‘come on let’s go’ by broadcast

I FIRST HEARD the English group Broadcast in a parking lot, probably in the summer of ’99, or around that time. I remember exactly which parking lot it was. It was the one beside the Presbyterian church in Setauket on Long Island. The song was “Phantom,” off of 1997’s Work and Non Work. I think after that, I fired up the old Napster, and Broadcast’s discography was mine. Even at that time, the internet was nascent and information was scarce and hard to find. I really had no idea what Broadcast was, who was in it. The band was shrouded in mystery.

Since then, there have been some advances in internetting. Thanks to Wikipedia, I know in a flash that the group was formed by Trish Keenan and James Cargill, a bassist (!) in Birmingham in 1995. From what I understand, Keenan and Cargill were a sort of scene super-duo (reminiscent of the Gane-Sadier partnership in Stereolab). I think context is a little important here. There was a 1960s revival going on in the late 1990s (think peak Britpop). This wasn’t just driven by nostalgia. People, including myself, just happened to like music from that time. Why shouldn’t we be able to write our own songs inspired by the music we liked? It raised questions about time and cultural ownership. The bottom line was that no matter the inspiration, what came out sounded different. There was no way to recreate that sound, but a sense of loss infused the music. You can hear this in Belle and Sebastian’s recordings.

In March 2000, Broadcast issued their first proper album, The Noise Made by People, on Warp Records. “Come On Let’s Go” was the second single off the record, released that May. Songwriting credits are attributed to Cargill, Keenan, as well as band members Roj Stevens (keyboards), Tim Felton (guitar), and Steve Perkins (drums). The song received positive reviews, with journalists reaching for familiar words like shimmer psychedelic pop. For a young person, there were haunting lines in the song. “It’s hard to tell who’s real in here, come on, let’s go.” It sounded like spending time with strangers. It sounded like a long, lonely walk home at 2 am.

Broadcast was burned to disc and was my music accompaniment throughout college. Once, while I was walking past the radio station at George Washington University, I heard the Broadcast song “City in Progress” being played over the speakers. There was a young DJ inside, an Asian American girl (I will not speculate if she was Korean or Japanese, etc.) but she seemed so introverted and unassuming, and I was surprised that she too had heard of Broadcast. Of course, I waved at her through the glass. “I love Broadcast,” I mouthed to her. “Me too!” she mouthed back. I later got my friends suspended from their show on the radio, when I was invited on and accidentally said, “fuck you” in response to the hosts’ provocation.

The manager came rushing in, sweating, cursing too. “I’m going to get fined for that!”

Trish Keenan died in 2011, when I was knee-deep in diapers, basically (my three daughters were born in ’03, ’07, and ’11). She contracted pneumonia while touring Australia. Swine flu. She was only 42 years old. Cargill oversaw the release of the remainder of the Broadcast catalogue in 2024. Spell Blanket and Distant Call covered demos recorded between 2000 and 2009. And that was that. There’s no Broadcast without Trish Keenan. I’m not sure what the other band members are up to now. But maybe some of us might try to make songs that sound as good. Pretty please?

roof

THERE I WAS, dancing with the Alexandrov Ensemble in my living room, when the wind blew the roof off the house. This was the premier song and dance ensemble of the Soviet army. They were used to doing prisyadki, or Cossack squat kicks. They knew how to do povzunets. But once I put the needle on the vinyl of Off the Wall, they were totally baffled as how to perform to “Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough.” “Good American music,” I told them. “But how do American soldiers dance to this style of music?” one of the dancers asked. His name was Boris.

Then the wind blew the roof off the house and the soldiers all fled into the street. The house was a single-story bungalow, the type that’s popular in California and other earthquake-prone places. The roof came off intact, hovered in the air. My family members gathered around to observe the sight of a roof being lifted into the air by a spectral, unseen force, then tossed on its side. It wasn’t even that windy. It was like watching the Titanic issue its final deep groan.

How was I ever going to fix that? That was my first thought. In other parts of the house, a table was arrayed with a family meal. Cousins were still seated around, passing buckets of fried chicken. They were unfazed by the loss of the roof. From our side of the house, we could see the roof pitch to one side, then float into some black powerlines. The roof looked like a UFO.

Another gust of wind pushed the roof back toward the house and then across the side yard. Down it came, out by the mailbox, still mostly in one piece, though wooden shingles had started to break off on the sides. Just then, a neighbor boy arrived home from school. The bus had let him off on the street. “Come quick,” I shouted to him. “Maybe we can weigh it down with some rocks!”

All this time, Off the Wall had continued to play on the house speakers. Now it was “Rock with You.” “You fool!” my wife cried out from inside the house. She was cradling our newborn in her arms. She said, “You really think some rocks can stop it from levitating?”

She was right. The wind began its ominous rustling. There was something precise and focused about it. Again, the roof went sailing into the air. Like a zeppelin, it righted itself and began to smoothly float away across a blue sky. “Well,” I sighed and told the boy. “There goes our roof.”

mill:liminal by murmer

*Into the mill. Mill:liminal is the audio accompaniment to the 2018 film The Mill, recorded at the Räpina Paper Factory in Estonia.*

MILL:LIMINAL IS NOT AN EASY RECORD to peg, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t interesting or enjoyable. In fact, it’s among the more haunting, thought-provoking, and meditative recordings I have heard in some time. Released this year by Murmer, the handle of sound artist Patrick Tubin McGinley, it is the sonic accompaniment to a 35-minute film made with Daniel Edward Allen in 2018 called The Mill. To record The Mill, McGinley and Allen descended on the Räpina Paberivabrik, a paper mill in southeast Estonia that has been producing paper continuously since the 1730s. Here, the old mill’s creaks, whirs, rattles and hums are arranged into drone-like compositions distilled into seven, hypnotic tracks. McGinley reports that he was inspired to record the mill after having been a customer. Räpina produced the packaging for earlier releases, and he was drawn in by its mesmeric sounds.

McGinley’s approach to recording is very cinema verite. His sound recorders are the shaky hand holding the camera, giving you a first-person look — or in this case, listen — at what’s happening. The sounds for mill:liminal were recorded mostly with a Sennheisier MKH 30/40 boomed microphone rig connected to an SD744T hard disc portable field recorder. Additional sounds were recorded with self-constructed contact microphones and some with DPA 4060 miniature omnidirectional microphones. So what can sound like sound captured raw is actually the product of some serious technological sophistication and deep processing.

The result is unsettling, for mill:liminal sounds like consciousness melting off the slate of time. In some moments, the low and steady growl of the paper mill machinery takes on monastic tones, as if a monastery of Tibetan monks were assembled for prayer in the mountains.

It’s not hard to find parallels in McGinley’s work, but it does lead one to unexpected places. Is a man in a plaid shirt with a microphone in hand, poised to capture sounds in the field, not unlike Alan Lomax, with his field recordings of world music? McGinley does agree with that.

“I have long-standing thoughts about the world of field recording and experimental music being considered as folk music,” he says. “It’s music that has grown out of a community outside of academic circles, a sort of voice of a population.” Interestingly, he has noted that the mill, in its own way, is a living entity, as people play limited roles in maintaining its processes.

There are also sonic links to the experiments of minimalist composer La Monte Young and his Dream Syndicate. One can see how the hum of a paper mill aligns with Young’s tunings that matched the environmental sounds around him, most famously his reliance on a refrigerator’s 60-cycle electrical hum, which he considered as a foundational drone for his music. Young called the 60-cycle hum the “drone of Western civilization,” but as mill:liminal reminds us, these folk songs of machinery are all around us. If listened to, they can be a thing of beauty.

mill:liminal is available now as a digital download and will be available soon as a cd packaged in paper from the Räpina Paberivabrik. In addition to undertaking field recordings of creepy paper mills, Murmer also produces a regular weekly radio show called Framework Radio. Other recordings are available on Bandcamp.

algún día by tomás del real

“ALGÚN DÍA” by Chilean singer songwriter Tomás del Real is easily one of his most accessible and enjoyable songs. Instantly satisfying, the lead single off his forthcoming album Jakobsoni, is three-and-a-half minutes long and finds del Real expressing all his strengths: gentle, playful melodies, deft guitar work, and that almost half-whispered conversational singing style of his, as if he was confiding in you his most important feelings and thoughts on a walk at night.

The image of the typewriter in the video for the single evokes the literary tradition in pop music and is apt. Think of stories about Bob Dylan and The Band’s The Basement Tapes, where the lyrics were composed line by line on a typewriter in the house they shared, or even The Beatles’ “Paperback Writer” or “Eleanor Rigby.” While sounding almost nothing like McCartney, it could be said that del Real has similar sentiments, a fondness for novelistic writing, atmospherics that make a song glow at its edges, finding inspiration in the everyday.

Though the song glides along as easily as a ghost, del Real said that it even challenged him to play it. “It has this very complex fingerpicking that I heard in my head at first, but couldn’t figure out,” he says. “It took months for it to become natural.” The lyrics also emerged over time and the whole composition came together during a week of self-imposed exile in Berlin.

“I was able to take a break and finish up four of the songs on the new album,” del Real recalls.

“Algún día” reflects on existential themes of life and death, the temporary and timeless.

Algún día de erosión / Nuestras almas se evaporarán / Al encontrar otra forma en vez de despertar / Quizá, me han de contar

Which translates in English to something like

One day, through erosion / Our souls will evaporate / Finding another way instead of waking / Perhaps, they will tell me.

Finding another way instead of waking;

“I think time and the ephemerality of things is a topic that’s on my mind quite often,” he says. “I was searching for the most vulnerable aspects of myself while writing this song, the real spots, for something valuable.”

The single was recorded in Viljandi, Estonia, where del Real has lived for the past few years and produced with Javier Barría, who added the synths and other instrumentation. “Algún día” was mixed and mastered by del Real’s long-time collaborator Jorge Fortune in Chile. It is available on all streaming platforms, including Spotify, as of 31 July. The new album Jakobsoni will follow soon. It will be the fourth record del Real has put out in Estonia, following 2022’s collaboration with Lee Taul Don’t Chase the Lizard, 2023’s Principios de Declaración and 2024’s Notas Rotas. Despite this prolific output, del Real says that he battles writer’s block all the time, even with “Algún día”.

“This one has been like cold brew,” he says. “Drip by drip. It took a while, but it came out right.”

drummer

I HAD BEEN SEEING Mai for a few weeks when she abruptly left me for a drummer. And not just any drummer, but Giorgio Marrakesh, the rhythm provider for one of New York’s most enduring indie rock ensembles. Mai was my kind of woman: a few years older, self-accomplished, intoxicatingly neurotic, a spicy summer cocktail of the dangerous and ridiculous, well shaken. She had her own TV show, which was called The Mai Show. She would emerge onto the stage of The Mai Show in her lovely pink tablecloth-looking dress as spellbound fans from everywhere applauded furiously. She would spin and settle onto one hip.

We had met at the Strand Bookstore downtown on a Wednesday afternoon. I had been paging through reproductions of 17th-century Swedish imperial maps; she had been reading a feature article about herself from 1994. She had just finished filming the day’s episode. She was sipping from a coffee cup. She wore those big glasses that famous people wear, to both draw attention to themselves and to avoid being seen. But those pink lips gave her away. It was all going swimmingly and summerly until Giorgio re-entered the picture. She went back to him at once. “He’s a drummer,” she said and shrugged. She related the end in a careless and wonderful way.

A drummer. Drummers sat in the back, surveying all before them. Drummers were steady, reliable. Drummers kept the beat. Drummers had their own philosophy. “But he’s just a drummer,” I wrote Mai. I sent telegrams to her apartment every hour on the hour, relayed by real messenger boys. “He’s just a drummer,” I continued. “He knows about cymbals, he knows about snares and tom-toms, he knows if it’s 4/4 or 6/8. Would a drummer write you a haiku?”

He’s just a drummer / Always playing with his sticks / Can’t write a haiku

A drummer, she was with a drummer, not a writer. But what is a writer? A writer is always writing. A writer is found in bookstores. A writer runs his fingers along old paperbacks by Salinger and Vonnegut, wishing he had written them, but secretly feeling superior to both.

“But can a writer also be worthy of your love?” I penned Mai. She read the letter while she was lounging around in her loft apartment, eating macaroni and cheese and talking to her agent. She never wrote back.

two a.m.

I GOT A TICKET to see a show at the old Main Street Theatre. A former vaudevillian hub that had retained its gilded, art deco elements even though it had been long since upgraded into a modern performing space and hosted all kinds of B-level musicians. These included up-and-coming singer-songwriters who would soon graduate to bigger and better things but miss its cosy intimacy. My seat was on the left. From its plush cushion, I could see everyone come in.

This was how I spotted Mai. To my surprise, her seat was next to mine, and to my double surprise, she was soon in my lap. She was still clutching the program in one hand as she embraced me. It was good to see Mai. She wore a red sweater, the kind J. Geils once sang about, soft and fuzzy, just magical to touch. I soon became lost in its textures, how they rose and fell, rearranging themselves along her abdomen like desert sands. Her chestnut hair was pulled back. Her eyes were blue. “I’ve missed you,” she said. There was a sincerity there. I had sincerely missed her too. My hands soon found their way under her sweater and we sat joined, like frogs. Sometimes you don’t need anything else but to be and be still. Most times, I think.

When I woke up, the shape of my lovely friend was still there but the band leader was shouting down at us from the stage. This was an old soul group, straight out of New Orleans. “If all of y’all is going to sleep, then none of us is going to play!” the band leader said, gesturing with his trumpet. I looked around the theatre and could see that everyone was asleep, not just us. Many blank and groggy faces, old ones, young ones yawning. “Oh, I’m so tired,” Mai whispered.

“If you are going to put on a show at 2 a.m., you shouldn’t expect people not to fall asleep!” I yelled back at the band leader. “You don’t know nothing,” he said. “We always play at night!” “Two a.m. is when most people sleep! It’s the middle of the night. Maybe your band should have its concerts during the day.” “Tell you what, man,” the band leader shouted back. “We are done playing for squares.” The band came off the stage, slowly, sorrowfully. They funeral marched up the aisles past their audience, sullen faces down, sad not to play, horns and all.

‘twilight haze’ by fuzzolini

FUZZOLINI’S NEW RECORD is called Beauty Exists in Everyone. I’ve seen this group perform a few times, and both times they were so loud, I thought I was about to go into cardiac arrest. Which is what makes listening to an actual recording, where I can control the volume, so refreshing. “Ah, so that’s what it’s supposed to sound like.” I wouldn’t blame them for the sonic dissonance. One aspect is that’s how rock clubs do it. It’s supposed to be loud. And I also think the group is going for the wall-of-sound effect. On the song “Twilight Haze” they manage to create that same kind of full noise tapestry without suffering from too much messy distortion.

I’m kind of impressed by Fuzzolini’s guitarist, singer and frontman (I guess you could call him that) Valter Nõmm, who looks like he fell asleep in about 1997 or so and just woke up in the forest somewhere, still wearing the same flannel shirt. He has maintained that kind of sensibility, as if he’s still listening to Soundgarden on his Walkman with his sunglasses on.

He’s not afraid of big, crunchy guitar sounds, but these bold strokes are applied sensitively, with the finesse of an artist. According to Nõmm, “Twilight Haze” was one of those songs that came out of nowhere. “Come out of nowhere” songs are mystical. Think of “Get Back,” which Paul McCartney conjured out of nothing. Better yet, nobody is quite sure of where they come from. They just come. Getting a few words out of this tight-lipped cat Nõmm is always an effort. He is a man who speaks in gestures and prefers to let his guitar do the talking. But he did manage to tell me that the song “was created spontaneously in the studio,” in one take.

The original track was just his guitar and drums, played by Lauri Pajos. Later Margus Voolpriit’s bass and Kristi Jõeste’s synths were added to the mix. “I decide to go for something cosmic,” Jõeste says. ” I started to feel a little bit like Sven Grünberg.” The synths give the track its “beamed in from space” feel. The vocals are performed by Mari-Liis Rebane, an audiovisual artist and producer, who sings with Fuzzolini. This too was improvised, which preserved its “raw emotion and exploratory style,” in her words. Rebane and Nõmm have known each other for 20 years and had collaborated before, but Fuzzolini gave them the opportunity to do more. She sings on several songs, including “Balloons,” for which she created the synth sequence.

“Twilight Haze” was the second track they recorded for the record. It seems they’re happy with it. “It carries within it the fluid feeling of moving through the night,” says Rebane. “I like it’s hypnotic quality,” Nõmm agrees. Cosmic synths, heavy guitars, smart vocals, big drums. What’s not to like?

Photos by Nicolas Bouvy

‘i guess i’m falling in love’ by the velvet underground

EVENTUALLY ONE ENCOUNTERS the Velvet Underground. They are the godfathers of punk, the remakers of rock, the anti-Beatles, or something along those lines. Much has been written about them, much has been attributed to them. In reality, they were a creative New York rock group that enjoyed limited commercial success in the late 1960s. They are probably best known as Andy Warhol’s house band, and the Velvets toured to support something called the Exploding Plastic Inevitable, a multimedia experience, for lack of a better term, that included loud rock and roll. These events included film showings, light shows, and noise experiments. The Velvets played one of these EPI shows at a venue called The Gymnasium on East 71st Street in New York on April 30, 1967, during which their set was recorded. This has to be some of the best rock of its era captured on tape and the standout is “I Guess I’m Falling in Love.”

Authorship of this song is attributed to the whole band, which at that time included Lou Reed (guitar, vocals), Sterling Morrison (guitar), John Cale (bass), and Maureen Tucker (drums). I’m guessing that it was the scholarly Morrison who ripped the amazingly fluid guitar solo, which sounds fantastic with The Gymnasium’s acoustics. This live version later surfaced on the Velvet’s boxed set, Peel Slowly and See, which yours truly acquired as a teenager. I honestly was contending with the winter doldrums when I was in my Velvets phase, and probably some hormonal stuff, I think I was having periods of mania followed by collapse and depression. High school started early too, and I believe I suffered from sleep deprivation, which happens when you wake up at 6 am every day. And which made this the perfect band to listen to. While they have their dark mood music, “I Guess I’m Falling in Love” was a rare splash of sunshine.

Yes, even Lou Reed had his up moments. Otherwise, it was mostly down. There were tensions with Nico (“You’re out of the band!”). There were tensions with Cale (“You are also out of the band!”). And there were tensions with Warhol (“You’re not the boss of me!”). There was just a lot of Lou-related tension and probably the greatest tension he had was with himself (hint, his future involved a lot more heroin and some transexuals). But he was from Long Island — Freeport, to be exact — and as a moody teenager I could relate to his desire to blow the whole place to smithereens with some infectious rock and roll and set it ablaze with the help of Morrison, Cale, and Tucker. Especially Cale seemed dangerous, with his greasy dark hair and undertaker’s countenance. A few people have told me that I look like this brooding Welshman, which I take as the greatest compliment. Before forming the Velvets, Reed was a songsmith for a record company called Pickwick Records, by the way, where he imitated a lot of bestselling 60s pop and produced knockoff hits. A little Ronettes over here, some Beach Boys there, an inverted Four Seasons progression to serve as the foundation. One can appreciate Lou Reed’s taste for memorable changes, propulsive rhythm, and great hooks on this recording from ’67.

lost stones

WHEN I MOVED out of the apartment, I discovered the extent of my hoarding over the years. No matter how many boxes of books I moved, no matter how many armfuls of coats and shirts I extracted, the task was endless. I worked day and night and still got nowhere with the thing.

The apartment was in some up-and-coming residential area in Tallinn, like Noblessner maybe, but farther inland, though no place is very far inland in Tallinn. I had outgrown the neighborhood though, it being taken over by hipsters 20 years my junior with tech jobs.

While doing the move, I stopped and helped myself to some refreshing water flavored with effervescent mint at a café bar in the building’s food court. Some kid in a flannel shirt called me an old man for sitting there. ‘Next you’re going to start talking about the Eighties,’ he said.

Outside, I paused in the courtyard to breathe beneath the palatial, intergalactic, honeycomb looking apartment terraces and balconies, made of brick, glass and iron. And that’s when I heard it, the unmistakable sound of the early Stones. The fuzz of the guitar, that stark beat.

But something was strange about this song, for I had never heard it before. It was a bit like ‘Tell Me’ crossed with ‘The Last Time.’ How could it be that I had never heard it? Surely it had popped up in some anthology. But no. Looking up at the brick work, I could see the band, projected high in black and white. Mick Jagger was up there singing, holding the microphone.

Then it occurred to me. This must have been one of Brian’s songs. Andrew Loog Oldham had said that Brian Jones had written a few songs that Jagger and Richards, the primary songwriting team, had snubbed. By Oldham’s telling, Jones’s output had been worthless junk. But girlfriend Linda Lawrence recalled otherwise. She said that Brian’s songs were brilliant.

This must have been one of those lost songs, leaked from the vaults at last, played by Tallinn hipsters from some upper floor pad in the digital future. They were still cool. I was old and in the way, but the Stones were young. Mr. Brian Jones, 57 years dead, still lived on, his music played and played. Some consolation it was to hear the Rolling Stones on that sad day.

fragments

I SAW THEM ALL on stage, a smaller auditorium, standing only, playing just a few feet off the ground. This was the classic line up, and after the show, one of the singers came over. I couldn’t tell if her face was really melting off or if I had been dosed again. She had a doll-like yellow wig, which could have been her real hair, and her features looked sculpted, contorted into a menacing grin, and not quite human, like one of those shamanic masks from the Pacific Northwest. She wore loose, Tibetan-looking robes. She handed a large witches hat, about three feet high, to the woman next to me, and said. “Thank you for coming to the concert.” When the hat was opened, a pomegranate-like fruit protruded, with red flesh between its stiff membranes. The woman beside me said it was delicious. “Like persimmons mixed with honey.”

Next another singer in the band presented me with my own reward, a green hat of about the same size. It was made of unfamiliar textile, smooth and yet fuzzy, a bit course to the touch. The singer’s brown hair was long and he was dressed in Renaissance clothing. “Thanks for coming to the show, man,” he said. I pulled open the hat and devoured its sticky contents.

Later, I found myself on the second floor of a warehouse in New York. My great grandmother was there sitting at a table, dressed in a white youthful dress of the time, something circa 1914. She was sitting there staring off into space and someone was taking her photograph. Everything was black and white, and each time the camera flashed, I could see a dark negative of a child inside her. Not a baby, but a girl of maybe three or four years old, sitting peacefully there, in her own white dress. What even was this? Why was I being shown the past and the future? My great grandmother still didn’t notice me in the warehouse. She sat there quite still.

Downstairs, at a café, I waited in line to place my order. The seller told me that the cake I wanted was too strong for my needs. “If I give you this cake, and you digest it, it will change you, it will make you into a real monster,” he said. “I recommend this cinnamon bun, over here.” I took the cinnamon bun and noticed that Violette was sitting below the window in the sunshine. She was sitting there, watching me, with the sun in her red curls and Lata was by the counter, standing tall and erect, watching me. Lata also looked like she had no idea what she was doing in the café. I looked over at Violette. She smiled at me and winked. Lata’s brown hair was pulled back in a braid, she wore a white jacket and trousers, and her light eyes looked alert and alarmed. “So,” she said while waiting for her matcha latte. “Fancy meeting you here.”