https://soundcloud.com/goatytapes/drunk-elk-quintessence
So there’s this song called ‘Quintessence’ by this Tasmanian band called ‘Drunk Elk’. The only instrumentation is bass and a cheap keyboard while a man sings an oddly mournful song, constantly wavering in pitch. The chorus ‘play that strange tune again, that off-key melody’ feels like it drifts above everything, achieving some kind of ghostly significance beyond the words and the simplistic nature of the song.
The rest of the cassette is fine. There are some fun melodies and keyboard lines and such. It sounds like three guys with some good ideas quickly writing songs to get them recorded. But on one song it somehow comes together into something else entirely.
Obviously I can’t say I wouldn’t love a tape full of songs as good as that, but at the same time this exact dynamic is part of what makes real at-home DIY cassette stuff intriguing. That random cassette you find at the used record store could be anything. It could be a bunch of dusty bossa nova or an exercise routine or an obscure indie band who wrote a song that pierces your soul. It’s not just that it’s a surprise, but that it’s inconsistent. That you may genuinely sift through a lot of boring, unremarkable music but that that’s part of what makes the unique gems that couldn’t have arisen any other way really hit.
I’ve been listening to a lot of cassette music recently. Partly because everything I said above, partly because exploring obscure music soothes my autism brain, partly because I’ve been feeling a bit unhinged (/pos) lately and dusty drifting distant music fits that mood.
This got me thinking about ‘amateurish’ music and outsider music. Outsider music is a really complicated thing with a long history of both celebrating genuinely interesting non-industry music as well as a long history of fetishization of mental illness and ‘naivety’ and all that stuff. It’s bad. The whole ‘Songs in the Key of Z’ circus act shit.
Which is a shame because a lot of this music is genuinely special. And, regardless of the nature of the artist, a lot of this fuzzy at-home tape stuff really does resonate with my neurodivergence and mental illness. It feels like how my brain feels when I’m a little out there. It just hits a specific nerve ending in a way nothing else does.
Or, it does sometimes. A lot of the time it’s a little boring or unremarkable or ugly, but now and then something rises from the fog and feels like light shining through you.