Three tunes from the Deeper Into Music archive with a dreamy submerged sound that just kind of pulls you under…
Bonobo
Tweaked electronica. Halting beats. You can feel the gaps. Beeps and blips and faux harps. Swells and grooves. Great interstitial sound. Nice to sometimes barely have vocals. Nonwords clipped and sweet. Maybe played backwards but somehow comprehensible. Electronic sounds have been around long enough that some of them trigger associations to a distant past. Other lifetimes. Unlike a lot of other ambient pieces that sort of flatline this one develops, crescendos, becomes something. Custom fits the body into a rhythmic pattern. Synth strings culminate in reminiscent harmonies.
Holly Miranda
This one caught me, or you might say I caught it. Waves like sound waves not just ocean waves. Calm authority of her vocal. Blues inflected cool. Katrina and the Waves never lived up to the resonance of this idea of waves, but here’s Holly Miranda fulfilling some of that poetic potential. Drone of vintage organ anchors etheral aspects.
where do the waves go my love?
some may go liquid
i don’t know, i don’t know
i don’t know, i don’t know
some may go liquid
i don’t know, i don’t know
i don’t know, i don’t know
Mazzy Star
Hope Sandoval was an early post-Velvet Underground iteration of that sleepyvoiced vocal. 1993. I saw her live once in NYC. The audience was impatient. Why are you so sad? they called out. Because life is sad she said. It was only later that I really began to love this song. It grabs my heart in the most quiet way and delivers that sadness. This song has aged really well. It pours out and hangs in the air. It spills over with longing and sublime melancholy. It sounds always out of reach, at a distance. An enduring pang just beyond our grasp. These spatial qualities give the song the feeling of a remembered landscape. It’s as much a place as a sound, and once in a while it’s the perfect place to be.
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