ID Music: Snow Makes the Mountains
Heavy melancholy, kosmische kolonoscopies, and age contemplation tactics
“I’m 48 years old. And not to say that age is a thing that dictates what you rap about, but in a way it does,” André 3000 tells Zach Baron in a recent interview in GQ. “And things that happen in my life, like, what are you talking about? ‘I got to go get a colonoscopy.’ What are you rapping about? ‘My eyesight is going bad.’ You can find cool ways to say it, but….”
Like André 3000 I am also 48 years old, only a few days younger than my gemini kindred. Unlike André 3000 – whose fresh and flutey New Age album is featured prominently in this edition of Inter-Dimensional Music – I end up writing a lot about things like how my eyesight is going bad. Funerals, mundane medical procedures that remain mundane until they become traumatic, and a heightened awareness of the space that grows between far-flung friends over time is all part of our creep toward elderhood, as documented via this direct-mail blog service. Even before I read that interview I was gonna at least talk a little about last week’s colonoscopy. Sometimes you choose the writing prompt, and sometimes the prompt chooses you. Sorry!
When I go to visit the dentist every five years or so, the dentist usually says something like “oh no” and then once they’re poking around inside my very nice cavity-free mouth they say something like “Don’t tell your friends how rarely you come to the dentist: You have unusually decay-resistant teeth and others will not have the same result if they neglect regular check-ups.” The opposite happened with the colonoscopy, which is actually a thing that we’re supposed to talk about in order to demystify this preventative health screening. This has been tricky for me because for some reason I can’t pronounce the name of the procedure the same way more than once: KAH-lawn-oh-scopey, koh-LOAN-ah-scappy, KOH-lawn-uh-scuppy, etc. So it usually takes a minute for the other person in the conversation to figure out what I’m talking about, including the receptionist at the outpatient surgery center.
Many people don’t want to talk about the procedure in detail because it’s toilet stuff. Neither do I, so rest easy. The tough thing about the procedure is usually the prep, the system flush, which given our household’s high fiber largely vegetarian diet, wasn’t an issue. ‘Nuff said.
My problem was the adverse reaction I had to guzzling eight pints of the aspartame-flavored bile-colored solution that clears the path to descend, and the hours of intense nausea followed by intense barfing at 4am. The takeaway here is go to the dentist regularly and be aware there are multiple options for the pre-op cleanse.
The pain was hard to describe, but mostly I kept thinking about the time I slipped a disc on a 2013 New Mexico backpacking trip and had to sit in the car twisted up in agony for an eight hour drive back to Marfa. The trip included a grim detour into a deserted, half-lit ER in the New Mexico oilfield that would’ve worked well for an arid lands Jacob’s Ladder reboot. This being the oilfield, the staff suspected that I was bluffing in order to score oxy, so they gave me some muscle relaxers that didn’t do much and I had to wait until I was back in Texas to find the sweet relief of opioid analgesics.
Opioids are a plague and I have at least one old friend who disappeared into a fentanyl haze and is possibly dead, but on the other hand returning to Marfa and then getting melted and goofy in a doctor-approved tramadol haze while Julianna Barwick offered her looping celestial vocal transmissions to a couple dozen people at Ballroom Marfa where I worked at the time was great.
For the soundtrack to my long night of intensely nauseating colonoscopy prep, I am grateful once again to my dear friend Whitney for recommending I Was Never There. This true crime podcast was ranked among the best of 2022 by Stephen King and lots of very well-read magazines and websites that I don’t read, so it’s probably old news if you pay attention to the podcasting world. Sometimes I think I pay attention to podcasts, but then I listen to something like this conspicuously produced series and I realize that I listen exclusively to so-called dirtbag leftist and parapolitical talk radio1 presented in ad-free podcast-via-Patreon format.
I overnighted in Morgantown, West Virginia – the setting for most of I Was Never There – on the way home from an extremely heavy family funeral at Arlington National Cemetery in February of this year. Morgantown is a good stopping-off place when driving from Indiana to the East Coast. The small mountain city has a familiar crunchy vibe that I couldn’t put my finger on, but never lingered long enough past breakfast to figure it out – something like Arcata, Ypsilanti, Bloomington, Taos, Terlingua, or other second-string countercultural locales.
The podcast is about the disappearance of Marsha “Mudd” Ferber, a cornerstone of the Morgantown community as it morphed from hippie hideaway hosting hair farmer orgies and The Grateful Dead to legendary yet low-key punk and hardcore stopover for Fugazi and Corrosion of Conformity. The backstory helped me understand Morgantown’s subtly cryptical vibe: interstate highways didn’t swing close by until the ‘70s, so if you weren’t into West Virginia University football you might not have noticed that back-to-the-land heads were beginning to congregate. It hasn’t changed all that much now that the four-lane has arrived: the Ascend West Virginia program is offering $12,000 to remote workers who relocate to Morgantown. Although these days I’m guessing the state’s 97% white population, repressive conservative government, and the presence of craven ghouls like Joe Manchin have more to do with our cohort’s hesitancy.
Once I got over the slick NPR-ish production, I Was Never There was a familiar story. I too have friends who make money doing things they don’t talk about and I don’t ask about, at least one of whom, like Marsha, disappeared or is maybe2 dead. My peoples’ stories don’t include Nicaraguan death squads, exploding yachts, or ethical non-monogamy. Or maybe – like Marsha – they’re the smart kind of outlaws who keep their mouths shut. One general guideline I’ve picked up from my extremely limited but not inconsiderable experience in this zone, and my much more wide-ranging experience listening to stories from this zone, is that not everybody who commits suicide committed suicide, but anybody who you think is snitching is snitching.
More on all of these things later, but for now I’ll say that if you’re up all night holding your belly and vacating your digestive tract every which way but loose, I Was Never There beat my usual late night companions detailing the rise of occult Belgian fascism in response to post-WWII decolonial movements at Ghost Stories For The End of The World.
One of the reasons I continue making this remarkably long-lived yet understandably unpopular broadcast media art project is that it keeps my cultural tastes from stagnating. If nothing else, producing Inter-Dimensional Music for Marfa Public Radio and3 WQRT Indianapolis on a weekly basis means I gotta find new stuff to play. It makes me less fun at elder parties where the dudes just wanna rank Replacements albums – they are all great, and we all knew that. Besides, my wife is the crate-digger with a wall of hip-hop, R&B, dream pop, shoegaze, and classic rock vinyl. My parents just relocated to a retirement community and Uncle Al died without cleaning out the house he and my Aunt Judy lived in for 50+ years, so death-cleaning is on my mind. It’s a lot easier to tote a drive of lossless audio than dozens of milkcrates.
The 2024 shows so far have been a weird mix of old favorites – I’ve been a voracious music listener since the days when “having music opinions” was a job that came with health insurance – along with the new discoveries that keep the transmission from becoming another celebration of the way things once were. The best music I’ve heard is the music that I hear today.
André 3000’s New Blue Sun is an ideal intersection of sentimentality and curiosity. André 3000’s collaborator Carlos Niño has been a mainstay on the Inter-Dimensional Music airwaves since the program’s genesis in 2010. Though I doubt he would remember me, I have fond memories of editing his writing in the pages of URB magazine in the late ‘90s, listening to his KPFA radio show, and going to watch Dwight Trible in Leimert Park on his recommendation. It’s wonderful to see him making music that extends that spirit of liberation and transcendence on his own, with young musicians coming up, with elders like Idris Ackamoor, and with our shared generational cohort of people signing up for their first colonoscopy.
Before I turn you over to the tunes, some programming notes:
• The goal in 2024 is to send at least one Vøid Contemplation Tactics newsletter each month, plus bonus content as it comes together. I’ve been working on a few longer projects that keep ballooning into unwieldy “everything essays” and I don’t want to rush them because then I usually get super depressed. Also while I am absolutely delighted and deeply stoked to have 30+ paying subs, I probably need to keep looking for other ways to make some money other than as a volunteer community radio DJ.
• Vøid Contemplation Tactics will remain free for the foreseeable future, though I’d like to get away from Substack if I can because they’re unsurprisingly terrible like pretty much anybody else doing things online. Any suggestions on alternatives are most welcome!
• I’ve also got another Muncie photo digest coming, and some writing about Muncie Folk Collective, a local street outreach and harm reduction group that I’ve been getting involved with over the last few months.
• Inter-Dimensional Music continues to air each weekend in Far West Texas on Marfa Public Radio, and 99.1FM WQRT Indianapolis, with intermittent archive updates. The 10 most recent shows will continue to show up on the Inter-Dimensional Music FM Mixcloud page, while the static archive of 218 shows from 2017-2022 can be found on the Cosmic Chambo Mixcloud page. Hit me up if you’re looking for something and can’t find it.
• I’m also figuring out how to get Basking in Gravity, my surprisingly popular yet disappointingly intermittent psychedelic death yoga happenings back up and running now that we can open the windows. I don’t want to do covid again cuz I still don’t feel back to 100%.
• And finally . . . Freddy Got Fingered4 (2001) is streaming on the Criterion Channel for a limited time, which is the only TV channel (?) that I have the patience for besides the surprisingly reasonably-priced NBA League Pass. Watch party5?
Thank you all once again and forevermore for reading these words, listening to the music, subscribing for free or for money, passing this along to someone who might enjoy it, lurking anonymously, or smashing that unsubscribe if you were expecting more yoga advice or something.
blessing up and blessing down,
Daniel
Inter-Dimensional Music 20240112+19
VØID SUPERSESSION
For this midwinter 2024 broadcast, we used excerpts from André 3000’s New Blue Sun as entry and exit music for two hours of beat-driven psychedelia. Our selections range from the ephemeral long-form organic ambience of Tokio Fuko on Astral Industries – the label that answers the question of “what if Wolfgang Voight went for more of an Online Ceramics vibe” – to decolonial pan-African diaspora dance music from Azu Tiwaline, Cinna Pyghamy, Abu Ama, Mdou Moctar, Ÿuma, and Lamin Fofana with The Doudou Ndiaye Rose Family.
Also because this is ID Music we’ll eventually make our way into Soulfly – hey where are you going! you wouldn’t know it was Soulfly unless I told you – and Sepultura, who are immediately recognizable as Sepultura. There’s also CDMX vs JA digi-dancehall, a vintage California hippie industrial freakout, and deep water Detroit techno. We wind up in even weirder territory because I have an absolute ball making this show [SPOILER] and Robyn sounds great anytime but especially in between Shackleton and Ricardo Villalobos. Real peak-hour choons pumping out of the extra bedroom here in Muncie.
Language throughout the broadcast excerpted from Zen Master Dōgen’s Eihei Koroku. Dōgen’s first major work, Shobogenzo or Treasury of the True Dharma Eye is more widely known as a foundational Zen text. Eihei Koroku is a collection of later writings, newly translated for a 1995 publication as Dōgen’s Extensive Record.
“Of all Dōgen’s writings, they are perhaps the most revealing of his own personal feelings,” the translators write. “Many speak of Dōgen’s long nights in meditation, his deep love of nature, the beauty of mountains, but also of the severe snows and cold of winter. He often reflects, somewhat whimsically, on his own life of practice, as in verse 90:”
In our lifetime, false and true, good and bad are confused.
While playing with the moon, scorning the wind, and
listening to birds,
For many years I merely saw that mountains had snow.
This winter, suddenly I realize that snow makes the
mountains.
This set aired over two consecutive weeks on WQRT and Marfa Public Radio, and is presented here as a continuous VØID SUPERSESSION, something special for all you true newsletter heads. Perhaps it will make a fitting score for your upcoming vernal equinox raves.
Hour I
André 3000 - I swear, I Really Wanted To Make A "Rap" Album but This Is Literally the Way the Wind Blew Me This Time
Toki Fuko - Spirit Medicine (Part One)
Azu Tiwaline & Cinna Peyghamy - Canopée Imaginaire (live edit)
Mdou Moctar meets Elite Beat - We & We in Azawad
Tuluum Shimmering - It's Here in the Circle (Part 4)
Soulfly - Zumbi
Lamin Fofana- Toco SOS
Hour II
Drexciya - Neon Falls
Crash Worship - Catatonic Dance
Smurphy - Montegod Riddim
I Jahbar & RDL - Bumper
Abu Ama - The Impossibility of Holy & War
Aswad - Natural Aggression
Deena Abdelwahed - Naive
Sepultura - Roots Bloody Roots
Shackleton - Death Is Not Final
Robyn - Call Your Girlfriend
Ÿuma + Ricardo Villalobos - Smek (Ricardo Villalobos Remix)
Young Galaxy - Pretty Boy
André 3000 - Dreams Once Buried Beneath The Dungeon Floor Slowly Sprout Into Undying Gardens
If you know anyone who might find value or otherwise enjoy Vøid Contemplation Tactics or Inter-Dimensional Music, please pass it along. It means a lot to me! Thank you.
Word of mouth is my primary form of promotion. My reach is limited on social media, which is a good thing as far as my own mental health goes. As Dōgen's teacher told him, “You don't have to collect many people like clouds. Having many fake practitioners is inferior to having a few genuine practitioners. Choose a small number of true persons of the way and become friends with them.”
If you’d like to support these projects with a one-time donation, you can also drop some ducats in the tip jar.
“Howard Stern for the post-9/11 left,” as one of the hosts of Chapo Trap House described it. Don’t @ me lol.
News can be hard to come by on the fringes of American bohemia, but at the very least I know that the “we’d love to contact you about brand ambassadorship” messages that originate from their Instagram account a couple times a year are spam and not proof-of-life.
RIP in peace to LOOKOUT FM in Los Angeles. If you are aware of any radio stations that might be interested in picking up the show, let me know! It’s free.
Alternate title for this colonoscopic edition of the newsletter was “Chambo Got Fingered” but . . . I couldn’t do it. I learned an important lesson from giving the most popular thing I ever wrote the title “Uncle Skullfucker’s Band.” How many times has that word been posted up on the Dead’s subreddit?
xox to Dave M.