ID Music 20211105 - Autumnal Melancholy II
North America's Gnarliest Mix for Crickets, Trees, Rocks, and Hills
Inter-Dimensional Music is heard weekly on the airwaves of Marfa Public Radio, LOOKOUT FM Los Angeles, and WQRT Indianapolis
For this second installment of the 2021 Autumnal Melancholy series, we consider the acceptance of impermanence and recognize that such universal suffering ultimately means that we’re in this together. As Zen teacher Lewis Richmond says, “the fact that we all suffer means that you are not alone.”
These ideas are relayed in the abstract at the beginning of our program, with an excerpt from øjeRum’s, Sølverhvide Skyer, where the decaying, spectral guitars drift like the silver-white clouds of the album’s title. Ambient funeral doom from Minnesota’s Celestiial follows, featuring an undulating drone of interwoven keyboards and growls laid over field recordings and acoustic instruments. A reminder that there is more to peep in the autumn woods than just the leaves.
We are especially fond of live Cure recordings here at Cosmic Chambo Studio, where the band so often reminds us that they are masters of hallucinatory psychedelia. Here we have “All Cats are Grey” from the expanded remaster of their 1981 masterpiece Faith. The intensely rhythmic intro was an excuse to include the heavyweight goth dub abstractions of Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe, aka Lichens and Candyman (2021) soundtrack composer.
An unexpectedly organic flow of metal-gaze goth and classic rock follows, as Nadja, Ilyas Ahmed, Cloakroom, and Grouper present re-readings of The Cure, Rolling Stones, Tom Petty, and Dead Moon. Universal knowledge about faith, hope, impermanence, and transcendence, with Petty echoing Lewis Richmond: We all know how it feels that nobody knows how it feels to be us.
Dead Moon walk us the rest of the way home with an anthem for the downtrodden, two inspirational goner lifers repeating the cathartic mantra of “it’s O.K. / we love you anyway.”
Gary Snyder is back to open and close our practice by illustrating how an understanding of deep time can help embed that acceptance into our daily lives, when we consider our fleeting existence in comparison to the long-form fleeting existences of rocks, trees, and hills.
More to come next week as we bring this series to a close with gauzy goth psych, lo-fi depressive black metal, another crushingly heavyweight re-rub from Faith, and an autumn raga from the master of the tabla tarang.
Thanks for being here.
ID Music 20211029 setlist
artist - work
øjeRum - Sølverhide Skyer (excerpt)
Celestiial - Waldlander im Herbst
Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe - Heart of Sogguth
The Cure - All Cats Are Grey (Live Somewhere Summer/81)
Nadja - Faith
Cloakroom - You Don't Know
Ilyas Ahmed - No Expectations
Grouper - Demona
Dead Moon - It's O.K.
øjeRum - Sølverhide Skyer (excerpt)
Dharma: Gary Snyder - They Are Listening
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