[00:00:00] Mahea: A composition created in the dark... A vocal piece destined to become a new kind of anthem... and quite possibly the most authentic song in the history of rock. You're listening to Themes and Variation.
[00:00:20] Themes and Variation is a podcast about music and perspectives, brought to you by Soundfly. I'm your host, Mahea Lee.
[00:00:29] Hey everyone! Welcome to the "Songs with Limitations" episode of Themes and Variation. This time I'm joined by my co host Martin Fowler, as well as his bandmate Lora-Faye Åshuvud, the literal and figurative voice of the group Arthur Moon.
[00:00:44] It was kind of a tricky theme for me and my cynical side. In fact, for possibly the first time ever, I somehow picked a song I initially didn't even think I liked. But after a little research, and a lot of soul searching, I really enjoyed making this episode. And I hope you enjoy listening to it.
[00:01:01] Before we get to that, if you like Themes and Variation, don't forget to subscribe to the show on Apple, Spotify, or your favorite podcast platform. And while you're there, we'd love it if you left a positive review to help us spread the word and keep this thing going. Also, follow at Themes Variation on X, the artist formerly known as Twitter, for news about the show and more. And with all that said, I present to you the episode, "Songs with Limitations."
[00:01:29] Welcome back to Themes and Variation, I'm your host Mahea Lee, and today we are talking about "Songs With Limitations." I'm joined as almost always by Martin Fowler. Marty, how are you?
[00:01:41] Martin: Hey, I'm good. I'm covid free. That feels nice.
[00:01:45] Mahea: That's really great. And we're super excited 'cause today we're talking with Lora-Faye Åshuvud.
[00:01:51] Thanks for joining us for the show today. How are you doing?
[00:01:53] Lora-Faye: I'm excited to be here.
[00:01:55] Mahea: Awesome. Um, so great theme. Thank you for picking it, Lora-Faye. Uh, how quickly were the two of you able to come to your song selections?
[00:02:05] Lora-Faye: I was listening to Björk and thinking about the record that I was listening to, which is Medulla, and then I wanted to think about how the song that I liked was made and then I was like, oh, it was a limitation. So I went backwards, I guess. I like picked the song first and then the theme.
[00:02:24] Mahea: I had a suspicion about that, actually. I was like, "this feels like one that got reverse engineered a little bit, but I'm into it." So there weren't any songs you considered in that case, since you went that way. Marty, did you consider any songs before you arrived at this choice?
[00:02:38] Martin: Honestly, no. I mean, full disclosure, this, uh, time wise was a bit of a time crunch, but sometimes that's... A nice limitation, because it, it made me trust my intuition on this one. So, uh, Dawn of Midi, the band just came to mind immediately for their sort of very minimal, clearly, thoroughly thought through set of limitations that they impose on themselves to arrive at the sort of palette that they utilize in their music.
[00:03:06] Mahea: Cool. I struggled with this one at first, to be honest. I was telling Lora-Faye before we hit record, it was really hard for my brain not to go to super cynical places... but I had this vague recollection... I think Christina Apostolopoulos brought the band up who's responsible for the song that I ended up going with on an episode like maybe two years ago even... she did not tell me what their name was or anything like that, but I just googled exactly what she said, and somehow it came up. And I'm really excited because I got to learn a lot about a band that I had never heard of, that I probably should have heard of by now. But let's get right into it.
[00:03:55] [tracks]: [music]
[00:03:57] Mahea: Martin Fowler, what are we listening to?
[00:04:03] Martin: This is "Io" by Dawn of Midi off of their, I would say only known record, Dysnomia. They're an interesting group. They were sort of a blip in time and space. They're not really a band anymore. They put this record out first in 2013, and then it was re- released in 2015 by Erased Tapes.
[00:04:23] Just like such a gorgeous example in the tradition of minimalism as a limitation. There's so many great examples. I guess if I was going to think of anybody else, it would be like exploring the whole world of minimalist composers like Steve Reich and Philip Glass and that tradition. And even before them.
[00:04:40] Mahea: I hadn't even thought of that. That's a good direction. Sorry. Steve Reich, of course.
[00:04:46] Martin: These guys just, they came to mind immediately because of the sense of space in their sound. It was sort of like you said the word "limitation" and the feeling that word gave me was the feeling of this record and this track in particular... um, just the feeling of space and like floating in space and sort of trying to navigate the negative space of something, which if you look at their record cover, I feel like negative space is a big part of their whole ethos. And also like naming a track "Io," like, moon of Jupiter, immediately evokes space, so...
[00:05:18] Mahea: That ties to the album name too, though, right?
[00:05:20] Martin: To be honest, uh, Dysnomia. Not a word I'm familiar with.
[00:05:24] Mahea: So I looked it up because it was not a word I was familiar with either, and I'm sadly unfamiliar with Dawn of Midi as well. It's a moon of the dwarf planet Eris, apparently.
[00:05:33] Martin: News to me. Wow.
[00:05:34] Lora-Faye: I think it's also like a language disorder. Like, if you have trouble remembering words and names of things.
[00:05:44] Mahea: Yeah, and it's um, it's a Greek like, I guess hero... like a child of one of the gods or goddesses. I don't know. That's what came up when I googled that word. It's kind of interesting.
[00:05:55] Martin: You know, Wikipedia says: "lawlessness, a child of the mythological Greek goddess Eris."
[00:06:01] Mahea: Well, there you go.
[00:06:02] Martin: And a moon of the dwarf planet Eris. So there you go.
[00:06:05] Mahea: Do you feel like that resonates with the album?
[00:06:08] Martin: Yes and no. No, I mean, I feel like the processes that they honed to achieve these recordings feel very structured, very lawful. So I don't know. I feel a little bit torn about that.
[00:06:23] Diving into their process a little bit, I learned that they're all CalArts kids in the way that many of us on this side of things are Berklee kids. They met in social circles over there and started improvising together. And to be clear, it's a trio. It's bass, piano, drums.
[00:06:40] They started by playing and improvising pieces in pitch black, like turning off all the lights in a windowless room, so that they're essentially forced to only work with the sort of extreme tactile sensibility of hearing in a much more visceral way than if you can see what someone's doing... if you can see what you yourself are doing.
[00:07:04] Mahea: That's so interesting... Or even just the eye contact element of playing with other people. Have either of you ever done anything anywhere close to that? I guess like standing on stage you're not always facing everyone, but...
[00:07:17] Lora-Faye: I don't think I have.
[00:07:19] Martin: The only thing I can equate it to is, I've been delving into some more loop- based practices recently and it has really forced me to listen to what I'm doing in a different way when I realize that, you know, later on, I'm going to have to respond to the thing that I did earlier. I really need to be paying very close attention too and listening carefully to, like, the tone I have, the sense of tuning I have, you know, those kinds of things.
[00:07:42] And I can imagine if you're in a pitch black room with other instrumentalists, any minute change in a groove or pattern or harmony is going to have a much more heightened, pronounced effect. So I think that's sort of the process it came out of. They essentially, like, locked themselves in a room three times a week for two years and recorded hundreds of hours of rehearsals, of improvisation.
[00:08:09] [tracks]: [music]
[00:08:10] Martin: So when they were going through this process of developing this sound, the pianist, Amino Belyamani, was playing with essentially like, not prepared piano, but like muting the piano, which you hear all over this record. Essentially, reaching his left hand in, either muting the piano string so that it sounds a little more like a percussion instrument than a harmonic instrument, which, you know... piano is a percussive instrument.
[00:08:40] Mahea: It's very Steve Reich.
[00:08:42] Martin: Very, very. But he's also messing with the overtone series of each individual string or set of strings that he's muting. Sort of like you would play harmonics on a guitar or bass, you know, piano just has these long strings, and if you hold a finger at a particular node, a point on the string that has a mathematical relationship to the string length, then you get a different tone than the one you get if the whole string rings. And so he's really messing with evolving what of those notes are coming out, or how many of the overall overtones of the fundamental are coming out over time, and using that as a textural palette.
[00:09:18] Because it's so minimal, because it's a sort of small footprint kind of sound, you might think, if you're a drummer, that what you should do is maybe hop in and fill the space around that. And instead, what they're doing here is saying, if we want to hear that sound, if we want to hear those minute melodies that are happening in these sort of infinitesimal little nooks of the frequency spectrum, You need way more space. And so the drummer, Qasim Naqvi, basically doesn't have cymbals. There's like no cymbals on this record except for a hi hat, I think. He's pretty much only playing with oddly tuned, interestingly prepared drums, including like putting cymbals on drums, tuning various snare drums to odd tunings, like really tight snares or really loose snares.
[00:10:02] And so they kind of landed in this space where they're all toying with these particular elements of vibrations, of string vibrations, of membrane vibrations on the drums. The upright bass obviously is ripe for all of this as well, all this kind of territory. So where they landed is this very sort of percussive, muted palette that, um, just evokes rhythm and heartbeat and just like a real sense of space and propulsion that I just find so, so compelling and beautiful.
[00:10:33] Mahea: It's interesting because on the one hand you're definitely describing limitations but also the opposite. Like, as a pianist, probably the most frustrating thing about the instrument is that you don't have the same kind of freedom that other instruments have in terms of pitch. Like even keeping your hand in a piano is such a brave move, considering how tightly wound each string is...
[00:10:52] No, I'm like, I'm serious. Like, that actually is scary to me. There's so much force behind a piano string that it's kind of a dangerous thing to do, which makes it super interesting, honestly.
[00:11:03] Lora-Faye: Every time I hear that record, I think about whether or not he had like a special.. 'cause it sounds like a grand piano. I don't know if it is. 'Cause it would be easier if the strings went up against the wall so you could reach forward, hold the string, and be like playing the note while standing as opposed to being sort of half slumped inside the piano, muting the strings while also playing with your other hand. Like I was wondering if they toured with a special piano for that. I was like worrying about his back a little bit.
[00:11:39] Martin: Totally. I had exactly that same thought. I think on the record it sounds like a grand piano, which again, definitely hurts my back to think about.
[00:11:48] Mahea: Yeah. But for some reason, I feel like it's way more common to prepare a grand piano or interact with the piano strings in that way than with an upright.
[00:11:56] Lora-Faye: Yeah.
[00:11:57] Mahea: I don't have a good reason for that now that I'm thinking about it.
[00:12:00] Martin: Yeah.
[00:12:00] Mahea: Gravity, I guess.
[00:12:02] Martin: Yeah. There's a real richness to those really long strings.
[00:12:06] Mahea: Right.
[00:12:06] Lora-Faye: Yeah.
[00:12:06] Martin: That's, uh, on a different level, I think.
[00:12:13] [tracks]: [music]
[00:12:16] Martin: So these guys, uh, it's trio, they're from Pakistan, India, and Morocco. So they're all dealing with, like, deep, deep like thousands of year old rhythmic, harmonic, melodic traditions in their own lineages, but they all are kind of coming at it from a place of, you know, we're in California, we're at CalArts, at this jazz school and living in this space, this weird sort of left of center music school, indie space.
[00:12:43] And, they all cite this African drummer who was a teacher of theirs at CalArts named Alfred Ladzekpo, who is a Ghanaian drummer, percussionist, and they're just like, "he was a genius, he taught us to play with our ears, not with our eyes," essentially. I think the record itself and the ethos of the record, it's their interpretation of a Ghanian style of putting listening over any other aspect of making the music.
[00:13:12] And I just so deeply respect that they called that out. And also it makes the music itself makes so much more sense to me — the percussive nature of it, the way that it evolves slowly over time, the polyrhythms, all of this... like, it really feels like it's coming out of a more African rhythmic tradition than anything.
[00:13:31] Mahea: Yeah, the responsiveness and layering, it feels very West African, maybe even Middle Eastern, where you have all these individual parts interacting with each other, but also just growing themselves in a way that's interesting and maybe a little repetitive.
[00:13:46] Martin: Totally.
[00:13:46] Lora-Faye: I often will refer back to that record, Marty, when I'm thinking about hockets. Because it feels like percussion hocket, you know, like they're so rarely interrupting each other. It's rare that everyone is playing a note at the same time, right? It almost feels like they're passing a melody around, like a monophonic melody around, you know?
[00:14:08] Martin: Yeah, I totally agree with that. They even cite sometimes how difficult it is, especially between the muted piano and the upright bass to specifically determine who is making which sound.
[00:14:20] Lora-Faye: Yes.
[00:14:20] Martin: And sometimes that even extends to the drums. It's a real beautiful, communal effort, this record. I hope they make other music. You know, they came together for a short time. Seems like they're all doing other things at this point. They haven't really played a show since, uh, 2019 as far as I can tell, but beautiful record and I hope more people know about it.
[00:14:41] Mahea: Yeah, they opened for Radiohead, right, at one point? I'm not that familiar with them. Is that kind of the level they were operating at or was that a unique blip?
[00:14:49] Martin: They achieved sort of like a level of stature around the sort of like NPR type indie notoriety in the crossover between, you know, jazz music, indie music. They also get attributed to like dance music because Erased Tapes is really actually quite focused on dance music. And they have a very, like we were talking about, like this super rhythmic forward, very danceable, very pulse driven kind of approach to the music. I'm sort of surprised that they're not better known than they are, honestly.
[00:15:18] Mahea: Yeah, me too.
[00:15:20] Martin: C'est la vie.
[00:15:21] Mahea: I'm excited to listen to more of them. Is there anything else you wanted to say about "Io" or Dawn of Midi before we move on to song two?
[00:15:27] Martin: Nah, thanks.
[00:15:28] Mahea: Cool. Thanks for bringing it in. Uh, moving on to our next song then.
[00:15:51] [tracks]: [music]
[00:15:52] Mahea: Lora-Faye, what are we listening to?
[00:15:57] Lora-Faye: We're listening to "Oceania" by Björk.
[00:16:00] Mahea: This is a good choice.
[00:16:02] Martin: Yeah.
[00:16:03] Lora-Faye: I love this song so much.
[00:16:06] Mahea: What jumps out to you about it?
[00:16:08] Lora-Faye: Ooh... This maybe is not necessarily... doesn't live in the question about limitations, but I just think it's one of the most beautiful melodies I've ever heard. Like I'm a Björk fan and sometimes her melodies just go right over my head and sometimes I'm like, this is the deepest thing I've ever heard, you know? It just depends on when it hits you. Um, anyway, that's like, that's my favorite thing about it.
[00:16:28] Martin: I have to hop in here for a second because... well, first I need to reveal, if you don't already know, Lora-Faye and I are in a band together. It's called Arthur Moon.
[00:16:37] Mahea: Oh, I'm such a bad host, I should have said that. Yes, Lora-Faye and Marty are in Arthur Moon together.
[00:16:42] Martin: The way you used to hide that you and Carter are married is fine. Like, we can hide that we're in a band together for a while. But it's gotta come out at some point. Yes, we're in a band together, and early on, I was like, "Lora-Faye, I don't get Björk. I don't get it. Like, what is going on? Like, it's like all over the place. What is this weird, like, ethereal, modal, melismatic approach to melody? It makes no sense to me. What's going on here?" And they were like, "you just got to keep listening. You gotta keep listening, you gotta understand the whole scope of the melody and how precise it all is."
[00:17:18] Because it sounds like Bjork's doing it by accident or like kinda feeling it out or whatever, but every single little individual choice, every nuanced articulation, every uh, every uh, what's the word I'm looking for? "Ornamentation." It was like extremely planned and precise and she's not messing around.
[00:17:38] And it took me so long to understand that, but it's because of Lora-Faye introducing me to songs like this and like making me sit with this record that I like have such a deep appreciation for melody in a different way. Thanks Lora-Faye.
[00:17:51] Lora-Faye: Oh my God. Thanks Björk. I feel the same. I mean, yeah, I had a friend say the same thing to me once and it really changed the way I thought about melody too.
[00:17:59] My understanding is, for the most part, she writes all of her melodies, like, walking out in the world.
[00:18:06] Mahea: Whoa.
[00:18:07] Lora-Faye: And then she comes back in and, like, figures out the arrangement around the melody.
[00:18:11] Mahea: That's an impressive memory.
[00:18:13] Lora-Faye: Yeah. She might have, like, a little voice memo situation.
[00:18:15] Mahea: Ah, okay. That makes sense.
[00:18:16] Lora-Faye: I don't know. Knowing Björk, probably it just lives in her, in her freaky brain. I don't know.
[00:18:20] Martin: I've heard her quoted as saying that the melodies that she keeps are the ones that she remembers the next day.
[00:18:26] Mahea: Interesting.
[00:18:26] Lora-Faye: So many people I respect have a philosophy like that and I just don't trust myself enough.
[00:18:32] Mahea: Yeah, I'm always convinced that the thing that I forgot was better than whatever I was expecting.
[00:18:36] Lora-Faye: Exactly. I still like mourn a song that I wrote when I was like 19 that I didn't record. Like I think about it once a day.
[00:18:43] Mahea: Yeah. Oh, I've got a couple of those from when I was like 12 where I'm like, "I think I wrote it in a diary I threw away," but yeah. You, Marty? Are you mourning any lost songs?
[00:18:53] Martin: Oh, plenty. Plenty, plenty, plenty. Yes. Um, I'm just thinking about what you said about writing melodies walking around. Now that you say that, I'm thinking about this particular tune and it feels like a very strong, confident walking pace.
[00:19:08] Lora-Faye: Yeah. Well, apparently it was written for... she got commissioned by the Olympics in like the early 2000s to write...
[00:19:17] Mahea: Yeah, 2004, right?
[00:19:17] Lora-Faye: Yeah... a song for the opening ceremony or something. And that's what this was, which is funny because like, it's normally like big pop stadium stuff that they have. And then it was just Björk being at this like dirgy pace, you know, singing about evolution or whatever.
[00:19:39] [tracks]: [music]
[00:19:42] Lora-Faye: So the album that this is on is called Medulla, and the conceit of Medulla is that it's only voices, only vocals, as you can hear from this song and other songs on the record. It's definitely got like percussion and... a lot of like production on it but everything comes from the human voice so all of the percussion is beatboxed and a lot of the sort of like synthy sounding sort of pads come from vocal samples that were then turned into like a playable keys part.
[00:20:24] [tracks]: [music]
[00:20:27] Lora-Faye: All of the sort of like things that you kind of hear as what Marty and I would call "risers" are just like Björk or her collaborators making like guttural body sounds with their mouths and then kind of just like situating it in the track such that it, it feels like it's um, it's like creating dynamic.
[00:20:44] Mahea: Sorry, can you go back and just explain risers to me? To us, me and the audience, it's not just me.
[00:20:51] Lora-Faye: Marty probably has more of a framework for that phrase than
[00:20:53] Martin: I do. Just real quick. So these like rises and falls are like... the first time I heard this record, I was like, "why is this happening? I don't want to hear that."
[00:21:02] Lora-Faye: Well, it's not in our... it's like, a lot of it comes from like, um, Inuit throat singing stuff, like this artist, Tanya Tagaq, who I think was all over the record was doing a lot of this stuff. That's just like really not in our framework for like what singing is. So I think we hear it as like kind of abrasive before we have context for it.
[00:21:30] Martin: Yeah, like I'm coming at it from like a strictly Western, like pop rock, jazz, R& B, like school of thought. And I'm like, it doesn't seem to have a discernible rhythm... there's no discernible notes. It's not a melody. It's not a harmony. What's happening here? And now I listen to the song and I find myself singing along with those. Like, I can't hear the song without them. There's no way that this song makes sense without them anymore.
[00:21:56] Lora-Faye: It just feels to me, Marty, like so very much in your idiom of sort of traditional electronic music, right? Of like, okay, like, we need to get from this part to the next part and we want it to feel dramatic. Let's go [sound], you know? It's just a version of that of like a white noise swell.
[00:22:13] Martin: Yep.
[00:22:13] [tracks]: [music and vocalization]
[00:22:18] Lora-Faye: Exactly it's just that literally, yeah.
[00:22:23] Martin: But instead of, you know, dropping the bass, you're dropping the high note of the melody. Yeah, it's beautiful.
[00:22:39] [tracks]: [music]
[00:22:42] Lora-Faye: Obviously, limitation is like, voices. The record that she made before it was Vespertine, which was like, big and lush and instrumental and like very electronic with like lots of collaborators. And then while she was finishing that record, she was like, "I just got to make like a vocal album." Apparently she'd like always known she would do that.
[00:23:01] But I think the thing that's kind of interesting about that is like the limitation is coming back to the limitations of youth... or like a time when... at least the way I hear that is like, you don't know all of the things that you can do. So you're sort of limited in your tools for making a song happen, right? In the same way that like when you're 17, you're limited in your tools for like what you know about the world and how you understand it. And so everything actually feels like more exciting and like more magical somehow.
[00:23:31] Mahea: Like, it's awkward because I just met you for the first time, somehow, on this call earlier, but I've been a fan of your songwriting for a really long time now. And, um, I'm curious if you feel there are any similarities between how Björk writes and how you yourself approach writing at times.
[00:23:47] Lora-Faye: I would be delighted to be compared to Björk. And when I have been, I feel like I'm getting away with something. Um, but like, I come from a songwriting practice that's like folk music.
[00:23:58] I mean, in some ways Björk is a folk... the consummate folk musician, but in other ways, no... or at least like American folk melody, which is like these really simple, repeated phrases over these really simple, uh, repeated chord structures.
[00:24:11] And that feels like sort of the opposite of Björk. And I think actually, similarly to Marty, when I first heard Björk, I was like, "what is this noise? Turn this off." You know? Because was, you know, 16 or whatever, and I was really not accustomed to hearing music like this.
[00:24:25] So in some ways I think I'm like coming from looking to subvert where I came from, which is like folk music and simple repeated melodies and structures. And so maybe because I'm like, allergic to that, I sort of seem to be in relationship to Björk, but I feel like she's doing shit that I barely even could claim to understand most of the time. So sometimes the relationship seems, um, too generous.
[00:24:54] Mahea: Do you feel that you're like, what role does your voice play when you're coming up with new material?
[00:24:59] Lora-Faye: It's so funny. I was just like thinking about this song thinking like, "maybe my next record is a vocal record."
[00:25:04] The record we're about to make, or that we're like sort of in the middle of writing for, I was like, "it's going to be percussion. It's going to be a percussion record." And now I'm thinking maybe I'll scrap it and make a vocal record. Sorry, what was your question?
[00:25:14] Mahea: I'm just curious, like how your voice plays into your writing process.
[00:25:17] Lora-Faye: Oh, yeah. Um, I don't start with melody. I start with like a world and then I like do vocal improvisations over the world until a melody and some, um, like syllables emerge. And then I write from there.
[00:25:36] Mahea: Interesting.
[00:25:36] Lora-Faye: Almost all the time. I feel like that's normally how we end up writing our songs when we're collaborating.
[00:25:42] Martin: Well, I feel like it was the process in the great writing session we had last week, but it sounds like, uh, none of that's going to make it to the record. I don't know what it is anymore.
[00:25:52] Lora-Faye: Sorry.
[00:25:53] Mahea: There's something unguarded about the human voice that I think makes it one of the most useful writing tools. Like, if I'm too lazy, or if I feel too limited by the piano, I'll sing everything because then I won't think about what notes I'm dealing with. And at the piano, it's impossible to not be aware of what you're playing, I think.
[00:26:11] Martin: That's funny because I am still a rudimentary pianist, so I actually turn to the piano for that purpose sometimes, being more of a string instrument, grid tied individual.
[00:26:23] Mahea: I think there's just also something compelling about a voice that you can't get from any instrument. Like maybe strings come close, but like Björk doesn't have a traditionally appealing voice, but it is so perfectly potent. You almost fear for her when she sings and that's something I'm always looking for in a singer. If I'm not a little afraid for them, I'm probably not that interested. You know, like I want to feel like maybe she's taking a risk and maybe it's not going to work out, but then it does every single time and it's captivating.
[00:26:52] [tracks]: [music]
[00:26:54] Lora-Faye: The thing that's so cool about the voice is that there's no intermediary between like the idea, your body, and then whatever gets recorded other than like the thing that's recording it, which is to say, like, I don't have to like hear the note in my head, find it on the piano, and then record it. I can just like hear the note in my head and then just make the note with my body.
[00:27:22] Obviously I'm not a piano player. If I were a piano player, I probably wouldn't feel this way, but to me like that feels extremely exciting. You can just have the idea and get it out as quickly as possible and then like continue to have ideas and move on and not be sort of mediated by instrument. And I feel like I can really hear that on this record, like the excitement of like fast and loose discovery and just like the building blocks of an idea, all just sort of like gushing out is how it sounds to me.
[00:27:49] Martin: I was thinking about the point you made, Mahea, about the strain, the vocal strain that Björk often employs on her songs. That's actually something else that Lora-Faye pointed out to me, and I have thought about ever since, which is it's really only interesting to hear people excel at something when they're sort of, they're at the visible limits of it.
[00:28:09] I shouldn't say "only," but like one very compelling way to create drama and interest, especially in art, is to put people sort of at a demonstrated limitation of their ability, whether it's speed, whether it's range, whatever it might be, such that it's articulating the yearning, the emotion of a moment in a particular way.
[00:28:29] And I really find throughout this melody, Björk kind of finds her way to that high note through a careful series of steps, but sort of trying out the different colors as she's climbing up the different landing points of each melodic phrase for a higher and higher final note to see how far she can get. And then she's also doing that under a very specific limitation, which is a constant repeated harmonic progression. Once she hits that high note, you realize that everything she's done before has really led to that point. But it's the creative constraint of that constant chord progression that makes the space for her to do that in the first place.
[00:29:06] Lora-Faye: And that's why we love folk music. Boom, boom.
[00:29:10] Mahea: That's also just really good writing. You know, like when you arrange for like horns or whatever, you're not supposed to just ran... "supposed to," but you're not supposed to just randomly leap to a high note out of nowhere. You get the player and the listeners ready for it. But this prolonged way of doing that is really interesting.
[00:29:28] There's something about her whispery voice too that just draws you in.
[00:29:32] Martin: Lora-Faye, do you know if Björk sang into a 58 on this record?
[00:29:37] Lora-Faye: Oh my god, I don't know.
[00:29:38] Martin: I know that that's a thing that she has done, historically.
[00:29:41] Mahea: Oh, right. Why don't you explain that a little bit, Marty, for listeners?
[00:29:45] Martin: Sure, sure, sure, sure. Speaking of sure. So the Shure brand SM58 microphone is like the stereotypical club stage microphone. It's the one that if you roll up to your local venue that is less than 200 people, they'll be like, "here's a 58 for you." They're made to be tiny tanks, dropped all over the place, thrown across the room. It's a really good mic for lots of very dynamic live applications.
[00:30:17] And so Björk, with this very sort of both intimate and extremely loud present way of singing, it just works for her to emote and explore the entire range of her vocals in terms of dynamics using this mic handheld in the studio. So famously, she's made, uh, several records using the 58, which is normally not a studio microphone.
[00:30:40] Mahea: I think it's worth noting though, that an SM58 is a relatively inexpensive mic too. So this is a choice she's making. I'm sure if Björk wanted like a vintage Neumann, she could have it. Oh yeah.
[00:30:51] Lora-Faye: I think her voice has like so much breath and overtone that like some kind of like really sensitive condenser might feel like too bright. Like there's just too much overtone coming through.
[00:31:10] [tracks]: [music]
[00:31:11] Lora-Faye: Okay. The other cute detail I learned is that Beyoncé was like scheduled to come in and sing on the record. And then there was like... she got sick or something and couldn't come in. And people were like, Why Beyoncé? And she was like, "it's an album about voices and she has the most amazing voice." I would have loved to hear that.
[00:31:30] Mahea: I would have loved to just hear her say that about Beyoncé.
[00:31:34] Lora-Faye: Yeah.
[00:31:34] Mahea: Yeah, that sounds incredible. Um, well, are we ready to move on to the last song of the day?
[00:31:39] Lora-Faye: Yeah.
[00:31:39] Martin: Can't wait.
[00:31:51] [tracks]: [music]
[00:31:56] Lora-Faye: Oh my God.
[00:32:03] Martin: Had you not heard that yet, Lora-Faye?
[00:32:05] Lora-Faye: No, I hadn't listened to it yet.
[00:32:06] Mahea: It's intense. Yeah. So this is called "Philosophy of the World," by a band called The Shaggs, who I did not know by name before this theme got brought up. Since this is your first reaction, throw some thoughts out there, Lora-Faye.
[00:32:22] Lora-Faye: Okay, it kind of sounds like when you play music with a backbeat for people in Europe... they can only hear the one, you know? When they clap on the...
[00:32:34] Martin: They clap on one and three.
[00:32:35] Lora-Faye: ... One and three, except like weirder. Oh my God. That was so cool. I feel disoriented. I love it.
[00:32:44] Mahea: So they have been called the best band and the worst band alive in pretty much equal measure... well, probably worst band... they probably get that more often than best.
[00:32:53] But, um, this group was influential on a lot of the, like, tweep pop scene, some noise art groups too. Frank Zappa was a huge fan of The Shaggs, allegedly even saying that they were better than the Beatles. Kurt Cobain listed them as one of his favorite bands and even called the album Philosophy of the World one of the six cult albums everyone needs to hear back in 1992.
[00:33:19] Marty, were you familiar with The Shaggs?
[00:33:21] Martin: Never heard this. Really enjoyed the first listen, because within the first, like, I don't know, five, six seconds, I was like, okay, something's happening here, and I don't know what it is, but I'm gonna find out.
[00:33:33] Mahea: You want me to let you in on it?
[00:33:34] Martin: Yes, please.
[00:33:35] Mahea: Okay, so The Shaggs are quite possibly the most authentic band in Western music. They were initially a trio of sisters, eventually a quartet from Fremont, New Hampshire.
[00:33:46] It's a trippy story. So their father... on his mother's, maybe not quite deathbed, but when she was nearing the end of her life, she made a prediction that he would marry a strawberry blonde woman, he would have two sons after his mother died, and he would have three daughters who would form a very popular band.
[00:34:05] And he decided he was going to make that happen, whether his daughters liked it or not. He did, in fact, marry a strawberry blonde woman, have two sons, and then his daughters.
[00:34:15] It's actually a pretty sad story. They were very isolated from the rest of the world, and he more or less forced them to be a band, which none of them were interested in at the time.
[00:34:26] Martin: Oh no.
[00:34:27] Mahea: One of them did go on to have a music career eventually.
[00:34:30] They're just this weird little blip in music history that's tragic but also inspiring. They're pure authenticity, right? They had very little musical training at all.
[00:34:41] Martin: This is the kind of bad that's so bad that it becomes good.
[00:34:47] Mahea: It's interesting you say that.
[00:34:48] Martin: I want to know how, how much they knew. I want to know how this happened.
[00:34:55] Mahea: Okay, I can shed a little light on that, I think. Dorothy "Dot Wiggin" is the lead vocalist and lead guitarist. She's the one who went on to have her own band, the Dot Wiggin Band. And I watched some interviews with some of those band members and one of the producers who had a lot of really interesting things to say about how she sees music.
[00:35:14] There's a man... I'm gonna try to say his last name, but there's a solid chance that I'm going to get it wrong and I apologize for that... His name is Mike, I think it's Fornatale... but he co produced, engineered, and was otherwise heavily involved in the Dot Wiggin Band's album Ready, Get, Go.
[00:35:29] And so he felt that they knew what they were doing to an extent. He said Helen, the drummer, knew what she was doing rhythmically, it's just not what Dot and Betty were doing.
[00:35:39] He also said that he felt that their music was very heavily based on melody and the way Dot wrote, everything just follows the melody with very little regard for what's happening rhythmically.
[00:35:56] [tracks]: [music]
[00:35:57] Mahea: They notated their music, but I've never seen it. Apparently it's not like traditional notation, but there's a level of understanding and communication that definitely existed amongst them.
[00:36:07] That said, the engineer who recorded their unreleased second album also said their performances were really weak during that recording session, which is why the second album didn't come out, but that the members of the band didn't seem to register that the performances were weak, which is kind of an existential thing to think about.
[00:36:26] Maybe it sounded good to them, and who's to say that they're wrong and the rest of us are right in those cases, you know?
[00:36:31] I think the reason that they are celebrated by a lot of people, even in the mainstream musical community, is this spirit of authenticity. What they put forward is what they meant to put forward. It's not hidden behind, like, strategy or anything like that. It's just pure music, whether you like it or not.
[00:36:50] Does that kind of answer your question, though? Not really?
[00:36:53] Martin: Kind of.
[00:36:55] Mahea: Yeah, I mean, they weren't well received when they did, um, like, they did a handful of live performances and the crowd just wasn't into it.
[00:37:02] They recorded this album, Philosophy of the World, same name as the song, in 1969. A thousand copies were made, but somehow only a hundred of them survived. Nobody knows exactly what happened to the other 900, but the speculation around that is either that the owner of the studio stole them, which seems like a weird move, or that their father Austin Wiggin refused to distribute more than a hundred because he was afraid someone would steal their sound.
[00:37:28] I also read that at one point session players were hired to re record some of the parts they played, but the session players had such a hard time following the music that that idea was abandoned.
[00:37:39] Martin: So what do you qualify as the specific limitation that you're thinking about here?
[00:37:44] Mahea: They were so isolated and basically only heard what their parents allowed them to hear. They just had this goal thrust upon them of being the greatest band that ever existed, without any real indication of what that meant. That's an idea that I find very intriguing... to just go out and try to be the best at something without being able to define what that is.
[00:38:04] Um, I did some research for a Soundfly video about air guitar recently, and someone made the point that air guitar might be the purest niche of music because it is just unadulterated enthusiasm and communication without all the like gatekeeping that goes around actually making music or the self doubt, you know?
[00:38:22] Martin: I see that. It's like the absolute pinnacle of perfectionism and achieving perfection is abandoning all sensibility around what achieving perfection could possibly mean.
[00:38:34] Mahea: Totally. 'Cause you know, like, I think we've all experienced this in music, where the more you know, the more you expect of yourself. LIke I've been playing piano since I was four years old. I don't think I'm a great pianist and I hate that, but my brain won't let me get there, you know? When logically it's like, well, of course I am. It's been 30 years or whatever.
[00:38:52] Music is like one of the most human things ever, right? It's the universal language. But we put these barriers up for ourselves. And while, like, I think that they came out of a horrible situation, there is something about just having a different relationship with what music means that I find really interesting here.
[00:39:12] Martin: Lora-Faye, are you still with us?
[00:39:14] Lora-Faye: Yeah, I'm here. I'm here. I'm here. Um, I'm just like taking this in. I mean, I think, I think Marty's asking me that because, uh, I'm untrained. But obviously, like, it's very, very different.
[00:39:30] Martin: To be clear, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
[00:39:33] Lora-Faye: But, yeah. No, but I think that perspective is one that, like, what you're describing is something that I talk about a lot, which is like, Marty keeps being like, "you know, you could just, like, study music theory for, like, a couple weeks and, like, you'd just, like, know how to say the names of all the things that you already do." And I'm always like, "no!"
[00:39:53] And a big part of that is because I feel like... Like what you're saying, it's like the more you are able to define and codify, the less magical it feels and the more you're just sort of like aware of trope. And actually, like the more aware you are of the limitation of music or like the perceived limitation, right?
[00:40:14] It's like I can play this C chord and then I can go to this other chord or I could go to this other chord and maybe I could do this to get to this chord. Whereas, like, if you're just playing the chord and then feeling your way out to where you're going to go next, even if it is the most obvious choice, it just feels more magical and authentic that way, you know?
[00:40:30] Mahea: Mm hmm.
[00:40:31] Lora-Faye: So it's more about process. I don't know.
[00:40:33] Mahea: Totally.
[00:40:34] Martin: It's a different process. Like, music theory is such a prescriptive tool that us music school nerds, we often get trapped in... not only tropes, but then try, like, trying to elude tropes and over analyzing and over understanding.
[00:40:51] And that being said, Lora-Faye you're one of the most well informed, well educated, and eloquent people I know, so, like, you have to make a really tough choice to, like, not know conventional nomenclature for things so that you make this process available to yourself.
[00:41:09] Like that's a real choice that you make in a specific way that I deeply respect. And like, other people make that choice in a similar spirit, but in a way where they're like, "I don't want to know anything so that I can just do whatever and it'll be cool."
[00:41:23] And it's like, you're still refining your taste. You're still understanding your intuitive sense... your, uh, non linguistic sense of what is happening inside of your ears and your body that is like a very, very valid process. And just a different one from being like, "Oh, well, I know if I tune my 808 kick drum to the fundamental frequency of the bass so that it's in line with the baseline I have in this production, then I know that it's going to work correctly."
[00:41:55] As opposed to just being like, you know, in a record we did last year where it was like, "Oh, well, I thought these two bass things, like, felt good together," and they're not in tune, and that's fine. In fact...
[00:42:05] Lora-Faye: Cale made us mix that out.
[00:42:06] Martin: And we're still mad at him for that, because I think...
[00:42:09] Lora-Faye: I still regret it.
[00:42:10] Martin: Like, I know what was happening and why it was happening. And I know that I wouldn't have made that choice in the beginning because I would have come at it from the linguistic analytic perspective. But Lora-Faye made that choice, and when I heard it, I knew it was good.
[00:42:25] Mahea: Yeah.
[00:42:25] Martin: It's engaging an entirely different part of your brain.
[00:42:28] Lora-Faye: It's listening.
[00:42:29] Mahea: Yeah. That's kind of the interesting thing about theory though, right? There's a big difference between understanding something and having like a sophomoric knowledge of it. And I think when we think about quote unquote "knowing theory," it is that sophomoric place that most people are coming from, which is totally fair. But what people forget is like, theory isn't meant to set rules. It's meant to try to interpret the thing that came before.
[00:42:52] And like Marty's saying, a lot of this ultimately comes down to like the nomenclature, like you know terms or you don't know terms. But having a desire to learn and grow, that's something that I think any good musician has, whether they want to learn theory specifically and call it that or not.
[00:43:08] There is an understanding of what they were doing here, The Shaggs. It's just not coming out in the same kind of language that we would use now. Like if you listen, their instruments are very out of tune. And a lot of people just jumped to, they didn't know how to tune their instruments, which might've been true... but they didn't know how to tune their instruments the way we're used to hearing those instruments tuned. They got them to a place that they were content with.
[00:43:32] Martin: That's the thing that fascinates me, and like, now that I'm seeing this full picture, like, I really... I really get that.
[00:43:38] It's like, we have a relationship to the physical world that results in things like resonances, where things can be harmonically in tune, or can be in time through a steady pulse that is an understanding of the way that the dimension of time passes.
[00:43:52] Or, we can say, "I don't prescribe to that, I'm listening to something else." And so the thing that I'm listening for is not the thing that you're listening for, which is like, a steady beat and an in tune harmony, like, who gets to say that that's all that music gets to be?
[00:44:06] Mahea: Totally. And sometimes it's most interesting when you're able to like, like when I first started listening to this song, I'll be honest, I was not into it. I was like, "Oh, this is confusing."
[00:44:17] Martin: It's challenging.
[00:44:18] Mahea: Just like, like what my brain listens for, especially as a pianist who cannot... like we were talking about earlier, I can't change the tuning of my instrument easily. I look for something to hold on to because I've always listened for something to hold on to and it's not there.
[00:44:32] And it took me a while to get rid of that and once I did and allowed myself to kind of listen to the song in a different way than I typically would listen to a song with lyrics and a guitar and a bass and drums... when I got away from that and like listened to each component individually or really focused on the spirit of the lyrics and the vocal delivery, I started to like all the pieces. I just didn't fully understand how they fit together. And that makes me want to listen to it more instead of less, you know?
[00:45:00] Lora-Faye: It almost sounds like, um, when you're in a rehearsal space and you can hear like the bands playing on either side of you and it like sort of works together for this reason where you're like, "why does this work?"
[00:45:14] But it does. And then it like comes in and out of like being locked in and not.
[00:45:19] Mahea: You're physically and internally responding to something about what you hear, just not in a predictable way.
[00:45:25] Lora-Faye: Yeah, it's like the brain tries to make sense of it.
[00:45:28] Martin: When I was in the throes of music school, one of my most visceral experiences was walking down a hallway of piano practice rooms, like dozens of pianos with very bad sound isolation between them.
[00:45:41] Mahea: And those freaking doors didn't meet the floor.
[00:45:43] Martin: You'd hear dozens of people practicing completely different music at completely different tempos and completely different keys, and there was something so lovely about relinquishing control and embracing the chaos of that.
[00:45:56] Mahea: Yeah. And then the little lines would jump out to you every now and then, and you'd be like, oh, I recognize what that person's working on.
[00:46:02] But just going back to something Lora-Faye was saying a second ago, it reminded me of another great point from Mike Fornatale. I really hope that's how you say it.
[00:46:11] Um, he brought up that music teachers tend to understand what's good about The Shaggs on like a fundamental level, because their music is what it sounds like when your student has a breakthrough. Like all the emotion you feel as a teacher tied up in that. It feels like that.
[00:46:33] [tracks]: [music]
[00:46:39] Mahea: There's a cover on YouTube by, I think his name's Andrew Thoreen. I gotta start being better at reading people's names, but it is beautiful and it really makes all these little interesting details in the music that a more conventionally trained musician would have never thought of just kind of pop.
[00:47:11] [tracks]: [music]
[00:47:13] Mahea: Interesting selections. They're all going to be sitting with me for a while. Lora-Faye thank you so much for joining us today.
[00:47:20] Lora-Faye: Thanks for having me. It was fun.
[00:47:21] Mahea: Of course. Um, so you guys are working on an album right now?
[00:47:25] Lora-Faye: Yeah, we just put out an album early in the summer and are sort of like figuring out what's, what's next and dabbling in different, different writing ideas.
[00:47:37] Mahea: That's exciting.
[00:47:38] Martin: Well, Lora-Faye, where can you find all things Arthur Moon?
[00:47:41] Lora-Faye: Um, on the World Wide Web, there is a band called Arthur Moon that lives inside of the Spotify algorithm, um, and also the Apple conglomerate.
[00:47:56] And then if you want like an object, you could order the music on vinyl. Um, there are two records. The most recent one you can get from Vinyl Me Please. They have like a limited run of them. I think there are a few left. They're very beautiful. They're cherry red. And they have a cookbook with recipes from like really gross recipes from all the band members including your very own Martin D Fowler. It's super duper awesome.
[00:48:23] And then, um, we're playing, Marty unfortunately will not be there because we're stripping back to like a little vocal trio to open for Dessa, um, in October on a couple shows.
[00:48:35] [tracks]: [music]
[00:48:38] Mahea: So there you have it. Thanks for listening to the episode "Songs with Limitations." I have been and will continue to be your humble host, Mahea Lee.
[00:48:47] We'll be back again in two weeks with another episode and another theme.
[00:48:51] Until then, you can find us on X, formerly Twitter, @ThemesVariation, or you can check out older episodes of the show on the podcast platform of your choice.
[00:49:02] Thanks for listening, and I'll see you next time.