ID Music 20211112 - Autumnal Melancholy III
North America's Gnarliest Mix for Us Human Beings Just Passing Through
Inter-Dimensional Music is heard weekly on the airwaves of Marfa Public Radio, LOOKOUT FM Los Angeles, and WQRT Indianapolis
We bring our three-part 2021 Autumnal Melancholy series to a close by returning to the beginning: A revisitation of Striborg’s documentation of seasonal affective disorder among the depressive kvlt hermits of New Zealand’s backcountry. We’ll also hear more organic goth-adjacent psychedelia from Liz Harris, Jefre Cantu-Ledesma, and friends; another unexpectedly poignant sludge translation of The Cure’s Faith, and Gary Snyder’s eco-temporal-geological poetry.
If you’d like to start at the beginning, you can find part one of this series here:
Pandit Kamalesh Maitra joins us in the second half of our session with “Raag Puriya Dhaneshree” a raga suited for dusk if we’re scheduling it according to the Earth’s rotation, or autumn if it’s the Earth’s orbit around the sun that we’re watching. Maitra is among my favorite masters of Indian Classical Music, though his work doesn’t seem to be widely available here in the West. He plays the tabla tarang, a “melodic percussion instrument” that is sort of a drum kit consisting of up to 16 tablas. The notes to Maitra’s 1996 Smithsonian Folkways collection offer further clarification: “Tarang means ‘waves’ and aptly describes how rhythm and melody, even harmony, are woven into one flowing element.”
Today’s selection comes from a release with unknown provenance, which is not unusual with Indian Classical Music. This sprawl of non-linear, deeply psychedelic, and endlessly improvisational sound does not mesh with the dystopian algorithms of contemporary music consumption or dualistic classification systems used in the Western canon. Ragas are both songs and compositional strategies. There are an infinite number of ragas, but there are maybe 500 in somewhat regular circulation? And so transcendent masterpieces of devotional outpouring are often filed simply under the name of the featured instrument, or the title of the raga being manifested. Maitra’s Raag Puriya Dhaneshree was recorded “Live at the House of the Cultures of the World” in Berlin in 1998, and released as Tarang, though there’s nothing on Discogs, and not much elsewhere. If you’re ready to let more waves of percussive melody wash over you, the aforementioned Folkways release is a great place to start.
You can hear more of his playing on this July 2018 episode, which also features the “orchestral synth visions” of Westerbur & Rowe, trance-inducing guitar work from Erik Maluchnik, Kamasi Washington’s re-visioning of a ‘70s soul classic, and a proggy Black Sabbath deep cut:
Thanks as always for joining me here, and on the actual air to celebrate the season that reminds us that we all, thankfully, will one day return to the dirt. What a relief!
ID Music 20211112 setlist
artist - work
William Basinski & Lawrence English - Selva Oscura (excerpt)
Grouper - Little Boat/Bone Dance (Audrey)
Striborg - autumnal melancholy
Hellish Form - The Funeral Party
Slow Walkers - Wake
Jefre Cantu-Ledesma - Tracing Back the Radiance (excerpt)
Kamalesh Maitra - Raag Puriya Dhaneshree
William Basinski & Lawrence English - Selva Oscura (excerpt)
Dharma: Gary Snyder - They Are Listening
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