week 1: link to playlist
monday-
robert lee & coco bryce: come now sound boy
randall, andy c: sound control (remix)
m-beat: surrender
the bug, flowdan, loefah - jah war (loefah remix)
DJ dextrous, rude boy keith - wicked
tuesday-
maymo - listening softly, quietly at night
toumani diabaté, ballaké sissoko - kita kaira
louvre doors - song for H. (so i can sleep tonight)
susan christie - rainy day
rogér fakhr - lady rain
kevin vicalvi - lover now alone
wednesday-
derya yıldırım, grup şimşek - bal
makers - don’t challenge me
alan lomax - all the pretty little horses
gustav lange, kjell bækkelund - blumenlied, opus 39
john mccormack, gerald moore - oft in the stilly night
los kipus - huye de mí
sam gendel - kōshi
thursday-
admas - astawesalehu
pink industry - don’t let go
medio mutante - 17 años
joose keskitalo - tietoisuus
friday-
roberto musci - claudia, wilhelm r, and me
meitei - nami
pavel milyakov, yana pavlova - midnight blues
fairuz - kamat mariyam
boba stefanovic, zlatni decaci - sam
mayssa karaa - white rabbit
saturday-
al hazan, the blossoms - misty moon
張露 - 夕陽紅
nora orlandi - lady luna
daniel norgren - why may i not go out and climb the trees
ric manrique jr. - inday ng buhay ko
trish toledo - sin control
usha iyer - good times and bad times
branko mataja - tamo daleko
sunday-
yujiro ishihara - ラブユー東京
tamaki sawa - ベッドで煙草を吸わないで
akiko wada - どしゃぶりの雨の中で
mina aoe - 伊勢崎町ブルース
yujiro ishihara - 夜霧よ今夜も有難う
intro/recap:
to say that i grew up around music would be an understatement. to say that i exist because of it would be dramatic but ultimately accurate- my parents met in the early 90s, through my dad’s band. a guitarist and pianist since age 6, he’d spent his life playing rock and country western music, including as a member of the house band at the old camelot inn in tulsa, living in a converted former brothel with certain unnamed people who would go on to become major figures in modern country music.
i was steeped in his favorites for as long as i could remember- his weekend house cleaning music of choice was the 1971 concert for bangladesh with george harrison and ravi shankar. as soon as i was old enough to carry a mic stand, i began helping him load in his equipment at the biker bars he played at. he had an old hammond organ in the garage with cutouts from playboy that would spin as he played. he would talk for hours about the invention of the steel guitar, about the genius of the “fifth beatle”, their producer george martin, about experimental time signatures and left handed blues guitarists. suffice to say, an encyclopedic knowledge of music is something that runs in my blood.
i’ve spent years obsessively seeking out music, things that the people around me hadn’t heard, music from around the world, music from history, gems hiding in plain sight. i would spend hours recording cassette mixes off of the giant 80s stereo cabinet that we kept on the porch, piecing mixes together, building and collecting a library of totally legally downloaded deep cuts from blogspot pages dedicated to rare music. i’ve become something of an insatiable, an obsessive.
i started noise ordinance to have an intro to music writing, something to let me practice but more importantly, to gush about music. as much as my friends like my long ass talks about whatever song i’ve just found (or… or at least they say they do. right, guys?) it seemed time to share it with everyone. i have a passionate, sentimental way of talking about music. nothing else is closer to me. so here i am, offering it to you.
the rules are simple: every day, i’ll seek out a minimum of 3 songs i haven’t heard before. any genre, any time, any theme. i’ll compile those into a playlist, and at the end of the week, i’ll write a recap of my week and highlight a few favorite finds.
so, here we go:
this week was an interesting one. on monday, i’d been asked to make my roommate a jungle/drum and bass playlist, which explains why every track is in that vein. these genres are interesting to me, as i’m a huge fan of reggae, early UK dubstep, reggaeton, etc, but somehow jungle and drum and bass had largely stayed off of my radar. i’m very picky about it. but monday’s tracks got through to me.
the rest of the week fell into more of a consistent theme- a little more mellow, a little more morose, a little more slow and experimental. a little classical, the odd operatic piece. john mccormack’s “oft in the stilly night” stuck with me. since i’ve begun curating soundtracks i often think of music in terms of film, picturing a song’s use in a scene. this one spoke to me. the possibilities were endless- sentimentality, sadness, rebuilding after a destruction or loss, a moment of solitude, a moment of beauty. john mccormack’s powerful tenor carries the vibrato of a violinist, enough to feel the quiver in your hand to try and reenact it. the song has a faraway quality that feels like passing by in a train, watching through the open windows of houses and apartments along the way.
thursday saw a little 80s, a little new wave. the guitar tone of pink industry’s “don’t let go” called to mind new order’s age of consent, pale saints’ sight of you. since losing daniel, i appreciate 80s music and new wave more than i used to. i wanted to dance with him to “don’t let go.” it seemed like something that would fit in on one of his 80s playlists.
the best music, the best food, the best people, the best art and literature, all of the best things in life lay outside of the anglosphere. i find that many people are either resistant to the idea of listening to foreign music or it’s something that doesn’t occur to them. this, to me, feels like the equivalent of never leaving your hometown. there’s an entire world of experiences that you’ll be missing out on, some of the most incredible, incomparable songs ever composed that still bring tears to my eyes and break my skin out in goosebumps however many years later.
the first time i heard ros serey sothea’s voice, i cried. the frequency of her voice seemed to find its way inside me and swell, until it felt like i was radiating with the sound. eleven years later, that feeling is as strong as it was the first time. let yourself be consumed by music in languages you can’t speak, places you’ve never been to. close your eyes and get lost in it.
music is one of the few great equalizers among all people- solzhenitsyn wrote “who has the skill to make a narrow, obstinate human being aware of others' far-off grief and joy, to make him understand dimensions and delusions he himself has never lived through?” through art, through music, through literature, through food, through dance. incorruptible products of the human spirit at its most honest, its most genuine.
you’ll find this as a throughline in noise ordinance, in every mix or playlist i create, every soundtrack i curate. the human spirit is not so different that we can’t understand each other through art if we’re open to it. the best advice i can offer to anyone is to be open to it. there is just no other way worth being.
as promised, foreign music was prominent this week, as it will be most weeks. sunday was comprised entirely of japanese pop and jazz from the 60s. saturday saw pieces like fairuz’s “kamat mariyam” a breathtakingly beautiful choral piece from 1990 album “good friday eastern sacred songs”, a collection of christian hymns sung by lebanese soprano fairuz. ethiopian tezeta jazz and funk is a genre i love, and admas’s “astawesalehu” stopped me in my tracks when i first heard it. many of us are familiar with wes anderson’s use of “theme to bombay talkie” in his film the darjeeling limited, but i had not heard “good times and bad times”, the song with vocal accompaniment by usha iyer. i must have played it over a hundred times in the last 24 hours alone.
overall, the week offered a pretty good mix. i’ve been listening to it nonstop. while it may be the rose colored glasses of the first week of a project, in the 14 years that i’ve been consistently seeking out new and exciting music, i haven’t yet lost my ability to be shocked speechless by a piece of music. if a song can have me frozen in place with my eyes damn near popping out of their sockets, it’s a keeper. there were a lot of keepers this week. let’s dive into my favorites-
my favorites from this week:
lover now alone -
songs of this type hold a special place in my heart. heart of gold, right down the line, sister golden hair. the nostalgic, bordering on melancholic melodies like a sad smile while looking at an old photograph of someone you’ll never meet again. it’s a bittersweet kind of affection, a plea, a goodbye.
my mother and stepfather owned a bar when i was young, a small dive with an impromptu tattoo studio in the back, still illegal in oklahoma at the time. it was a favorite hangout for bikers, gnarled men with faded, stretched tattoos and hardened attitudes, long beards and braided beards and vests with insignias on the back. my stepfather was among them, a large burly man with jet black hair worn in a ponytail, a long beard, cobwebs tattooed on the corners of his hairline where it had begun to recede, a nose that had been broken one or a few times and hands like catcher’s mitts. he had a commanding presence, a brick wall kind of attitude that communicated in no uncertain terms that this was not someone to fuck with.
he and my mom would pick me up from my father’s house in the middle of the night after closing the bar, showing up at 4 or 5 in the morning in their deconstructed jeep with no roof or doors, only rusted out framework. they’d drive us through east tulsa, by the neon blaring route 66 sign, down the highway with the radio cranked up loud and cutting through the noise of the wind. in the winter we would bundle up in blankets, in the summer we would take the long way, in the rain we would scoop cupfuls of water out of the floor of the jeep.
the late night radio always played my stepfather’s favorites, the same kind of nostalgic classic rock. it’s on these drives that i first heard don’t fear the reaper by blue oyster cult, rock on by david essex, year of the cat by al stewart. my stepfather would sing along in his high, raspy falsetto that was always jarring and shocking to anyone who heard it for the first time, a drastic contrast to his normal rough, booming voice.
it was a summer night the first time i heard sister golden hair. i was young, how young i don’t remember. my stepfather had come to pick me up. the highway was empty, the wind and crickets screaming. “well i tried to make it sunday, but i got so damn depressed…” he would fill in when the crackly radio station slipped out of transmission, into an AM radio televangelist threatening us with eternal damnation, and i’d laugh. “...i’ve been one poor correspondent, and i’ve been too, too hard to find…” with the dark blue of night stretched out beyond the road, gold streetlamps hazy in the humid night air, a backing chorus of frogs and cicadas, i wanted the moment to last forever. i didn’t want to ever have to get out of the car and return to the reality of life. i wanted to live inside a capsule of that moment. it’s a feeling i’ve been searching for ever since.
kevin vicalvi’s “lover now alone” incites a similar feeling. under the right circumstances, this could have been the song accompanying that moment. the clarity of the acoustic guitar, each pass of the pick distinguishable, just the right amount of reverb, bass peeking through beneath, a bowed string kind of tenor and grouped vocals reminiscent of crosby, stills, nash, & young all converge to fit the mood perfectly. it’s the kind of song that you listen to with one hand carving patterns against the force of air outside the car window, heading down the highway at night. lyrics like “you will find, to your surprise, you’ll live again” are delivered with such gentle sincerity that you can’t help but believe them. it’s an encapsulation of a feeling, a promise. “please remember that i want to stay with you, and be by your side until your sadder days are dead and gone.” it takes me back, as they say, to a time when all that laid before me was an empty highway in the middle of the night and all my troubles were behind me. the feeling it conjures is, for that alone, invaluable.
inday ng buhay ko -
ric manrique jr.’s “inday ng buhay ko” had me frozen in place, staring at my screen until it ended. the instrumentation is a beautiful, haunting combination of bluesy guitar, bell synths, and chimes of a Q-chord that give it the sound of an old music box or an empty carnival.
ric manrique jr.’s voice floats through the instrumentation with the slow, solemn quality of a scene from in the mood for love or happy together. it’s a perfect song for the loneliness of an old city at night, a cigarette smoked in the alley, streets still wet from earlier rain and lights from businesses reflecting across old cobblestone streets, a car ride with everything to say, a world between you, and no way of saying it.
it’s atmospheric. it wraps itself around you and moves you along with it, like a last slow dance before parting.
夜霧よ今夜も有難う -
jazz is one of my favorite genres of music. i’ve been told that this both tracks for me and comes as a total surprise. i’ll leave that judgment up to you.
jazz has a rich history in japan, dating back to the 1910s with groups like the hatano jazz band. japan has produced a wealth of incredible jazz and experimental musicians and singers such as ryō fukui, seatbelts, eiji kitamura, hako yamazaki, and carmen maki. (here is a playlist i compiled of japanese jazz, vintage and modern)
i’m a fan in general of vintage japanese singers and crooners. kyu sakamoto’s “上を向いて歩こう”, strangely anglicized as “sukiyaki” to be more comprehensible to western audiences, has been one of my top-listened songs for years.
“夜霧よ今夜も有難う”, “yogiri, thank you for tonight”, is another dreamy slow dance song. you can’t help but sway along to it. yujiro ishihara, called a “japanese elvis” croons over gentle saxophones in a way that seems to echo through a dance hall filled with silver streamers, glittering sequins, dim light, couples held close with all of the preciousness of young love. the lyrics are a play on the name “yogiri” itself, spelled “夜霧” or “night fog.”
“晴れて会える
その日まで
かくしておくれ 夜霧”
“i’ll see you when it’s sunny, but until that day, hide me, yogiri.”
it has the perfect amount of dramatism and pleading, a tender and bittersweet kind of goodbye, the kind to dance to with the person you love and swear that you’ll never relate to it. i’ve found myself returning to it over and over, swaying along. can you see the dancehall, the streamers, a lazy mirrorball casting shattered light over a slow dancing crowd, a moment stuck in time like old footage? a voice swelling throughout an empty hallway into the venue, “yogiri, kon’ya mo arigatou…” maybe my imagination is a little romantic. maybe you can see it, too. either way, i know that hearts were filled and broken to this song.