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In Celebration of Deep Listening: Three 2019 Albums to listen to, not just hear

Brent Thomas

I have loved music for as long as I can remember, even though I have not talent at it myself (which I believe helps me appreciate those that do all the more). And I listen to a lot of different kinds of music. Many years ago, I went through a phase of really trying to expand my palate. During this phase, my friend and I used to refer to some music as “intentional listening.” In other words, you had to work to get through it. It required your attention and engagement. It also referred to a lot of music that our wives sometimes referred to as “racket.”

Somewhere along the line during those musical excursions, I came across Pauline Oliveros and the idea of “Deep Listening” and that changed things for me. The idea of “intentional listening” implies forcing one’s self to listen. It doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re actually engaging with the music itself, just getting through it. In hindsight, “intentional hearing” or “intentional music” might have been better descriptors of what I was doing during that phase. I was certainly expanding my musical horizons to include things like free jazz, drone, “freak-folk” and lots of other stuff like that, but I’m not sure how much I gleaned.

As Oliveros points out “We know more about hearing than listening.” I was hearing a lot of challenging music but I’m not sure I was up to the challenge. Oliveros describes “Deep Listening as a way of listening in every possible way to everything possible to hear no matter what you are doing. Such intense listening includes the sounds of daily life, of nature, of one's own thoughts as well as musical sounds.” If you are interested in hearing Oliveros explain some of this a bit further herself, you might want to watch her TED talk: ‘The difference between hearing and listening.’ Oliveros points out in that TED talk:

“Scientists can measure what happens in the ear. Measuring listening is another matter, as it is involves subjectivity. We confuse hearing with listening . . .

. . . I differentiate to hear and to listen. To hear is the physical means that enables perception. To listen is to give attention attention to what is perceived, both acoustically and psychologically.”

Like any skill, Deep Listening requires practice, patience and persistence. But it also has its payoffs that not everyone can understand. I still listen to all kinds of music and I often find myself at odds with family who does not. Much modern music requires very little of its hearers; certainly not deep listening. It is packaged in tiny shiny nuggets and treated as a product. As much as I wish my family loved the same music that I do, they will often come home and say things like “What are you listening to?!” This is no slight to them. But it doesn’t fit their expectations. They are not practicing Deep Listening (which is not to say that everyone who does will enjoy the same music).

It should come as no surprise, then, that three of my favorite albums so far this year require a listener’s participation. They ask for engagement and while they can be simply “heard,” each album opens itself up further and further with each “listening.” These three albums are wildly different from one another, but I think of them as kindred souls in the pursuit of Deep Listening.

75 Dollar Bill: I Was Real

75 Dollar Bill is the core duo of Rick Brown who plays the plywood crate and homemade horns, and Che Chen, who plays microtonal guitar. Sometimes as just the duo and oftentimes with a revolving cast of guest musicians, 75 Dollar Bill plays hypnotic drone/trance/desert-blues/rock that swirls in and out of itself, often in long-form pieces. The unconventional percussion patterns and guitar tunings may be a bit jarring for some, but once you allow yourself to dive in, the songs are somehow primal, guttural, meditative, and joyous all at once.

Album opener ‘Every Last Coffee or Tea’ originally appeared on 2011’s Cassette and is presented here with an expanded lineup, laying out a fine template for what to expect from the rest of the album. Starting off with washes of viola drone, jangling bells, and minimal, searching percussion, the guitar plucks about, finding its place, and then everyone locks into the groove. And the groove is undeniable. Listeners might be reminded of Malian Blues, Saharan Desert rock, and/or Thai psychedelic rock. 75 Dollar Bill’s music certainly includes elements of all of those things but it is somehow more than the sum of its parts.

‘Tetuzi Akiyama’ (named after Japanese guitarist, violinist, and instrument-maker) further shows that Deep Listening can have a good beat that you can dance to. Swirling, repeated patterns build upon driving percussion, continually moving us forward until stopping abruptly, opening to the drones of the title track without jarring the listener. It’s all part of the same musical journey, tied together by Brown and Chen’s interplay.

The album drones and grooves. It challenges and rewards, inviting listeners to confront their preconceptions without ever coming across as pretentious. 75 Dollar Bill’s music invites listeners to cross borders, including genre, and find the sounds underneath. It is at once transcendent and immediate.

Dire Wolves Just Exactly Perfect Sisters Band: Grow Towards The Light

Often known simply as Dire Wolves, welcome to the musical universe revolving around San Fransisco’s Jeffrey Alexander. The musical collectives makes music their website introduces as:

“a sound of ecstatic improvisation, each member documenting coordinate points in the higher dimensions of cosmic free-rock. The music lies somewhere near the nebulous intersection of psych, kosmische beat and spiritual jazz. These are exploratory journeys, transportive trance-based experiments in vertical listening, totally collaborative and often forming spontaneous compositions. The focus is more about feeling than any specific approach to playing. Psychic rock for the mind and body: breathe deep and grow towards that light, dig.”

That’s about as an apt a description as one is likely to come up with. Consisting of an often rotating lineup, the newest album ‘Grow Towards The Light’ finds the group including vocalist Georgia Carbone who sings in an invented language which accentuates the notion that this music is “more about feeling than any specific approach to playing.” There is a visceral nature to the trance-like tunes, driven by almost-tribal, immediate percussion and flourishes of of violin and skronking saxophones (courtesy of Sunwatchers Jeff Tobias) the music builds on repeated rhythms evoking both Krautrock and hippie fireside drum circles all at once without sounding contradictory or lost. This is confident music chasing a mood as much as technical precision.

The music comes in pulsating waves and sometimes resembles “freak folk,” sometimes “free jazz,” sometimes Krautfolk (is there such a thing?) and yet always sounds immediate and urgent without being stressful or repetitive. The soaring vocals float above the earthy rhythms and the violin and saxophone sometimes jar you back to reality and sometimes help transport you into the ether.

The longing search of spiritual jazz lies at the center of what Dire Wolves are about and may help us tune in to their frequency, but this is not a jazz record, even if it is a spiritual record. With an album title of ‘Grow Towards the Light’ and song titles like ‘Every Step is BIrth,’ and ‘Crack in the Cosmic Axis,’ Dire Wolves remind us that, with those for ears to hear, even wordless music (as we recognize it; this is not quite instrumental music because there are vocals) can still be a soundtrack for the journey of discovery for those willing to listen.

Joshua Abrams And Natural Information Society: Mandatory Reality

Another musical collective featuring a rotating cast of players, the core of this one features prolific and influential Chicago bassist and guimbri (a three-stringed percussive African bass) player Joshua Abrams. Having played with the Square Roots (later becoming the Roots), Tortoise, and Fred Anderson among many others, Abrams has centered his newest ensemble around the “ecstatic minimalism” of repeated guimbri patterns and assorted accompaniment. The band’s most recent release, the sprawling 81-minute (with none of them wasted) Mandatory Reality consists of four long-form pieces (the shortest of which is just over six minutes) proves not only the necessity but the joy of “Deep Listening.”

Like other minimalist music, the music pulses with slowly repeating but slowly unfolding patterns that transport the listener from one place to another almost imperceptibly, requiring attention and patience, but there is also a sense of yearning towards something (shared ecstatic experience?) the us from losing interest. The gradual tempo shifts reflect the rise and fall of the deep ocean more than the crashing of the waves on the shore. But you have to be willing to travel to get there. The music requires focus but never seems tedious. It music shimmers with hypnotic waves and the long-form pieces call attention to the spaces between as much as the notes being played themselves.

These slowly unfolding pieces stand not only as a testament to Deep Listening, but to the idea that we are more than our schedules. We needn’t always feel rushed, and when we do, this music asks us to pause, take some deep breaths and pay attention; to listen and not just hear. There is much detail and beauty that may initially escape us if we’re not paying attention.

As Oliveros urges: “I invite you to take a moment now to notice what you are hearing and to expand your listening to continually include more.”