Inter-Dimensional Music: Late Summer Digest
Plus thoughts on finding value in making and sharing unpopular art
One of the persistent mundane challenges of the independent publishing or newsletter economy (lol) or whatever it’s called is building momentum. The feeling that I’m starting from scratch each time I sit down at the keyboard, trying to come up with justification for spending hours on a nebulous DIY project. I miss working with other people to assemble our words and images together under a masthead or mission statement, to combine our respective ‘zines into a “mega-zine,” if you will.
[audible groans followed by the sound of 300 people frantically smashing “unsubscribe” buttons]
My point is that I’m grateful for the long-gone magazine staffer experience of letting group movement carry me through the slow times, even if it’s to file unremarkable B-grade writing by an arbitrary deadline.
After summer travels there’s usually a slow-down in the Vøid Contemplation Tactics publishing schedule. Due to afternoons spent staring at a blank computer screen and trying various combinations of meditation, exercise, prescribed pharmaceuticals, outlawed plant extracts, and over-the-counter stimulants, depressants, and/or NSAIDs to see if I can override my anxious doubts and get my fingers to start typing. Managing brain chemistry that fluctuates between a creeping sense of guilt that I’m letting you 300-odd subscribers down, and the liberating sense that there’s not a whole lot on the line so maybe today I’ll focus on housework or looking for freelance grant writing gigs or expanding the farm where I live in No Man’s Sky, the open-world space exploration video game that unfortunately conveniently dropped for Mac as I returned from the 2023 Basking in Gravity Summer Tour without much of an idea of what to do next.
This is less of the case with Inter-Dimensional Music broadcasts because it’s on the actual FM airwaves. There are people – or at least there’s the one person who opens my emails – at WQRT Indianapolis and Marfa Public Radio who expect me to submit a show to fill an hour or two of airtime. In the interest of getting the Vøid Contemplation Tactics operation up and running again, this is a digest of new archive additions that aired in June 2023, plus our return to the airwaves in early September, following the Summers Bummer broadcasts - available in a previous editions as a newsletter-exclusive 96-minute super session.
Summer Bummers I + II
The Basking in Gravity 2023 Summer Tour has been over for awhile now, but re-entry to the East Central Indiana Rust Belt can be tricky. We’ve also been slow to bring our attention to online as the computer is such a terrifying vector for ravishing grimness these days: the reality of environmental apocalypse is easily confirmed by the scent of Canadian wildfire smoke obscuring the Midwestern US sun, no need to pore over another hopeless UN Climate Report.
These Basking in Gravity shows are close to the live sets I DJ from my yoga mat as part of the IRL BiG yoga/art/meditation project. Each of the three mixes begins with the guided meditation that I use to introduce the participatory happening. This guidance is a combination of body-scanning techniques, capped off with Zen priest Lewis Richmond’s familiar coda of “everything is connected / nothing lasts / you are not alone.”
From there, it’s a gradually intensifying free-form drift of organic and silicate ambient music, spiritual jazz, “motorik Americana,” burned-out dubs, and a few contextually appropriate doses of cosmic metal. I’ve backed off from the practice of creating a mini-video flyer for each show as it was way more work than it needed to be and I don’t think many people watched them? The covers for the Basking in Gravity series are still images taken from the 90-minute “Tippy Rock Lichens” animated video comprised 100% of my photos from the Adirondacks, which so far has only been screened live.
Inter-Dimensional Music 20230609
Basking in Gravity I
This is an unusually twangy version of the show, featuring the freshest pickin’ and a-groanin’ from our favorite backcountry seers timber rattle, along with Kieran Hebden’s surprise collaboration with longtime friend of the show William Tyler. Pedal-steel features again, however briefly, in Agriculture’s self-described ecstatic black metal, before pivoting back to Tyler’s vision of motorik Americana. The aridlands flow continues with classic Pink Floyd and the Afghan-American street music project Naujawanan Baidar.
timber rattle - ghost or white pavilion (edit)
Kieran Hebden & William Tyler - Darkness, Darkness
Agriculture - The Glory of the Ocean
William Tyler & The Impossible Truth - Highway Anxiety/Radioactivity
Pink Floyd - Free Four
Naujawanan Baidar - Raftim Az Ayn Baagh
timber rattle - ghost or white pavilion (edit)
Inter-Dimensional Music 20230616
Basking in Gravity II
This second session begins, and eventually comes to an end, with the ephemeral ashen drift of Igis Osim Lara’s antifascist ambient music rituals. In between, Leslie Keffer’s silicified visions experienced in deep meditative states, excerpts from “a divine session of time-dilating, resonant drone meditations made by Salvaticus Selvatico on gongs, Himalayan Bowls, and synths1”, typical examples of the scorched JA sounds we favor on the program, and more work from ID Music staple Luke Stewart. Our program concludes with a Scott Kelly-free2 crescendo of vintage drum-circle Neurosis.
Igis Osim Lara - Horos (edit)
Field Lines Cartographer - Bones of the Earth
Leslie Keffer - Conduit
Gregory Isaacs / Alpha & Omega - Oh What a Dub
Jay Glass Dubs - Hyperacousis (for Miles)
Salvaticus Selvatico - Rise
Luke Stewart - 07
Neurosis - Origin (instrumental edit)
Igis Osim Lara - Horos (edit)
Inter-Dimensional Music 20230623
Basking in Gravity III (Vøid Supersession)
We have a special place in our heart for those metal-averse readers and listeners who continue to not unsubscribe even if they might turn the radio off or restart their computer when the noisy parts come around: Rest easy friends, this one is entirely free of heavy metals. It’s also another newsletter-exclusive supersession, a continuously mixed two-hour set.
We start with kaleidoscopic dance music from Olof Dreijer, constructed from field recordings of Amazonian frogs plus birds from forests near Berlin. We’ll also hear polyrhythmic ambient jazz from Hamid Drake and William Parker, and some of Deep Magic’s Solar Meditations, which has been a staple of the ID Music airwaves since our first broadcasts in 2010.
This edition is not without heaviness though, with more yin-facing ambient Americana, this time from Kaya North, who sits in good company with timber rattle and Lightning White Buffalo as some of our favorite acoustic/ritualistic ambient music of the last few years.
This two-hour version is loosely symmetrical, moving from Dreijer’s tropical goth electronics into gloomy ambient and Natural Information Society’s ecstatic psychedelic jazz, before returning to rhythm-heavy Tunisian dub techno from ID Music favorite Azu Tiwaline. Then it’s back to the dance floor with an attempt at de-colonial steel drum music from Dreijer and Mount Sims, plus a Peter Gabriel cover from Dreijer’s frequent collaborator and actual sibling Karin aka Fever Ray. Our program begins, and eventually comes to an end, with a excerpts from a collaboration between amby downs – Tahlia Palmer’s de/anti-colonial ambient/noise project – and guitar polymath Steve Gunn. It’s a real good one.
amby downs & Steve Gunn - Looming change
Olof Dreijer - Echoes From Mamori
Kaya North - Dead Fox (Eleven Days)
William Parker & Hamid Drake - Faces
Deep Magic - Untitled
Huerco S - Promises of Fertility
Najee-Zaid - Tribal Scars
Natural Information Society - Immemorial
Azu Tiwaline - Through Exodub
Emmanuel Jal - Kuar (Olaf Dreijer Remix)
Ony Ayhun - OAR003B (Korallreven Version)
Olof Dreijer & Mount Sims - Hybrid Fruit
Fever Ray - Mercy Street
amby downs & Steve Gunn - Building fabric
Inter-Dimensional Music 20230908
Impure Flow
Our digest concludes with one of my favorite mixes of the year, a dharma-free Impure Flow session. Ninety percent of what you hear on ID Music is mixed live-to-FLAC inna laptop DJ style here in the home studio. Busting out this clattering yet fluid blend late one September evening was a total blast. The core of the program is a monolithic hybridization of Luke Stewart/Blacks’ Myths’ constantly shifting and perpetually vibrating drums-and-bass devotional “For Mdou”; an edit of a jaggedly hypnotic live post-Boredoms drum circle jam from Japanese gorge “bootists” Indus Bonze; and Yellow Swans performing an ear-splitting yet still somehow lush version of “Mass Mirage” from At All Ends in an idyllic Italian DIY space in 2007. I could go a long way with limiting my sets to Yellow Swans and Luke Stewart projects.
Benthos Ensemble - Neophytou's Marble Drifter (edit)
Luke Stewart - For Mdou
Indus Bonze - LIVE @ hate.hate.hate. vol.6 2023/06/24 (edit)
Yellow Swans - Mass Mirage (Live Tarcento May 18 2007)
Nairobi Sisters - Promised Land Dub
Benthos Ensemble - Foxed Parasol Drifter (edit)
To bring things back around to where we began, I’ve included a lengthy excerpt from Gabriel Mindel Saloman’s recent essay on Yellow Swans’ experiences touring European squats and DIY spaces. It’s a welcome reminder that things have not always been this dire for working artists. It’s something I’ll continue to revisit when I’m seeking the momentum to make seemingly unheard, undervalued, or ignored work such as understandably unpopular yet surprisingly long-running radio broadcast, esoteric death yoga, or this newsletter.
From the Collective Jyrk page on Bandcamp:
For an underground American band, one of the abiding pleasures of touring Europe is having your gigs untethered from the raw economics of ticket sales. In the US we were reduced to entertainers and entrepreneurs, responsible for drawing an audience, self-promotion, for selling a product that people wanted disguised as music/art (I mean… this was even before Web 2.0). That meant that if no one turns up at the show, it’s your fault and consequently you don’t get paid. Sometimes we would be playing a DIY space where it was understood that we’re all in this together, and the joy of being in community (and the compensations that come with it like friendship, a floor to sleep on, a vegan breakfast in the morning) makes it worth it even when you barely get a tank of gas for your trouble.
Europe has its own share of commercial entertainment, and its own underground networks of bar/door funded gigs at squats, clubs, etc., but the economics for YS and bands like us in the 2000’s was shaped by the fact that we were making “art”. Cultural centers (sometimes housed in squats, sometimes fancy institutions, sometimes itinerant) could resource funds from social democratic governments to put on non-commercial gigs on the premise that “culture” and “art” are social goods that need to be supported outside of the cut-throat logics of everyday capitalism. This meant that Yellow Swans could play to a few dozen people at Hybrida’s beautiful space on the River Torre, be fed, billeted, and paid well, offered home-made grappa, treated with dignity and respect. I still think about our show there as a quintessential example of the “good life” that being a noise musician at that time and place could afford. It wasn’t the most money, the most glamorous, the most luxurious, the biggest audience… It was in a way a quiet and humble experience, but one which combined the communal joy of a DIY show with the sophistication and economic stability of something more legit.
So thank you for reading, listening, subscribing for free, subscribing for money (?!?), lurking anonymously, forwarding this to a friend, or unsubscribing if these materials are no long of interest. “We’re all in this together,” as Saloman writes, “and the joy of being in community makes it worth it even when you barely get a tank of gas for your trouble.”
Keep your eye on the inbox for more archive updates, including the long-delayed annotation and commentary for the final chapters in the Rows of Endless Waves funeral doom series.
There’s also a soon-coming three-hour freeform and metal-free mix that I provided3 for a late summer “heart-opening” medicine journey in the wilds of Appalachia. Plus reflections on the post-tour comedown and what it feels like to continue a long-running and surprisingly widely-distributed yet understandably unpopular and remarkably financially unsustainable project such as this one as I creep toward 50. Speaking of which, Inter-Dimensional Music’s Autumnal Koans series is already underway, available all weekend long via FM band or wi-fire transmission on the usual Far West Texas and Central Indiana channels.
Thank you again, and as always, for being here.
blessing up and blessing down,
DC
If you know anyone who might find value or otherwise enjoy Void Contemplation Tactics or Inter-Dimensional Music, please pass it along. It means a lot to me!
Word of mouth is my primary form of promotion. My reach is limited on social media, which I’m increasingly convinced is a good thing. 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 brand new tip jar.
Language via Boomkat, because a lot of the best music writing about this kind of music happening today is actually advertising copy from the in-store circulars of digital retailers.
Longtime Neurosis vocalist and guitarist Kelly publicly outed himself as an abuser in August 2022. IMO the band issued as good of a statement as can be expected, attempting to take responsibility for not looking more carefully into the former comrade’s behavior. It seems heartfelt and sincere, and all the more so considering the low bar when it comes to this kind of thing. This particular song is mostly instrumental, and Kelly’s brief vocal appearance at the end has been washed from the mix. The band is currently on hiatus AFAIK. From Neurosis’ statement (via Metal Injection):
Now, without returning any of the calls, texts, or e-mails of his bandmates and friends, Scott has made a public post about the situation. To us, this decision seems like another attempt at manipulation, another opportunity for his narcissism to control the narrative. Don't allow Scott to make this about himself, it's about the abuse his family has suffered.
Are you planning a “medicine journey”-style retreat, or plotting out a solo road/body/head trip? Do you need an offline soundtrack so you don’t have to rely on Ketamine Therapist Inc®’s proprietary mixes of HOA-approved ambient zones, nor invite the shitstem transmissions from Spotify’s drone warfare funding operation into the circle? Would you like to contribute a modest donation toward the financial sustainability of this project? Cosmic Chambo Studio is available for soundtrack commissions customized to your set and setting. Drop us a line at cosmic dot chambo at gee mail dot com and let’s see if we can meet your needs.
appreciate the hard work!
I feel you baba! Looking forward to the jams.. OM