second. So it kind of comes in waves, you know. Well, this is really beautiful. And yeah, I love room core. That's going to, I'm going to make that my new favorite genre. Like when people say, well, what kind of music do you?

Like, yeah. Room core. Yeah, I like Room core. You know, they're like Room Corps. And they're like, oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. But in 2019, that absolutely. essential record of a broomcore. They just completely changed the genre.

From an equally brilliantly titled album, it means a lot. It means a lot. It means a lot. Yeah. From Ula and UltraFog. Where do you want to go next? Robin, you're a person who's lived a lot of different places. And when you've moved to a different place, do you ever feel like there's a clean slate for you to kind of like present a different version of yourself? Yeah, actually, I'll A lot of my friends think that I reinvented myself when I came to D.C. It's been like 25 years ago. But it's for one simple reason, and that is I have gone by Rob my entire life. And, you know, so everybody from my past calls me Rob, my long time.

My family, everyone calls me Rob. But when I started here, there was a Bob, a Robert. You know, there were a couple Bob's, you know. Right, right, right. There was, you know, another Rob. And Bob Boylan at the time said, you know, you ought to just go by your real name. It's Robin. And so that is literally the only reason I started going by Robin.

In fact, if you listen to stories I did when I worked at Morning Edition, they're all, I say Robin, all of those. Well, I mean, I bring that up because Jeff Parker is a guitarist who, in my mind, he has two very distinct phases in his career as a musician. he kind of made his name in Chicago as the guitarist for Tortus, the great post-rock band. And he was also a very prolific member of the free jazz and improvised music scenes in Chicago. And he had a very distinct way of playing his guitar that when you heard it, it was like, that's Jeff Parker. And then if it hasn't been a decade, we're getting close. But he moved to L.A. and his guitar tone changed. the way he thought about melody changed.

And he's been working with this quartet called the ETA Fortet. In this group, Jeff Parker has really opened up his ideas about space and slowness. They put out a record called The Way Out of Easy that I've just been obsessed with. Each track is 18 minutes long. I just want to play like an excerpt. So I think maybe around like eight minutes into this song is where, things start to get cooking a little bit. Did you write that?

Here what I wrote my note, kind of like the stretch. This starts around eight minutes in. For people who know TARDIS, to me, this isn't too far removed from what he would have done with that band. Maybe if you speed it up and electrify it a little bit more, maybe. And gave it maybe even more textures, more whiz-bang maybe, is maybe the technical term. But the thing that he's been doing with this quartet has really captured my imagination. It shows me that there is so much beauty in knowing who you are.

The phrase that I keep coming back to when thinking about what Jeff Parker's been doing with this quartet is ritually unbothered. Yeah. Where it's kind of like he's figured out where he is as a musician and as a person, and he's very much at peace with. that but also wants to evolve within it. And so I think this kind of sound, this kind of pace, can only come when you are aware of who you are in that moment. It's interesting because this song is called Late Autumn. And to me, you know, maybe for a lot of people, autumn feels like the beginning of an end. It's the penultimate chapter of each year, right? Or that an end is approaching. But to me it feels more like a

a beginning. It's autumn, but not in a fading light kind of way. There's almost a feeling of renewal in it. Also, I want to note that Jay Bellaros is the percussionist on this song. I mean, this band is great. Josh Johnson on Altusacks, and then Anna Butters, who is the secret weapon of like, I think three or four records this year out on the bass, including her own record. Yeah, this Quartet is incredible. So that's Jeff Parker with ETA Fortet, and the four is spelled with Roman numerals. Right. I actually really like that.

Ivy Tet. Ivette. Fortet, late autumn, again, the song from The Way Out of Easy. Great turn of phrase there. I want to go to hop across the ocean to Somaliland via France with the artist Zara Halgan and this really ribbon record called Hido Dar. And the track we're in here is called Charaf. This is the sound of catharsis for you then?

Is that what this one's filed under? I think so. I think it's also maybe catharsis for her. Sada Halgan is a political refugee from Somaliland. Somaliland declared independence from Somalia in 1991. And there's a lot of political turmoil. And Sada became a political refugee and ended up in France throughout the 90s and early 2000s. She's back in Somaliland now, but it was in France where she started this band.

And it was an opportunity for her to mix folk music from East Africa. But she, on this record in particular, it's not just rock, it's like garage rock. It's like 1960s style, Far Fisa, blown out, big psychedelic rock riffs. So sonically, that is just fun and cathartic for me, but she wants to promote her culture. In fact, that's what the title of this album means. It means promote culture. And she has said that this song in particular is a hymn to the Pride and Digitius. of the human being.

Often when I feel a little bit constricted by what's happening in America or England, I like to branch out and listen to stuff in languages that I don't understand. And that can be a form of escapism, I think, because you can kind of project your own feelings and ideas onto it. But once you get that deep down layer, and you can mix the joy and ecstasy of what you can, what you've just heard with, like, the power of her lyrics and her, the message that she wants to portray. That makes it more exciting and more rich for me.

So Sharoff, again, is the name of the song from Hito Dharan, the artist Sada Hogan. So I have a couple of Athens, Georgia picks. Both you and I spent some formative years in Athens, Georgia, but at different times. Yeah. And there was one band that for years would. just a complete mystery to me. And I think it was a complete mystery to anybody who cared or was interested in Athens' music history, which obviously includes bands like the B-52s and R.M. and Pylon, the big three.

Yeah. This band called Limbo District. Only people who were there in Athens at the time had ever heard the band, and I was always curious about them. And then a few years ago, Henry Owings, who's a music preservationist, he runs a record label called Chunklet. He found tapes. He found studio recordings made with Mitch Easter. By Limbo District. From Limbo District. And there's been this big reissue campaign of music that people have never heard. It's brought me immeasurable joy. This is one of my favorite songs, Alamazon, from Carnival.

I'm glad you took the time to explain just how obscure this band was and how little known. Because when you told me about him, I thought, I've got to be honest, I've never heard of Limbo district and you know I moved there in the early 90s and it was definitely you know REM in the B-52s but also like love tractor right vigilantes of love even widespread panic widespread panic was huge and you know and then the whole elephant six collective stuff broke and we're going to talk a little bit about that but this hearing this now it to me is such a perfect reflection of whatever was in the water there man I mean because I You know, there's a little Hanna New Wave in it.

Even almost a little Fred Schneider B-52 is like, da, da, you know, a little bit of that comical sing-songy, whatever you want to call it. But it's unpredictable, and it's beautifully weird. And it's unlike anything else you're hearing. And just imagine when this came out. I mean, it was really unlike anything you would have been hearing. My understanding is that not only did people find the music weird and irritating, they were also... Weird and irritating the Lars Gautred's story. Yeah, it's true.

Limba District were known to be provocative performers. They were all untrained musicians, and they were all, like, it's sort of ringleader was this guy named Jeremy Ears, who, among his many credits, he co-wrote songs for R.E.M. in B-52s. He was a member of Andy Warhol's factory. And he was kind of like the instigator of Athens. He was kind of like an undersung connector of worlds. Like there are people who say he's partially responsible for the B-52s. And this was like his project that had a lot of different people come in and out of the band. And to have these recordings, it peels back another layer of the glorious myth of Athens

because there's just so much myth and folklore about what's come out of the Athens music scene and this offers a way to show up the stuff where it was like this band really tried. They did tour to like New York.

I think they were more of received well in New York because that's when no wave in teenage Jesus and the jerks was happening so people were into Limbo district up there. But people in Athens were like what are they've been a bunch of weirdos? But like that's the thing that made me excited when I lived in Athens, that you could be a little bit of a freak and people celebrated that. And then you found a home at NPR.

Yeah. Well, you talk about when you went to Athens how you sort of found your people, right? Right. You know, and it was sort of an awakening, don't you think, in you, you know, like creatively and artistically. And that was certainly what happened to me too. I moved there after college. and it was like there was electricity in the air. It was like the air was crackling with life,

and you'd go out at night. And, you know, I was coming from Kansas, and it was winter, and it was ice cold and snow on the ground when I left, and I got down to Athens in the South. Everyone's out in the streets at night, you know, and music is pouring out of every building. It was such an exciting time to be there.

And one of the things that happened pretty soon after I got there is I would go out and see music, and I started seeing all of these bands like Elf Power, the gerbils, apples in stereo, the big one that everyone knows about, probably more than any of the others, Neutral Milk Hotel, and my personal favorite, the Olivia Trimmer Control. And the Olivia Trimmer Control, like just about all the other bands in that Elephant Six Collective, were really only around a very short time. Yeah. And put out this incredible music and then you didn't hear from them again. Well, it's literally decades now.

But here we are in 2024 and we got two new songs from the Olivia Trimmer Control. It was amazing. Yeah. We should listen to the same place. No matter what you do, say. I could not believe the news when I saw that there were two new Olivia Trimmer Control tracks after all these years. I always imagine they must have just a trove of stuff that they've never released. But this news of these songs, it was just immediately shrouded by the fact that the singer Will Cullenhart died. Yeah, the same day the songs came out.

Very same day, there were kind of like two main guys in the band who did most of the lead singing. It was Will and then it was Bill Doss. And Bill Doss died in 2012. The timing could not be more tragic that these songs came out. Also, you and I were texting, you're the one who told me that Will had died. Yeah. And I had not seen the news. And it was maybe that night or a couple days later, I was watching this new Michael Shore series called A Man on the Inside, this Netflix series.

And at the end of one of the episodes, they played the Olivia Trimmer Control song, The Opera House. It was opening cut to their debut album music. music from the unrealized film script Dusket Cubist Castle I don't think I've ever heard an Olivia Trimmer Control song in a popular TV show like that and if you didn't know the tragic news

of Will's death you'd think oh my gosh everything's finally happening for this band I know he was always painted as the more experimental side of Olivia Trimmer Control and Bell Doss was always painted as the melodist basically he was the McCartney to his limit.

Yeah. But I think over time, and especially through Will Cole and Hart's other band, circulatory system, there is a switch, there is a flip. He became a brilliant melody maker. And in particular, he always been great lyricist as well. So I think about the words on this song, no matter what you do, no matter what you say, no matter who your friends are, no matter what you've done, you're headed to the same old place. It's part of me and you.

What a sentiment to go out on. Well, the new song that we got from Olivia Trimmer Control at the end of November again is called The Same Place. It was one of two singles that came out. Right. There's the same place, which was mostly led by Will Cohn Hart, but there was also Garden of Light, which was primarily written by Bill Doss. Well, Lars, it has been a journey that you've taken this on here, as always. And, you know, when I was listening to all of your picks, I kept thinking, wow, these are really beautiful. So calming, so gorgeous.

And then I got to this band Castle Rat. And I thought, there it is. There it is. Yeah. I saved it for the end. Yes, the best for last. You know, we talked about at the top of the show, the sort of the theme of the show is catharsis and calm or catharsis and escape. And Castle Rat is a metal band.

There is no doubt about it. But they are a metal band in the escapist realm. This is a band with a big old theme. They are fronted by the Rat Queen. And she, she... They've built this whole lore around the, yeah, all these characters. And they dress up on stage. And the whole thing is that they're out to defeat death.

But the thing that I appreciate about this band, the name of this record, by the way, this is called Into the Realm, is by Castle Rat. They are from Brooklyn. And yeah, you can throw some Brooklyn hipster metal BS at them all you want. But the end of the day, these riffs are fuzzy and they're fun. And the band sounds like they're having a blast. Riley Pinkerton, that's the singer, her pipes are extremely formidable. And this song, Fresh Fur, like, I actually want to see this live because I bet it's ridiculous and fun. So we'll go out on Castle Rat, fresh fur from Into the Realm,

performed by the Count, the Plague Doctor, and the Druid. Well, thank you, Lars, for another great year of outsider sounds from Vikings' choice. I assume you've got a much longer playlist that we can point people to. Yeah, I'm going to have several different near-end mixtapes that I'm going to release. I have a newsletter that I publish myself. So if you like where you have been so far, at the end of this glorious episode, there is even more to explore at viking'schoice.org. All right, thanks, Lars.

Thanks, Robin. And for NPR music, I'm Robin Hilton. It's all songs consider.