Friday Heavy: October 14, 2022

Cliff: Welcome to Friday Heavy, Your Guide to Aggressive, abrasive, Loud, weird, experimental, and on occasion Possibly Swamp Swamp, Swamp, Swamp Music. Brought to you by the folks behind Tune Day. I’m Cliff.

Kyle: And I’m Kyle. Each episode we cover three things in a quick and digestible format. First one, brand release in the world of heavy and swamp and swamp and swamp music and why we think it’ll be worth a spin.

Secondly, one playlist we’ve curated to help you explore a heavy sub genre or artist are seen often related to the new release in some way. Definitely the case today. And third, and most importantly by far, one organization tackling a heavy issue. By doing critical cultural impacting work in their community.

Cause we punk records or all we got Cliff, what do we have today?

Cliff: I’m very excited to talk about our release today, but unfortunately parts of it will sound like a will feral bit, a little bit, so you will have to bear with me.

Kyle: Right in the

Cliff: So this week we, check our blast beats and decipherable lyrics at the door and go headlong into heavy and meditative drone. So we’re featuring this week out today, Devotional by the Lord and Petra, Hayden put out by Sabbath. Three hash BMI and cool Sally Music, bmi. So I figure our first stop is probably a necessary clarification the Lord.

Um, which the Lord are we talking about? The Lord

here?

Kyle: inside of us the whole time. One one set of footprints in the sand.

Cliff: Greg Anderson is in a way, very inside of me at this particular point, so Sure. So Greg Anderson is here for the Lord. And you’ll probably know Greg from Sun, from Goat Snake, from Engine Kid, or just generally Southern Lord Records. Greg.

An incredible amount of stuff prolific in a way that is really hard to describe, but specifically a prolific collaborator across.

For lack of a better term, drone adjacent styles. And, but pretty regularly hits strokes of genius. I would like to draw a bit of a contrast to like Omar Rodriguez, Lopez is like ventures out. Um, because sometimes those stay out and don’t necessarily come back to a thing that clicks with you.

They’re just like raw experiment.

Kyle: He’s like, I got a song about a Buffalo

Cliff: Yep. , right? This is a squiggly single note about a buffalo. Yeah, so I would say, especially with Greg, like these collaborations yield some really outsized cool moments, and I think Devotional is another one of these, right? I don’t think we necessarily went. Into this week of Friday, heavy recording planning, expecting to necessarily hit this record, and then it was like the right spin, just clicked everything into

Kyle: Yeah. And, and if you’re a person who likes music because you like thinking about the art of creativity and just sort of the human phenomenon of it.

Greg Anderson and Steven O’Malley, both of the guys from son but Greg in particular is a great follow on social and just a great person to follow his art as he like unearth. The craft of human expression and the sort of deeper things that we long for when I feel myself doing the will feral thing here, trying to trying to get earnest and esoteric about it.

But genuinely, I think when we talk about like being inspired by Greg as a prolific collaborator, that’s the kind of thing we’re talking about. Like, I, I have learned a lot about how to be an artist and express myself creatively in this world by following his career.

Cliff: Yep. Absolutely. And it’s, they really present, uh, both of them. They present their collaborations with very open hands. They, there’s not a lot of like, this is what it means, or this is what it’s about. This is how you should receive it. It’s, we made this and as we’ll point out here, like usually the context they give us is, here’s what we were thinking

about when we

made it.

And that’s about. Yeah.

So Devotional is a new collaborative album between Greg and Vocalist and Violinist Petra Hayden, uh, who first worked with Greg Anderson during his time in Goat Snake and Petra also worked on the Second Sun Studio album. Everything, some puts out is impossible to pronounce, but it’s the Void one with some symbols in front of it, is also a sick. you ever catch yourself trying to tell somebody about a sun record, just do the, like, just hand me your phone. Just go ahead and do that you can type it into

Spotify or

Kyle: May Copel, we were both the guys that walked around being like, Have you heard that new Sonno record? And, and I don’t know if it ever happened to you, but getting corrected at the bar menacingly one time, you’re like, Oh, it’s just sun.

Cliff: We would just compare it to how he is. Legend had that cloud song with all of them in front of the seas and try to connect those two dots

Kyle: the parenthesis band, the guys in robes who are parentheses.

Cliff: You mean sea gross, right? Like, no. All okay, so devotional, the way that they talk about this record themselves quote devotional is a rapt and heavy offering of wordless vocalizations, droning guitars and heaviness. Explored and unexpected and intoxicating ways inspirations came from deep listening.

Indian classical music as well as a fascinating look at the chaotic and unbelievable life of Ma Aand Sheila and the Ragni community, which is a wild story about someone who was trying to build an ashram in Oregon and has become the subject of documentaries. And I don’t mean wild like. they were pure as the driven snow and did nothing wrong, and were super impressed about it.

It’s a pretty wild story. I don’t think a statement is really being made. But like, I kind of had to look into it a little bit because I don’t think a statement is being made about the positive value of that community so much as they’re calling out. Literally, like, This is what we were thinking about when we made this collabo. Like, as far as I know, they were like watching a documentary or something while they made the music. But that kind of speaks to what we were mentioning earlier, right? They’re, they’re more about we made a meditative music thing. Here’s what we were thinking about. Then here are any parameters we had, like that one record they came out with a while ago that was all in a specific key or whatever, and then pretty much just go, and then here’s what we came up with, you.

There’s our band camp. Have a good day. I do wanna say as well, like you’re about to hear a couple of the singles we’ll play. You’re gonna hear vocalized singing without lyrics. And I sincerely hope that you will give yourself time to get used to hearing it. Um, maybe it rubs you the wrong way and you can’t hear it and it’s distracting as part of the music.

But as somebody who quite honestly hears a lot of music this way to begin with if you sit with it and let. Express whatever they’re expressing using wordless vocalizations. I think in time you get used to it a little bit. And I find that it can be really helpful even in, in meditation to experience it.

So I want to encourage you to stick with it, even if that’s a type of weird that it’s not up your alley quite yet. So it’s anybody’s guess what’s gonna kind of come on this album between the book ended front and back, songs that have been released as singles. But we’ll go ahead and play ’em both for you.

And the best way that we can describe the two in contrast are the first one has percussion. Here it is.

Cliff: And now the second track called the End of Absence doesn’t have percussion. Here’s that.

Cliff: So I, I do think that’s cool because whether it’s literally a part of your meditation practice or just good background tune, like this is a really cool way to stretch music and art and what people make across your life. In new ways. And I would say that if that kind of second single that didn’t have the percussion if that more like ethereal rhythm list ambience kind of sticks to your ribs better check out the recently released Art of meditation from Cigarro and Paul Corley.

Uh, it’s a half hour guided meditation using the words of Allen Watts in. It’s really rad. But more importantly, connect this back to this larger space of meditative music. And let’s, see what else gets released on this album as it drops today.

Kyle: check out devotion out today from the Lord and Petro Haven on Sabbath rehash and cool Sally music.

Go listen to it however you want, and as always, we encourage you to send this band your money through shows, merch or direct donation so that more cool art like this can get made.

Cliff: Okay, so Kyle, every week you make a playlist out of nothing somehow and it always feels like it’s not gonna exist. And then 10 seconds later you both have a really good playlist and some sort of excuse about why this playlist isn’t as good as you had hoped it would be. So put me in my place. What do we end up with this time?

Cuz I was already stoked on it by the time I

Kyle: So I. Pride myself on making playlists that you can put on in some specific context and let it ride and, and just enjoy, right? Like the punk rock or the anti-religion or some of the other ones that we’ve done. The stoner rock one, certainly like get in the van and, and ride around hot boxing type of thing.

This is not that decidedly And that’s because drone is the biggest tent imaginable. Let’s call all of this sound and approach to music drone just for the sake of expediency. It’s the biggest tent imaginable for a breath of ideas and of sound to execute and like literally put out in the universe and all of them you. They dial you in deeply to a very particular mental, emotional wavelength. And that’s, really the key here is the depth part, right? Like all, all music can make you feel a feeling. Taylor Swift can make you feel a feeling. But this approach specifically to music, Envelopes and suspends you in like an indescribable tangle of them, right?

That’s why so often they are, they’re wordless, and when they have vocalization, it is typically wordless or hard to decipher. So I say that to say that this playlist is best served as a sampler platter. My encouragement is to put it on when you’re not paying too much attention to it, and then jump around on chuff.

Until you find tones and spaces that draw you in, and then you go click on the album title and go experience that whole album and, and mood more presently. the Meditation to drone connection is, is an obvious one, but the correlation is there for a reason. Like it’s, it’s getting there. It exists to get you deeply into a head space.

It’s like a tuning fork for your spirit, I guess. there is a huge amount of diversity in this playlist. It is the longest playlist time wise that we have done by far, and there are obvious reasons for that cuz this is vibration stretched to the farthest possible limit. But in choosing to filter pretty deliberately for.

Thick and meditative vibrations, a lot of mid and low end. We have deliberately avoided also a few key dimensions of droning style music. So the first thing that you won’t really see any of is like light or cute, ambient, you know,

Cliff: No Tyco on this one.

Kyle: Spotify morning yoga playlist. With no disrespect to that because like Brian Eno or Band, Camp X, Y, Z person.

All of that has a place in the world and we love that it exists and love that it’s proliferated as the tools have become more accessible to make it there’s tons of that kind of music and lots of it is really beautiful and artful, but even more of it is indistinguishable and commoditized and to no fault of any of it.

It’s all great, but it’s not this. On the other end of the spectrum, we try to avoid really super bright, harsh cacophonous stuff. So like, no, there’s no mebo on this playlist or Rola or Cherrypoint. That’s great. If you’re going down the Orette Coleman free jazz, how much can my body take? what sort of GForce can I put my ears and consciousness through?

This is not that either, right? It takes patience and discipline and it, and it can. It can feel physical because you’re like attuning yourself, but it’s not like we’re not trying to harsh you out. It’s also ex anything that’s like explicitly part of a cultural practice. They mentioned deep listening to Indian classical music.

So this is not that. Anything that’s like. Pointedly trying to be religious or reaching for a higher consciousness in nature. This is not that. So no sacred harp or apocryphal singing, No Eastern spiritual music. This knocks on the, like the devotional record knocks on the door of all that but is not doing it as a practice.

So we. Just cast that out as well. Uh, lastly, no captured or non generative sounds. So no, like field recording or collage. You’ll hear some layering in some of the stuff, but that’s its own art form and is a totally different approach. And then lastly, like nothing to. Obviously on the nose, there’s Boris on this playlist, but there’s no sun.

So if you want to hear some of the other Greg Anderson experiments, go check out sun. But otherwise you have 10 plus hours of literal vibrations to just elevate your head space. Enjoy.

Cliff: Thank you and bless you. We can always mention directly to that we post all of these playlists, both on our Spotify profile and on our YouTube channel too. So no matter which way you grab music we’ve gone ahead and made some easy stuff for you to crank out.

Kyle: We’re getting close to 20 of ’em now,

Cliff: They are all so good. Yeah,

Kyle: quite enjoy them.

Cliff: Yeah. This one, your challenge is to, uh, I’d say sit down and listen to all of it in one go and let your family know that you’re okay. So lastly, we always wanna talk about somebody doing really important work in the community, uh, and sometimes we expand that out to. Larger organizations, you know, who may be creating a coalition of networks or a network of coalitions. I get both. Both of those things are true actually. Or just something that, that’s broader that maybe works with the federal government or, uh, even countries around the world to show how things are shifting, how your.

Actions and votes and thoughts matter even at your local level. Because every human being is important and all of these things impact individuals. So one thing we wanted to draw out this week as we talk about people doing important work. Is the conversation of, uh, Joe Biden who attempted to find the, the smallest sliver of the right thing that can possibly be done.

And he tried to find it this week by publicly asking for marijuana to be rescheduled. This is both objectively correct and wildly popular, but we thought maybe it’d be a good moment to talk about scheduling really quickly and people working to deal with that. Because every time somebody throws you a word or a phrase like that under it is 50 years of oppression.

bears under a single word.

Kyle: and thousands and thousands of lawyers.

Cliff: Yes, Untold. So, briefly put the reason that rescheduling matters schedule as a term refers to a one through five ranking of substances coming from the Controlled Substance Act written in 1971. Schedule one is the most serious, and by that we mean that the government uses this category to lock people up and terrorize them for being in raw possession.

At any point, uh, schedule one ranges from something like marijuana. Heroin which like, I don’t know how to help if those feel like they are on the same level to you. All I know for sure is that you’ve done probably neither of them. Uh, and that’s okay. But that’s clearly not just, and has a ton of implications downstream, but it.

Also means that on top of criminalizing people for just having stuff like this in their possession, it means that everything in Schedule one because basically impossible to research. And if you’ll think about the time that’s passed since 1971 and how. Just in general, maybe our public thoughts and positions may have changed towards drugs during that time.

Things that we even call drugs, right? Think about how much it’s changed. While all of that stuff has been on schedule one. Right. While all of that stuff has been nearly impossible to research and even try to invalidate like basic dumb assumptions like marijuana being a gateway drug and just basic stuff like that, right?

It’s impossible to actually counteract that or very close to impossible. So rescheduling substances would not only decriminalize these for the benefits of individuals, but also for our broader benefit as a society, um, not only in America, but across the world. Because in fact, before this criminalization happened, and especially, you know, you centralized in the CSA here, psychedelic research was making a lot of really positive progress in the us.

So we come to the organization, we wanna bring to your attention. In the time, since research has effectively been criminalized because of the Controlled Substances Act, the multidisciplinary association for psychedelic. Maps has been a key organization in bending the long arc of US history back towards science in this area for the good of everybody.

They’re a 5 0 1 nonprofit. Like many of the folks that we talk about, they specialize in research and education, and we’re founded in 1986. Like this guy primarily to address the lack of safe mdm, a research as a treatment for PTSD and similar issues. That’s something we still need to know more about all these years later.

Uh, and they’re still working on that and in fact have helped make a lot of progress in that area. But they’ve also grown to span a number. You know, controlled substances that are, uh, in Schedule one especially, and they’ve been working with regulatory agencies and authorities across the world to further the use of scientifically valid clinical research of substances that can help people.

Cuz obviously it’s really important that if you’re gonna convince governments that drugs are maybe not as bad as you want them to be, and you should allow people to do research, then obviously you have to make very sure that the research that’s being done is above board professional. And basically doesn’t leave any daylight for people to criticize cuz the movement and the motion is, is that important?

And Maps is doing work like that and has been for decades.

Kyle: Yeah, we hope and we hope that you hope that in the years to come, organizations like Maps will have the opportunity in the daylight to become even more broadly impactful. Because we need science backed understanding of what substances have to offer us on whether or not they’re actually dangerous.

And imagine how much more our minds will have been able to change in 50 more years. You know, in changing public sentiment or not, we should always be trying to better understand things that we don’t know much about, especially those things that have developed a stigma in the absence of clear knowledge.

So, thank you to MAPS for existing and for all the great work that you’re doing to learn more and to support their work. Go to maps, m a ps.org.

Cliff: Or buy one of

their

really sweet shirts

cuz they, they got, they got good. Good March. Awesome. Thanks so much. This has been Friday heavy. We’ll be back in

two weeks.

Go to tunedig.com or follow us on Instagram and Twitter for links to the new release, the playlist and the organization that we talked about today.