The Year of Magical Listening

FEATURING Sound Ancestors by Madlib, arranged by Four Tet, released by Madlib Invazion in 2021. Listen / Buy direct "There Is No Time (Prelude)" "The Call" "Theme De Crabtree" "Road Of The Lonely Ones" "Riddim Chant" "Two for 2 – For Dilla" TRANSCRIPT What's the point of music? What's a musician striving to do? The simplest answer, which holds true much of the time, is that music is about the expr...

FEATURING Wuddaji by Theo Parrish, released by Sound Signature in 2020. Listen / Buy direct "Hambone Cappuccino" "Hennyweed Buckdance" "Radar Detector" TRANSCRIPT Nothing about this should work. At any given moment it feels like the whole thing could fall to pieces. So let's start by just appreciating the fact that this music not only does manage to hang together, but that it grooves. Take, for ex...

FEATURING "Deep River (Live at Le Guess Who?)" by Beverly Glenn-Copeland, from Transmissions: The Music of Beverly Glenn-Copeland , released by Transgressive Records in 2020. Listen / Buy direct TRANSCRIPT We will end in jubilation, but we begin in prayer. A single, solitary voice — a simple, five-line verse — an earnest plea for deliverance and grace. As this voice stands before us, naked and exp...

FEATURING "Savage Remix (feat. Beyoncé)" by Megan Thee Stallion, released by 300 Entertainment in 2020. Listen TRANSCRIPT Have four single chords ever sounded so dope? Have four single chords ever so effectively encapsulated a whole song? Two seconds in and you already know everything you need to know. This song is an attitude, and that attitude is defiance. These chords, with their half-step alte...

FEATURING Last Leaf by Danish String Quartet, released by ECM Records in 2017. Listen / Buy direct "Despair Not, O Heart" "Shore" "Shine You No More" TRANSCRIPT What even is a string quartet today? Do we need them anymore? What new could they possibly have to say? To many, the string quartet may seem like a dead language: beautiful, self-contained, but of things past, an object of study rather tha...

FEATURING Don't Lose This by Pops Staples, released by ANTI- Records in 2015. Listen "Somebody Was Watching" "Nobody's Fault But Mine" "Better Home" TRANSCRIPT It's customary to think of songs as built up out of a few fundamental elements: melody, rhythm, harmony, lyric – words set to a tune sung in time atop chords. But these songs are nothing like that. They of course have melody and rhythm, har...

FEATURING Ritme Jaavdanegi by Mohammad Reza Mortazavi, released by Latency in 2019. Listen / Buy direct "Tears of a Fakir : op1" "Riding Time" "Sudden Inspiration" TRANSCRIPT The first thing you hear is time. Not so much time's passing, or its pulse, but the dimension itself: pure Time, as it were. As a solo percussion performance, there is nothing to hear but time: no melody, no harmony, no lyric...