On Repeat: Rain, Sinéad O’Connor, More

I try to at least quickly note some of my favorite listening from the week prior — things I’ll later regret having not written about in more depth, so better to share here briefly than not at all.

▰ “There are cars, pigeons and aircraft!” warns Mark David Hadley in a brief liner note for his collection Recordings of the Rain, which contains exactly that. Also: church bells. “Metal Garden Chair 3” is a banger.

https://soundbymark.bandcamp.com/album/recordings-of-the-rain

▰ I mentioned recently the phenomenon of doing some research while writing a review of a concert and stumbling on a video of that very same concert. This is one of the four sets from a great recent show I saw here in San Francisco. The quartet, playing a kind of ambient chamber jazz, is Ross Hoyt, keyboards, electronics; Ryan Honaker, violin, electronics; Leila Abdul-Rauf, trumpet, voice, electronics; and Ed Lloyd, contra bass. Pay attention particularly to Abdul-Rauf, who runs her voice thorugh the same technology that transforms her trumpet. The music is apparently all drawn from Hoyt’s upcoming album, Peregrinari.

▰ And let’s be honest, I spent much of the week listening to the late Sinéad O’Connor. Her debut record, The Lion and the Cobra, came out at the start of my senior year of college. She was barely four months younger than I am. To suggest she had an impact on my Gen X cohort would be an understatement. More specifically in the context of the sort of music I focus on at Disquiet.com, her version of the 17th-century Irish poem “I Am Stretched on Your Grave,” with an underlying Amen break augmented by bass line and fiddle, off I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got, her sophomore album, came out in 1990. That’s the same year as Enigma’s “chant and beat” MCMXC a.D (brainchild of Michael Cretu, a decade older). This left a mark, and we’re all the richer for it. Fold in Dead Can Dance’s own cover of “I Am Stretched on Your Grave,” a few years later on Toward the Within (1994), and these seeds — among many others — of cultural impact are pretty clear.