STUDIOS PLAYLIST 002

Introducing a new weekly playlist guided by the contents of the week's digital programme and its associated artists, music in its surrounding orbit. We’ll be compiling each shorter weekly selection into a rolling playlist for your longer listening needs.

Following the trajectory of the week’s online programme, our second Studios playlist takes cues from resident Vivienne Griffin’s work and the writings of late cultural theorist Mark Fisher, known best for his k-punk blog and the incendiary Capitalist Realism.

Earlier this week, Vivienne Griffin presented two new works, I LEAF and SLOW AND LOW, for our I Should Be Doing Something Else Right Now LIVE series, kicking off a new programme of quick fire experimental commissions from Somerset House Studios artists, broadcasted via live stream. Closing out the week this Sunday for our Deep Listen feature is Baroque Sunbursts: k-punk Revisited with Dan Taylor – revisiting an archival panel discussion and group listening event recorded at ASSEMBLY in 2018 that aimed to celebrate Mark Fisher’s vision of a ‘social and psychic revolution’: one of collective joy and care.

Griffin’s SLOW AND LOW – an auto-tuned choral piece – is our jumping off point, influencing a selection of vocally-led music from Lyra Pramuk, Meredith Monk, The Bulgarian State Radio & Television Choir, GAIKA, Sosena Gebre Eyesus and Matana Roberts, alongside a handful of artists referenced in the writing of Mark Fisher, including Burial, Rufige Kru, Black To Comm, Drake and The Fall.

Follow the links below to purchase this week’s featured music. You can also subscribe to the playlist here:
 

Dengel Sele Esbe (When I Say Your Name) – Sosena Gebre Eyesus 

Sosena Gebre Eyesus plays the begena or King David’s Harp. Listen to Little Axe Records’ release of six Ethiopian orthodox hymns, sung by Sosena Gebre Eyesus over the low buzzing of the begena.

Tendril – Lyra Pramuk 

The opening track on recently released album Fountain, a record created entirely with Pramuk’s own voice, often shaped and structured by electronics.

The Games: Panda Chant II – Meredith Monk

Taken from Meredith Monk’s sixth studio album Do You Be. ‘Panda Chant’ is a section from The Games: a science fiction opera by Meredith Monk and Ping Chong. Performance of ‘Panda Chant’ involves coordinating the vocal material with rhythmic stamps and claps, working with two different rhythmic cycles at once.

Kalimankou Denkou (The Evening Gathering) – The Bulgarian State Radio & Television Female Choir

Formed in 1951, The Bulgarian State Radio & Television Female Choir are best known for their contribution to the Le Mystère Des Voix Bulgares series of LPs released by Marcel Cellier from 1975 onwards. The first volume of Cellier’s recordings were reissued by British independent label 4AD.

How Bright They Shine – Matana Roberts

Closing track on the fourth instalment of Roberts’ acclaimed Coin Coin project Coin Coin Chapter 4: Memphis (2019), a proposed 12-part suite. 

Enoch’s Drone – GAIKA

From Studios resident GAIKA’s 2015 mixtape MACHINE.

Come Down To Us – Burial

Cited by Mark Fisher in his writing on Hauntology, he described Burial’s 2006 self-titled release as having “less to do with a near future than with the tantalising ache of a future just out of reach. Burial is haunted by what once was, what could have been, and – most keenly – what could still happen”. ‘Come Down To Us’ is taken from Burial’s 2013 EP, Rival Dealer.

Ghosts of My Life – Rufige Kru

Tamar Shlaim (Repeater Books) notes this Rufige Kru track as the “quintessentially Mark Fisher record” in this week’s Deep Listen, Baroque Sunbursts: k-punk revisited with Dan Taylor. Taken from Rufige Kru’s 1993 Ghosts EP.
 

Tuscan Leather – Drake

Fisher reflected on 'Party Hauntology' and the “hedonist's sadness” in the music of Drake and Kanye West in Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures. Read The Man Who Has Everything: Mark Fisher on Drake’s Nothing Was the Same, an article ‘deconstructing the Drake dilemma’.

Rauschen – Black to Comm

One from Black to Comm’s Alphabet 1968 (2010), an album critiqued in Mark Fisher’s Ghosts of My Life: “the labouring, looped double bass on ‘Rauschen’ has all the mecano-meloncholy of a phonograph winding down”.

The NWRA – The Fall

In 2016’s The Weird and the Eerie, Mark Fisher analysed The Fall’s 1980 album Grotesque (After the Gramme) as a record “structured around the opposition between the quotidian and the weird-grotesque”, noting final track ‘The NWRA (The North Will Rise Again)’ as where “the conflict between the claustrophobic mundaneness of England and the grotesque-weird is most explicitly played out”.