Neanderthal Flute, Nightride Ravedeath, 10,000 Kings
Hello from 2020MG. Today we have recommendations of ancient organological concern, the emotional ambiance of R&B and Drone, and a phenomenology of instagram bots.
Recommendation: The Neanderthal Flute debate
“Neanderthal flute” is the intrusive thought of the week. I first encountered it while reading my Kindle on an elliptical overlooking a recycling processing facility. While entrained in my taskscape.
The flute in question is a cave bear femur with holes in it, from the Middle Paleolithic period. Some people think it was crafted by Neanderthals, while others think it was not. National Geographic dates it back 43,000 years in their article, “Was ‘Earliest Musical Instrument’ Just a Chewed-Up Bone?”. Musicologist Gary Tomlinson argues that there isn’t any “secure evidence” for Neanderthal musicking.
There is a nice sentence in Philip G. Chase and April Nowell’s 1998 Current Anthropology article “Taphonomy of a Suggested Middle Paleolithic Bone Flute from Slovenia.” “This is a chewed bone,” they write, “nothing about it is inconsistent with this as an explanation, and nothing about the bone is very surprising given that it was heavily chewed.”
—Alexander Iadarola
Recommendation: Tinashe - Nightride / Tim Hecker - Ravedeath 1972
I played some music on my stereo a few days ago—something that’s become increasingly rare given how “outside” I’ve had to be for work over the past month or so. Twilight outside, windows cracked, I put on Tinashe’s 2016 album Nightride. I was drawn to the album after listening to a TikTok of her new music that debuted in NYC last weekend. I’ve listened to this clip on loop hundreds of times over the past few days. Tinashe is underrated; I think people know that. She’s an extremely hardworking borderline star, but hasn’t completely broken through—grinding on total mood, total choreo, total vision—a security and confidence with her sound. Her track 2 On is a favorite of 2010s rap radio; and, more recently, “Bouncin’” is in regular rotation. I feel like she might finally actually break through this summer. Tinashe Summer. Just a feeling.
Her album Nightride, released in 2016, sums up a particular dark R&B atmosphere that I’ve always been drawn into, embarrassingly so. It’s embarrassing because the music could easily be taken as overwrought—verging on becoming background music—confident in its emotions to the point of becoming almost “stock.” Underneath its prefab toolkit, Tinashe has a dedication to drawing out mystery, intrigue, and mood into cohesive stretches of album—rare in a pop-R&B space that often favors beat switches and odd track-flows that can mess up the vibe. Her sound is drizzly and overcast, like orange neon pooling under drawn blinds, shared secrets, pillow talk. Producers Metro Boomin, Boi-1da, and The-Dream all create very “known” sound palettes, setting scenes for dim clubs, street-glow freeways, enshrouded bedrooms. “Sacrifices” is a perfect example—an arpeggiated gamelan VST bounces around in an icy pattern. Hi-hats skittering over drawls of moody, melodic 808 type shit. It almost disturbs me in how easy it is to draw aura and ascendent moods from this type of music. Fantastic.
I fell asleep while listening to Nightride on the stereo this past Sunday. Shockingly, I awoke to hear not more Tinashe, but Tim Hecker’s 2011 breakout ambient album Ravedeath 1972. I awoke in the middle of the album, around the track “In the Fog II.” This music is special, and hasn’t lost any of its brutal, greyscale intensity that still seems to somehow find its way into the most intense moments of life. I consider the album to be kind of haunted for this reason. I remember seeing it live at an Appalachian arena in 2011 with my friend Xander Seren and we almost had to run outside of the venue, spooked beyond belief as 19 year olds. Hecker’s music also doesn’t always beat the overwrought allegations. But it understands itself. Beautifully.
I like both Tinashe and Tim Hecker. I’ve got two YouTube tabs from both artists open at the same time right now (“Lucid Dreaming” and “No Drums”). It doesn’t sound too bad. But, hearing them in surprise sequence with each other the other day was genuinely moving. I don’t think I need to dictate their comparison too much more; they share a kind of brutal emotionalism hidden behind their confident genre-work. And, I enjoyed their chance conversation, linked in between exhausted dreams in Spring twilight. Nightride, Ravedeath.
—Nick James Scavo
Recommendation: Jeter Jones “Da Kang of Trailride Blues” bots, Maurice Merleau-Ponty “Cézanne’s Doubt”
Every day for the last few months, Jeter Jones “Da Kang of Trailride Blues,” requests to follow me on Instagram from a brand new account. It’s really a huge honor for me that Mr. Jones would take such an intense interest in my work and activities, because (as I wrote about some weeks back) I really love his music; but I have to admit I feel a little bit smothered by all the attention. I follow his main account, of course, but it’s never enough for Jones. A new account each day, a new request: Jeter2589, Jeter3829, and so on. A deluge of Jones’ requests. It invites some reasonable speculation, I think, on whether there’s something funny going on. But I don’t want to be cynical, and I’d really like to support the work of the arch-trailrider.
What is it that Jones wants to tell me, or to know? What does he want from me? He probably wants to thank me for writing about his music. But as I regretfully decline each new follow, I wonder at the mysterious persistence of Jeter Jones, the digital avatar in my inbox.
I’d like to bracket out the possibility that this is, in fact, NOT Jeter Jones. Instead, I’ll regard these requests as in good faith: simply an expression of the proliferation of Jones in the digital world. And, perhaps even a fraudulent Jones is still, in one sense, a Jones.
Maybe I’ve been too conservative, too guarded. Why not allow the 10,000 kings of trail ride blues to follow me, and why not follow each king in return? I guess I feel like one is enough. I appreciate information being a bit centralized, when it can be. And I don’t imagine it would be very fruitful to carry on discussions with the same person across such a wide array of accounts. But again, I’m searching for the truth of these matters, and want to remain open to possibility.
Why not create a new account each day? A new domain. The central account presupposes a continuity that may be far more representationally consistent, yet actually less true in nature. Why wouldn’t there be a new Jones for each day? A Jones for every season, in a state of continual growth and change. Maybe I am nostalgic, and looking for a type of ephemerality online that I can recall, but no longer access.
One thing about the Jones account series is that there is little to no content on any of the new versions. I think that’s okay. It produces a textual resonance rather than a visual/informational one. It is a daily reminder of Jones in name alone, inviting broad consideration without direction, gestural guidance or intent. It simply names the man and the new number with which the daily expression is anchored within Meta’s vast data infrastructure.
The mysterious, shifting boundary of the many Jones reminds me of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s exposition in “Sense and Non-Sense,” in which he describes the painter Paul Cézanne’s profound and creatively generative near-blindness. He explores the question of freedom in art as something simultaneously constrained by and accelerated in its expression, as a result of the insurmountable experience of subjectivity.
“…to say that we are from the start our way of aiming at a particular future would be to say that our project has already stopped with our first ways of being, that the choice has already been made for us with our first breath. If we experience no external constraints, it is because we are our whole exterior. […] If I am a certain project from birth, the given and the created are indistinguishable in me, and it is therefore impossible to name a single gesture which is not spontaneous-but also impossible to name a single gesture which is absolutely new in regard to that way of being in the world which, from the very beginning, is myself.”
As we inevitably produce images of the world, ourselves, and each other, as with Cézanne, there is maybe an equally unavoidable exterior to what we see and know that can only really be expressed and represented at the boundary of our sight, where the imaginary of clarity dissolves into color and texture. In this respect, maybe the many Jones - true or fraudulent - offer one such texture, or reflect the representation of the basic instabilities in how we appear and what we mean in doing so. I guess, let there be 10,000 kings, on myriad trail rides, with an infinity of blues.
—Alec Sturgis