Hello friends,
Welcome back to Speaking in Tongues, a monthly newsletter / interview series from Black Eyes that extends the thread we started with our zine of the same name. If you haven’t checked it out, you can find it here.
For the record, this edition of the newsletter marks the start of our bonus section for paying readers. You’ll see more about that below.
In case you missed the news, we’re happy to report that all of the line-ups for our Winter ‘23-’24 performances have now been announced. They are:
January 27th & 28th: Los Angeles - Lodge Room with No Age, Maral (1/27) and Puli (ex-Mi Ami) (1/28)
We’re headed back to D.C. in mid-October to start putting together these performances. We’ll be working on a new set, with what we hope will be a few surprises ;)
A few things we are thinking about/listening to/reading/watching/et cetra in the meantime:
Mike: I got a chance to see Lewsburg this past week. It’s a four piece from Rotterdam, Ned., that, as has been widely acknowledged, owes more than a bit to the Velvet Underground. But it’s way more than that. Minimal. Hooky. Noisy. Motorik-driven. The band is currently touring the U.S. and is absolutely worth the price of admission (or purchase of recorded material).
I’ve also been (slowly) working my way through this thing, a dense exploration of the nature of time, space, and physics. I’m not sure that I understand it all but it’s also blowing my mind?
Jacob: A few things I’ve heard/read in the recent past…the new (and unfortunately last) Jaimie Branch LP Fly or Die Fly or Die Fly or Die ((world war)) is a fully alive and incredible collection of music that has to be heard for all of its fire and vitality. Long standing personal faves and boundary pushing power trio Radian has a new LP out (Distorted Rooms) that is as good as any of their previous offerings. Incredible how they can keep making things feel fresh after 20+ years with a fairly similar palette yet always creative and pushing things in unexpected directions. Was lucky to catch Water Damage and Konjur Collective at a small show in Brooklyn on a (torrentially) rainy night a few weeks back and both were absolutely stellar. Water Damage did that drone thing I love where 5 minutes in it feels/sounds one way but 10 minutes later it doesn’t seem like anything has changed but it feels completely different…not to be missed if they play near you.
On the reading front, Henry Threadgill’s memoir/autobiography Easily Slip Into Another World was a great read. Thought provoking ideas about being an artist but also as a history of creative music in Chicago and New York in the 60s/70s/80s and also stories from his time in Vietnam and thoughts about how those experiences personally and at a broader scale tie back into that world. Recently in the middle of a rather more light-hearted music book “Denim and Leather: The rise and fall of the New Wave of British Heavy Metal”…great stories and a cool look into a scene I know mostly about from Metallica’s covers of some of the bands (and of course Iron Maiden as well)…
Daniel: In August I started teaching an course on electronic music at Baruch College and it’s given me the opportunity to revisit and rediscover some amazing stuff. Some material that’s crossed my desk: the music of Richard Teitelbaum and his essay “Biofeedback,” on the process of conducting EEG and other corporeal data through an early Moog; George Lewis Voyager, which I only knew about but had never taken the time to hear; a rewatching of “A Joyful Noise.” The live footage is incredible. Also loving Michel Redolfi’s Desert Tracks, recommended by the excellent Jake Muir, and this Spanish DJ named Brava, who has a truly insane Boiler Room set (not usually a fan of BR but you know…). Also, many live recordings from Dripping, the festival I co-direct, are up, including RP Boo and Nìdia. Both are so so good. Reading a cool 33 1/3 book on Switched on Bach. I recommend.
Hugh: Adulkt Life - There is No Desire: frayed like the edges of a canvas patch I silkscreened and safety-pinned to my jacket, lo skill in hi skool, this record is immediate and abstract and urgent and blurry in a way I can’t pin down. Recorded in seven hours and full of gnomic utterances like “we don’t even rehearse”, it reminds me of the first Raincoats LP without sounding anything like that. Chris talks in his convo with Mike below about the perceived contradiction of Huggy Bear having been a riot grrrl-allied band with mostly female members having a male primary vocalist. This sounds like a band full of dudes with animating impulses that entirely overturn mildewy rock manspreading. Oh, my heart!
Irreversible Entanglements - Protect Your Light: I found Alice Coltrane’s Ptah the El-Daoud LP at the Georgia Avenue AmVets thrift store when I was 17 and Impulse Records released many other guiding-star-importance (to me and other Black Eyes) LPs. Irreversible Entanglements have stepped into, and filled, some enormous footprints on this album. The Once and Future Sound of Jazz to Come. I just heard an atmos mix of the title track and all my nerves are on fire with anticipation of playing together in December.
Reading: Emily Wilson’s Iliad translation. Metrical, unfussy, rich, and like a spear in the gut, sounding the heavy, heavy rhythms of war. Conveys the familiarity and strangeness of Homeric epic beautifully.
Helen MacDonald - H is for Hawk: Like Wilson (and the composers of the Iliad), MacDonald captures the weirdness of grieving their father’s death alongside the mundanity and inevitability of loss and grief. The art of losing is - and also isn’t - hard to master. Training a goshawk was not in the cards for me when my own father died but reading this book makes it seem like a perfectly understandable thing to do under the circumstances. Also this book makes me cry a lot.
With love,
Dan, Daniel, Hugh, Jacob, Mike
Huggy Bear’s radical, vicious, queer boy-girl energy was a huge inspiration for many of us in Black Eyes. We owe them a lot.
On April 6, Black Eyes played a surprise warm up show at Haydee’s in the Mount Pleasant neighborhood of Washington, D.C. Our friend and merch person Forest sent a video of our cover of Huggy Bear’s “No Sleep” to Chris Rowley, one of the singers in that band. A few days later, Chris reached out to say hi and a conversation began. It kept going via a series of Instagram DMs. That format is preserved here.
This is the second of two parts. We present it here for Speaking In Tongues subscribers.
Chris’ latest music project, Adulkt Life’s “There is No Desire” is currently out on Jabs Every Day/Our Voltage.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Black Eyes: Speaking In Tongues to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.