Gentle reader and cherished co-conspirator,
Mortar #25 arrives to you from the wild chiaroscuro of Oakland, having recently relocated from the placid suburbia of Petaluma. Photos make up much of this issue while words take a backing role as blurbs on the music of Bernice, Deerhoof & Marcos Balter, Conlon Nancarrow, and Warmer Milks.
550 tons of grapes have been crushed and harvest at Hobo is over. Being back in Sonoma and working with this team was challenging and incredibly rewarding. A heat wave around Labor Day made for two hellish weeks (83 and 86 hour work weeks) in an overall condensed harvest.
I have moved back to Oakland. I got a job in the cellar of Hammerling Wine Company in Berkeley, a boutique Methode Champenoise producer. I’ve helped out at this winery many times before so I’m excited to work with this crew and I look forward to developing some more cellar skills, especially in sparkling wine. Moving back to the Bay wasn’t initially the plan but I need to let my feet touch the ground for a bit to build some stability and gain more clarity. The job feels like a great step forward in the right direction and I look forward to enjoying old and new Bay Area friendships. I live in a spacious house with a giant backyard and cool housemates. Garden projects will ensue. Dinners will be had. I feel very lucky and thankful.
Discovering the music of Bernice has swept me up like a new crush- I blush at their hushed intimacy delivered in charming harmonies (charmonies), feel the dopamine rush with each left-turn songwriting choice, and ache with joy at little embellishments of synthesizer and pastel painted percussion. The Toronto-based outfit is headed by vocalist Robin Dann, who crafts songs with playful dexterity, hoisting melodies high into the air with a warm and weightless vocal lilt
Bernice crafts songs that breathe, that sprout their life through the joy of improvisation as much as they do practiced melody or adhered tempo. Tiny flickers of guitar wiggle around tattered cozy blankets of cheap casio. Bits and pieces of ridiculous synth noodling flirt with coy drum machine, the perfect suggestion of a drumset. Every sound has its place while no element ever seems to dominate. Their future pop takes its cues from the sleek sheen of early 00s RnB, the mind-(b)ending experimentalism of laptop music, and the charm and oddity of 2010’s left-field indie pop. I LOVE this sweet sweet music.
(bonus: Dann’s collaboration with Canadian producer Ben Gunning, EX POP, has me feeling some type of way)
Autumn swept into Sonoma County as a brisk leafy breeze, gripping the Sonoma and Mayacamas mountains in cool slate purples while every tree, grass, and vineyard blushed rusty bronzes, bloody reds, and earthy oranges. Heavy gray tufts of the pacific morning layer sulked and sauntered back over the hills as the sun and wind burned little spotlights through the mist painting epic backdrops and creating incredible distracted driving hazards while I careened up the 101 on my early morning commutes. These drives were usually soundtracked, often with Wajatta’s stream of conscious house anthems, denim-disco balladry of Sam Evian, and sometimes more experimental moods dense with curious textures and wild melodic forrays like those found in a special syzygy of freakish art-rock and ethereal contemporary classical timbres.
Satomi Matsuzaki’s unmistakeable sun ray soprano flickers through a morning fog of fragile shifting strings revealing a surreal musical landscape explored on Balter/Saunier, a 2016 collaboration between experimental-rock powerhouse Deerhoof, composer Marcos Balter, and the Chicago-based contemporary classical group, Ensemble dal Niente.
I often find these crossover classical/indie projects a botched experiment as in Cronenberg’s 1986 film The Fly, the contrived musical wince of collaboration stuck between tepid indie platitudes and neo-liberal classical pandering. On Balter/Saunier they’ve struck a wellspring of commonality and exciting experimentation present in each contributors own practice. Deerhoof’s quirky mixed-meter romp and primary colored pomp nestles comfortably in Balter’s excellent brew of glassy timbres and mouth-watering harmonies. Dal Niente plays like an ensemble of music lovers and listeners, giving grit, breath, and edge to well practiced professionalism, delivering motifs, solos, and extended techniques not in masturbatory rituals of avant-garde schtick but as passionate fluent bards of colorful musical language in service of new songs.
What are wines without the drinker, music without an ear, film without an audience? Is it a language?
“I think a band like Warmer Milks could only have been possible in the 2000s, and in a place like Lexington. Away from the economic pressure and scenester conformity of the coastal media centers, yet still with full access to the entire world of the internet, people in such a place have the potential to be as artistically free as you can get under late capitalism.”
-Larry “Fuzz-O” Dolman, Blastitude Magazine
I won’t ever get over how lucky I am to have grown up in Lexington, KY in the late-00s and to have sniffed even a whiff of the freakish explosion of music that came out of my quirky humble hometown in this time. Warmer Milks is no exception to this lineup, as a cocaine country crust gem recorded in suburban Kentucky by the prolific ever evolving Michael Turner.
There’s a distinct thread of experimentalism running through Warmer Milk’s music that dredges the depths of noise, scrapes the sludgy corners of rock, and using these beautiful poisons, crafts them into a present form that is at once familiar and transparent and also crushingly heavy and dense. Listening to country classics seated at an empty saloon, post-apocalypse. Belting breezy 70s yacht rock inside of a burning cheap motel. Toe-tapping to classic rock on your radio as too many drugs take hold.
Across Turner’s milieu of creative outputs (Ma Turner, Mazozma, Teal Grapefruit) he maintains a striking ability to present agony and ecstacy together as some evolved translation of honesty. Jangly guitars spit ragged tomes of carefree days while dancing in mis-step with haggard lyrics, sometimes crooning, other times screaming. A raw slop of improvised rock, country twang, and Kentucky cool distills the bravado of southern rock into strange hymns and depositories of porch-drunk poetry and the backwaters of coastal cultural trash.
In Studies for Player Piano Conlon Nancarrow pushes the physical and temporal bounds of the piano to explore an otherworldly, absurd, and sometimes shockingly beautiful realm of music unreachable by human performance. Essentially, Nancarrow is a computer musician but instead of using a Laptop or an Amiga, he uses a Bosendorfer Player Piano, a grand piano mechanized to read punch card scores and play automatically.
Nancarrow is able to to achieve a rhythmic novelty that isn’t humanly performable and it is part of the recipe which makes these player piano studies so intriguing. Across the 50 or so studies, there really isn’t much of a consistent tempo but rather a feeling of tempo that we generate in order to connect with the music. Time can help us understand and digest the music, but to take time and smear its symmetry can produce wildly exciting results in the disorderly.
Friends are making great music
Thank you for reading and staying in touch. Talk soon
In boundless curiosity, to the depths of absurdia
and with much love and friendship,
Cody
and remember: