What I’ve been listening to
It’s been a busy few weeks here in cubeworld, and I haven’t been able to set aside much time to write. I’ve been doing a lot of listening though, so I thought I’d share a few things I’ve been enjoying recently.
Adam Hurt - Earth Tones
I’ve been playing various instruments since I was very young, but I just picked up the banjo at the beginning of 2022. I started out playing Earl Scruggs-style bluegrass, but eventually records like this won me over, and now I’m playing a lot more of the clawhammer style, which has an intoxicating, heavily syncopated rhythmic quality that I absolutely love. Earth Tones is a collection of traditional tunes played solo on fretless gourd banjo, the mellow sound of which is much more chilled-out than you might expect when you think of banjo music. Lately I’ve been transcribing Hurt’s version of the Eastern Kentucky fiddle tune “Flannery’s Dream” for my own playing, and its odd meter has required lots of attentive listening to get it right.
J. Childers - Transmissions Vol. 2
Following up 2023’s Threshold and Transmissions Vol. 1, the latest release from J. Childers, Transmissions Vol. 2, is a delightful half-hour of dubby, psychedelic electronic music that reminds me of both The Orb’s spacier moments and the underwater music from Donkey Kong Country, two things I absolutely love. I’ve had the single “Submersible” in heavy rotation for a while now, but the whole thing came out last week and it’s very good.
Beth Orton - Weather Alive
I think someone recommended this record to me based on my love for two sax-inflected, rambling folk-rock albums that came out in 2021: Cassandra Jenkins’ An Overview on Phenomenal Nature and The Weather Station’s Ignorance. I was not a Beth Orton knower, so I sort of slept on it until a couple of months back, when I became obsessed with William Orbit’s 1993 chillout masterpiece “Water From a Vine Leaf”, which features a mystifying vocal performance from Orton and prompted a deep dive into her discography. The title track has felt especially relevant to me (a person who has extremely weather-dependent moods) over the last couple of weeks as we finally got some warmth and sunshine here: “Almost makes me wanna cry, the weather’s so beautiful outside.”
That’s all for this week. See you next time!