Alisa Larsen Plays Further
And now, the fourth Plays Further*. Here’s Alisa Larsen, again; but this time, more. One hour and fifteen minutes of exquisite music – exquisitely described by Alisa herself, just a short scroll below. Listen here, and enjoy your Friday.
* once, twice, or less/more per month I’ll ask a previous Plays Softly guest to put together a (sometimes much) longer playlist than the strict 7-song version for Fridays.
»Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about cultivating a practice. How nice consistency feels, to get better at things, to be able to immerse oneself over (long stretches of) time. I have a writing practice and a reading practice. Earlier this year, I read ›Love Me Tender‹ by the French author Constance Debré, an absolute force. In it, she speaks about swimming in a communal pool every day, something to hold on to as everything else disintegrates, as she rebuilds something completely different. It inspired me to take up my swimming practice again, at noon every few days, as much a physical exercise as a philosophical one.
Another professional practice is my work with spatial design. It is an abstract term I am at odds with. What I am concerned with is atmosphere. How a place or even object feels, how it manifests a mood or temper. I’ve put together a playlist of songs with particular atmospheres that feel appealing or fascinating these days. Together they form an atmosphere in their own right. There is a texture or mental scenography to all of these tunes, can you feel it too?
This is what I listen to while I sit at the dinner table writing every day, between kids shouting at the school playground and the bricklayers’ power tools whizzing through asphalt as they pave the road outside.
About the songs…
I heard this song on Jack Rollo’s indispensable Friday early bird show on NTS. This is texture in the right sense of the word — the warmth of the bass, the way in which the words are spoken or laid out, the palpable vibration of the synth. It’s been on repeat for two months now, I can’t get enough. Do check out Jack and Elaine’s other show Time Is Away too, it’s a wild and beautiful mix of field recordings, music and storytelling. Here’s my favourite episode, I’ve heard it at least 15 times.
No one plays Debussy like Mitsuko Uchida. This recording feels revelatory, like it says something about the music I did not know before, even if I have heard other people play it. Playful, mysterious, visual, somehow.
A magical tune from the unsurprisingly superb soundtrack to “Priscilla”, Sofia Coppola’s new movie. This song feels like a film.
Was ›Love Like Anthrax‹ the beginning of hardcore? Maybe. You probably recognise these phrases from Dean Blunt’s ›A_X‹. The original is, perhaps, even better. Vicious drums that do something to you, physically.
This wee number off PinkPantheress’ ›to hell with it‹ (2021) is immaculate. Featherlight, 1:36 minute jungle heaven. I’ve been listening loads to her and Ice Spice this year.
I discovered the British jazz saxophonist Trish Clowes a few years back and immediately fell for ›Muted Lines‹, a mysterious, eerie, kind of funky number that reminds me of Jan Garbarek. Her latest EP ›A View With A Room‹ is stellar too.
There’s no band I’ve listened to more than Dry Cleaning the past 12 months. It’s one of those bands people love or hate, and if you see them live, you love them even more than before. I did. And I do. ›Viking Hair‹ is from an early EP, a testament to how good they were even then. I wish I was a tragic heroine with viking hair.
Unfortunately, I only got to know the work of Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho’s after her death earlier this year. It has been a transformative discovery. If we’re talking about atmosphere, the intro to ›L'amour de loin‹ is unlike anything I’ve ever heard. Uncanny, chilling, brilliant.
I recently watched ›Daisy Jones and The Six‹, a kind of mediocre series about a fictionalised band of the same name loosely based on Fleetwood Mac in the years between “Rumours” and “Tusk”. In other words, there’s big drama, fights, drugs, infidelity, tight pants, long hair, you name it. Bitter as hell. What makes it much, much better, is that the songs are actually GOOD. So good I had to find out who wrote them. Of course it was Blake Mills (with the help of Phoebe Bridgers and Cass McCombs, to name a few) and it reminded me of his exceptional debut from 2010. It was kind of impossible to pick just one song. ›Wintersong‹ breaks my heart, and come to think of it, it feels like a Fleetwood Mac tune.
A great discovery last year was Fishmans, a defunct Japanese Shibuya-kei/dub group that unfortunately crest too soon (a David Berman reference for you). Here’s a really, really good intro to their output. You don’t have to listen to all 36 minutes of this, it peaks within the first 13. Don’t tell them I said that.
It was really hard not to put Troye Sivan’s ›Got Me Started‹ on this list. It haunts me and I actually know some of the choreo.«