WARMER MIXTAPES #1597 | by Nicholas Sheram [Soren Sheram]
1. Dmitri Shostakovich | String Quartet No. 8 in C minor (Op. 110) (Performed by Kronos Quartet)
I went through this phase for about a year where I could only listen to my own Music, Bach, and Shostakovich. I think there's a lot reflected in comparing Bach and Shostakovich, the two parts of The World, The Real and The Ideal. Bach is cold and beautiful, all of those multi-layered and darkly abstract harmonies, for me Bach is like the Music of Heaven - beautiful, perfect, abstract, but also it can get a little blank feeling. Too much Perfection, too much Distance. Shostakovich is what I see The World as actually being, he writes these beautiful and tragic melodies that he then warps by throwing in dissonances, he teases you by going somewhere and then denies you, it's like he's reaching for this perfect beauty but he knows The World will never be like that, and what you're left with is a very private yearning, a sense of Isolation. I listened to this piece compulsively, I had suffered something of a personal tragedy and was very alone, living abroad in near complete isolation and I used to walk around under these oppressive grey skies and listen to this over and over again. It felt like The Music was such a complete reflection of what I was going through, the sense of Loss, and the occasional bouts of Anger, it was like someone had put my entire emotional state into Sound and I could wrap myself up in it...
2. Selda | İnce İnce Bir Kar Yağar
This is such a rich and energetic song, you really get the feeling that she's trying to convey something from the depths of her soul with it. It helps that I don't know what the words mean. If I ever looked it up I think it would take away the magic for me, to me she's singing about whatever it is I'm feeling at the moment. I was given this song by a lover of mine, we both used to wander around at night (neither of us were aware the other did this) and listen to Music. We ran into each other one night before we had become lovers, when things were accelerating towards it, when I asked her what she was listening to, it was this song. It became something of a talisman between us to listen to it together, like we were invoking some mystic power that only we knew about. I later ended up living in Turkey for a few months, only to discover that this obscure artist with her one song is actually a very famous singer in Turkey!
3. Nico | Frozen Warnings
This is one of the most important songs I've ever had in my life. I can still hardly listen to it, it's too intense for me, just to hear a few seconds, it gives me a physical shock. I first heard this when I used to use a fairly heavy amount of drugs, I remember often having been up all night and The Sun would rise and I would feel all tired and washed out, but too jacked up to go to sleep still. The idea of a lone mendicant, climbing up the summit of a mountain, The Sun rising behind the clouds, staring out at The World, it gave me the idea of some mystery in Life that you find when you go too far... I always saw the Frozen Warnings like that, the Coldness of the drugs I was on, but at the same time a sense of having stepped so far outside of Life that I had a perspective that saw The World for what it was, with no illusions. When she sang a thousand cycles to come, a thousand times to win, a thousand ways to run The World I would see myself there, weak and skewed, just a person in this endless world that runs across so many ages and places, with people who live and die, and beyond this... There's something beyond this also, something out there that I felt I had wandered off into... The warnings, of going into that cold lonely place outside of Life, with this utter strangeness where you see things as they are... It's a beautiful knowledge, but comes at a price. I feel now, even years later, like I'm still in that place in many ways, like having been there once I can never really leave it...
4. Leonard Cohen | Last Year's Man
It's hard for me to pick just one song by Leonard Cohen. I used to have his albums on vinyl when I lived in a shitty rooming house in Chicago many years ago, there was one of those ancient record player and radio cabinet things that also served as a table. I got so used to listening to those albums that I expect the clicks and pops to always sound in the same places whenever I hear any of his Music. I guess Last Year's Man, because it's the story of the drama of Love and such, tied to the drama of everything in Life... For me it's part anthem, part memories, part story of my life. Whenever I hear any Leonard Cohen I feel like I'm visiting these rooms inside of me, from my past and all that I thought and felt. So much of it, every line feels like a secret code that's tied to so much, things I've done, places I've been, people I've loved. It's like there's some huge old book up in Heaven, with all of the details of my life written down in it, and Leonard Cohen is singing out of it. It's very intensely intimate Music for me...
5. Arthur Russell | A Little Lost
This is such an earnestly joyful song. It's truly rare to listen to such an unique and exact expression of a feeling, it doesn't fall into being a musical piece so much as it just stands as a person saying something. It's very pure. I like Arthur Russell's Music in particular because there’s that tension between so many differing styles, but within that he maintains absolute integrity to what he wants to do. A lot of the tensions he has as an artist I can understand: being classically trained, playing an instrument that is a bit unusual, as well as the need to experiment and break down the barriers or oppositions to all of those different influences. Also his life itself, never having achieved the recognition he really deserved, and dying young of AIDS... He consistently resisted all attempts to classify him, both in his Music and in his personal life, I get the sense of this person who is just so alive in spite of it all, who has greatly suffered but is still capable of writing songs such as this one, with this sense of childlike innocence and unabashed joy in them...
6. Olivier Messiaen | Quartet For The End Of Time (Performed by Amici Chamber Ensemble)
I can't think of another piece that manages to combine such chillingly Abstract Modernism with such lush and haunting Music. I used to walk around late at night and listen to this piece, the cold glow of the yellow streetlights seemed to match the Music perfectly. It's a piece that was written when Messiaen was imprisoned in a Nazi camp, the sense of Wrongness and Resignation goes right along with the sense of Hope that is buried within the Music, it seems to say this is the End of The World, but still, once there was Beauty. It says that even in a world where horrors are daily reality, to even have the courage to create is perhaps the most powerful form of Resistance. He named it appropriately, in a time when nobody knew which side would win the war, and there's this sense of immense Mourning in it, of crying out for such loss and waste of Life... It always reminds me that at times when The World seems so hopeless, there is still Music...
7. Vår | In Your Arms (Final Fantasy)
This is the first piece I heard by Vår. Again, it's hard to pick one piece, but I chose this one because it reminds me of moments in Life when everything seems to break open, a sense of pure release where The World opens up... It gives me a feeling of what I would call Mundane Transcendence, where you don't fly off to Heaven, but the illusions covering The World slide off - even for a moment - and you realize you're already there here on Earth the whole time, you just couldn't see it before. I'd also say No One Dances Quite Like My Brothers, it seems to have such a sense of Urgency, a heavy sense of Revelation, much of Vår's Music feels like that to me. A state of Intoxication, times when you do something because you're impelled by a passion, when you're willing to throw everything away just on a whim because it's something that overtakes you...
8. Iggy Pop | The Passenger
When I hear Iggy Pop it reminds me of a particular time in my life, specifically of the community laundry room at the apartment complex I was living in. I seldom washed clothes there, but it became an important indoor place for me and my friends to congregate in the middle of the night, and during the day the sickly-sweet scent of fabric softener would hit me as I walked past it. I've never learned how to drive so I spent a fair amount of that period of life in my friends' cars, feeling the peculiar combination of Inaction and Motion that comes from being a passenger. Iggy Pop's Music for me is Life as Pure Struggle against Society, it never became so much a part of the Punk Scene in the sense of any political ideology, so in that sense it seems more pure to me, more raw. This song has an almost apocalyptic feeling to it of Pure Joy at simply being alive in the face of The World, which is perhaps the greatest struggle against Society there is...
9. Dieterich Buxtehude | Prelude And Fugue In F-Sharp Minor, BuxWV 146 (Performed by Bernard Foccroulle)
I remember the first time I heard this as a child being transfixed. The opening is dramatic, explosive, and for a moment nothing existed but the Music. I used to have a cassette tape of his Music played by Helmut Walcha, the great blind German organist, I still remember the severe black cover. I played it over and over, I think I eventually wore the tape itself out. Buxtehude is one of the most inventive musicians ever in my opinion, yet his Music is actually fairly simple when looked at closely, his example of being able to do so much within the constraints of his Baroque Formalism has taught and inspired me greatly. When I was a pipe organ student I learned his Music extensively and have always been amazed by its depth and originality.
10. The Velvet Underground & Nico | European Son
When I was a teenager my friends and I all thought we were the coolest kids in The World for listening to The Velvet Underground. Our whole aesthetic was wrapped up in the idea of being lost wastrels wandering around the city getting high on whatever we could score. It’s hard to choose one in particular because they all held different meanings to me, this one used to be what I listened to when riding the subway, turned up on my headphones as loudly as possible. It formed something of an armor for me, I hid inside of the aggressive distortion and noise, wrapped up inside of it The World receded a little, I had room to breathe. I tend to listen to heavily aggressive Music full of Distortion when I am out in public, the same sense of the Noise and Chaos providing something of a shield and a cocoon has always stayed with me...
