Corridos Sousáfono, Space Broadcast, Worm Devotion
Hello! This week we recommend the Mexican sousaphone sound and tradition, songs to wake up in space to, and the worm as a devotional figure in music.
Recommendation: Fuerza Regida - Del barrio hasta aquí, vol. 2
Last week I saw the band Corridos Ketamina perform at the recommendation of Max Ludlow. I’ll bracket that experience out for now, in anticipation of more potential interaction with that band in my immediate future. However, that show drummed up some personal nostalgia of spring/summer 2021—a season spent listening almost exclusively to Fuerza Regida. The band is a chart-topping quintet who make excellent corridos tumbados, a Mexican genre that updates traditional narrative ballads to become variously inflected with hip-hop, trap, a bit of reggaeton, and other more recent sounds. Corrido is more than two hundred years old, centering musical storytelling of historical figures, daily life, and emotional tales of outlaws, miscreants, crime, and personal struggle. Fuerza Regida’s 2021 album Del barrio hasta aquí, vol. 2, one of their earlier releases, is one of their more traditional albums, heavily featuring the bright, doubled sound of Samuel Jáimez’s twelve-string guitar, and the incessant, virtuosic punchy low end of José García’s sousaphone.
I’m particularly drawn to the way the sousaphone sounds on this album. Its presence is relentless, outlining chord progressions or locking into rhythm in staccato blasts. The modern mixing on the record gives the bass instrument an entire spectrum of excited, extraneous bass and mid frequencies. The sousaphone presents itself on the recordings as a malleable firebrand analog synthesizer like a Rashad Becker modular synth rig, despite being a 19th century brass instrument. The materiality of the instrument as the entire bass frequency on these recordings, rather than any synthesized or string bass instrument, is intense. The sound erupts out of a speaker as a complex, holistic band of frequency—taking an immense amount of breath to manifest flights of I, VII, VI minor key chord progressions, dueling with the lattice of the twelve-string guitar. I’d love to see a sousaphone renaissance in more contemporary computer/DAW environments that are usually defined by front-and-center bass-synth VSTs—as the sounding of the sousaphone itself is a frequency origin for the bass sounds of monophonic detuned Moog oscillators, envelopes, or filters. The breathwork required for playing a sousaphone has a slant-rhyme with this type of synthesis through its inherent filtering and wind force needed to produce sound. It’s an unwieldy, difficult to transport, probably hard to mic instrument … but let’s bring it back.
With Fuerza Regida, we hear sousaphone in a modern recording context that centers it as both a traditional acoustic machine imbricated with how electronic music is recorded and produced in the 2020s. I love its fidelity, and want to hear ensembles of dozens of sousaphones performing blasts of dissonance (a la Anthony Braxton, but maybe with a 2hollis tinge); or, Rashad Becker-style “Traditional Music for Notional Species” with amplified sousaphone instead of a modular rig; or, Baille Funk where the bass is carved by the presence of a lone sousaphone. A few years back, my colleague Kari Rittenbach and I spent months finding the right sousaphone player to perform in choreographer Ralph Lemon’s piece In Proximity, which we produced at MoMA PS1. We weren’t particularly shocked by how difficult it was to find tuba/sousa players with experimental leanings (we spent hours scouring the credits of performances of Braxton tuba pieces, specifically). I’ll conclude here by issuing a plea for more true low brass (sorry trombonists, we need that extra octave) in the current experimental music landscape. For now, Fuerza Regida is holding it down.
—Nick James Scavo
Recommendation: Orca - “4AM”
There is a new spaceship called “Artemis 2.” I know it exists because my FYP surfaced an explainer from Scientific American introducing me to “NASA wake up songs.” These are queued up by the control room and remotely broadcast on the spacecraft in order to rouse the astronauts from sleep. Here is the playlist:
“Sleepyhead” by Young & Sick
“Green Light (feat. André 3000)” by John Legend
“In a Daydream” by Freddy Jones Band
“Pink Pony Club” by Chappell Roan
“Working Class Heroes (Work)” by CeeLo Green
“Good Morning” by Mandisa and TobyMac
“Tokyo Drifting” by Glass Animals and Denzel Curry
“Under Pressure” by Queen and David Bowie
“Lonesome Drifter” by Charlie Crockett
If you were to make selections for this situation, you might first define two things: how you feel about waking up, and how you feel about space. You might want your selections to articulate something about your team’s mission, or the condition of perceiving space whilst in space, or a hundred other things.
You might remember the 1977 Voyager Golden Record, described by NASA as “a kind of time capsule, intended to communicate a story of our world to extraterrestrials … containing sounds and images selected to portray the diversity of life and culture on Earth.” It included field recordings of humpback whales and greetings in 55 languages, as well as musical selections ranging from Mozart and Kesarbai Kerkar to Laurie Spiegel and Chuck Berry, as well as 116 planetary images encoded in analog form.
Or you might simply choose a song that you enjoy. I might select Orca’s “4AM.” Though the more I think about it, I don’t think I would want to wake up to music in space.
—Alexander Iadorola
Recommendation: The Worm / TM Krishna feat. Vikku Vinayakram: Live at Afghan Church
In the last week I’ve had multiple extended discussions (with more than one person) about the worm. The animal. This line of thought started for me, sitting in the sun in my yard in the morning. I saw the first worm I’ve seen in many months crawling across the grass at my feet. I realized I’ve not considered the worm recently and regarded it with proper respect. As a fisher, the worm sacrifices for sport or food, devoid of its independent, auspicious contexts as the refiner of soil. They break down organic matter into nutrient-rich waste. Their tunneling aerates the soil, allowing oxygen to reach the roots of growing things, and creating aqueducts that drain the flooding ground.
When we are children, in the yard, I think we perceive and consider more of the worm’s being. They embody a quality of life and an orientation to their environment that is so different from ours, and their translucent, intestinal, spineless countenance is non-human to a degree that is, maybe, frightening. What drives the worm? The worm, like sound, moves in a wave. And worms dance when the ground resonates with the striking of rain drops.
Coincidentally, I’ve also been obsessively listening to the Southern Indian Carnatic music of the ghațam instrument. The ghațam is a clay pot - it’s one of the most ancient percussion instruments. Masters of the instrument, like Vikku Vinayakram (whose playing may be most familiar in John McClaughlin’s fusion group, Shakti), transform the ceramic into a spectral, sonically explosive vehicle for rhythm and sound. While produced in multiple areas of the Indian subcontinent, the ghațam from Manamadurai are said to have a special quality and tonal purity. It invites further contemplation of the worms appointed to process this particularly musical clay.
The rhythmic forms of Talas in Indian classical musics divide time, not linearly, but cyclically. And within these cycles, standard sub-sequences of beats, called aksaras, form a fixed, grounding structure over which the instrumentalist engages in improvisatory contractions and expansions of time (most often through combination of the jatis - the five “families” of rhythm - in groups of 4, 3, 7, 5, 9).
In Vikku Vinayakram’s philosophy of the ghațam, he emphasizes the pot as a voice that is given expression through total devotion to it - sacrificing and suffering the often painful, precise finger strikes upon its hardened surface. The fingers: like worms. The rhythm, worms. The air and sound-waves become refined, organized in resonance and the silence between resonances; aerated, tunneling in the ear, drained, nourished.
—Alec Sturgis