Forty Five Minutes of Speaking Voices

I had the misfortune recently to see an advert on TV with the voice of Alan Watts is being used to sell cruises for the Cunard shipping company. Watts was a writer, speaker and philosopher who did much in the 1950s and 60s to popularise Eastern philosophies in the west. His lectures and speeches have been widely available for a long time, not least since the rise of Youtube. His son tries to control the use of them through an Alan Watts website where they can be downloaded when paid for, so presumably Cunard paid for the use of Alan's voice rather than just ripping it from Youtube. The advert chops up Watts' speech and misses the end section entirely, not surprisingly, (knowingly) misrepresenting the message of the original, selling a luxury cruise on the high seas as the dream Watts speaks of. I'm not here to complain about advertising, it's a bit late in the day for that. Watts' voice and speeches are instantly recognisable and catnip for use in media where his message, accent and speaking voice and rhythms are striking and attention grabbing. 

I came across this clip this week too, writer Paul Bowles interviewed in 1970 about a trance dance and self mutilation he witnessed while resident in Morocco. Bowles left the USA in 1947 and settled in Tangier, recording local musicians and writing. His novel The Sheltering Sky came out in 1949, turned into an epic film by Bernardo Bertolucci in 1990 (I read the book and saw the film at the time and enjoyed both but don't remember much about either now so need to revisit). Bowles' speaking voice, like Alan Watts, very much lends itself to being set to music, not just the content but the tone and timbre and patterns of speech. Which led to think that speaking voices set to music would make a good longform mix.

The mix below is forty five minutes of speaking voices set to music, sometimes where voice and music have been specifically made for and recorded with each other and sometimes where the voice has been taken from earlier recordings and sampled. I could probably find enough to make a second at some point in the future. 

Forty Five Minutes Of Speaking Voices

• Jon Hopkins, Ram Dass and East Forest: Sit Around The Fire
• 10:40: The First Step
• Coyote: The Outsider
• David Holmes and Jon Hopkins ft. Stephen Rea: Elsewhere Anchises
• Rude Audio and Dan Wainwright: Be Love
• Steve Queralt and Michael Smith: Chaldean Oracle
• Steve Queralt and Michael Smith: Glitches (Flug 8 Remix)
• Fireflies and Joe Duggan: Leonard Cohen Knows

Sit Around The Fire is the closing track on Jon Hopkins 2022 Music For Psychedelic Therapy, the voice of guru and writer Ram Dass talking about spiritual discovery through sitting round the fire and staring at the flames, while Hopkins' slow piano chords and sound of wood burning and crackling drift by. 

The First Step came out on Higher Love Vol. 2 last year, a 10:40 track that borrows a Bertrand Russell interview and layers a slow burning groove and wash around it, growing in emotion with nods to Elvis and Spiritualized. Russell speaks of acting and of doing in spite of doubt and in the absence of religion.  Magical stuff. 

Coyote are masters of sampling voices and building beautiful Balearic songs around them. This one takes Alan Watts talking about artists, work, states of evolution and sane and insane societies, adds some lovely acoustic guitar, and pays tribute to Andrew Weatherall (who styled himself as The Outsider when writing for Boy's Own back in the late 80s). The Outsider is the last song on their 2021 album The Mystery Light, a highly recommended record. 

Elsewhere Anchises is from David Holmes' Late Night Tales, a stunning 2016 compilation album that pulled together nineteen songs of life and loss, spanning Buddy Holly and David Crosby to Eat Light Become Light and songs David made for the album. On Elsewhere Anchises actor Stephen Rea speaks the words of Seamus Heaney over David's ambient backdrop, the sound of something quite special taking place. 

Rude Audio and Dan Wainwright have released one of this year's best dub/ dub techno/ psychedelia albums, Psychedelic Science. Be Love opens the album with the voice of Ram Dass making his second appearance on this mix. 

Steve Queralt and Michael Smith released the four track EP Sun Moon Town last year, Ride bassist Steve writing and recording four very different pieces of music and Hartlepool born writer and flaneur Michael narrating his own tales of adventures and wanderings in the 21st century, a place and time that seems quite bewildering to him. The Flug 8 remix comes from this year's remix package, a dissection of late stage capitalism and advertising agency dreams you can dance to.  

Fireflies is one of Nina Walsh's musical outlets, a South London based collective. The voice is that of Joe Duggan, Derry born and resident of Crystal Palace. 'If anyone knows', Joe says, 'Leonard Cohen knows'. 

Wise Men Say Only Fools Rush In

We went to the cinema last week, the first time we'd been since pre- Covid. There's nothing quite like sitting in the dark and seeing a film on the big screen for that full immersive experience. The film we chose was Baz Luhrman's Elvis, a brash, hyperactive, high camp, historically inaccurate take on the life of Elvis Presley. It was great fun of course if an hour too long. Elvis' musical life splits into three stages for me- the raw, untamed brilliance of the Sun years followed by a succession of increasingly tame songs made to promote films he was starring in followed by a kind of renaissance- the '68 comeback special (the first heritage rock show?) and then the Vegas years (a mixture of sublime inspiration and utter schmaltz). Elvis released Can't Help Falling In Love in 1961 to accompany the film Blue Hawaii, a song which has a life of it's own- Elvis crooning with his heavenly backing choir, some emotional button pushing lines but some genuine beauty too. It was covered by UB40 and the supporters of several English football teams have made it their own too- hearing massed ranks of Sunderland fans singing it at Old Trafford once was quite a moment.

Can't Help Falling In Love

In 1997 Jason Spaceman was going through the recording of Spiritualized's then latest album, what would become Ladies And Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space. He wrote and recorded the title track, a weightless, wracked and wasted piece of space pop/ rock, introduced by a deadpan Kate Radley, blending his own song with the melodies and words from Can't Help Falling In Love. Obviously, by the time the album was ready to be released, Spritualized's finest album, the Presley estate were not happy and the Elvis parts had to be removed. Bootlegs exist of course. As a song, it is almost too much.

Ladies And Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space/ Can't Help Falling In Love 

Last summer Jesse Fahnestock was having his own blues and revisiting Ladies And Gentlemen... and in search of a musical outlet for this found himself playing the song everyday, focusing on the line 'getting strong today/ a giant step each day'. I'll let Jesse describe the next steps...

'A lot of my music is about touching the hem of Spiritualized/Spacemen's cloak anyway, so I decided I’d pick up the baton. I spent a couple of weeks at the piano writing my own melancholy folk song in the round, keeping the “fools rush in” and adding some hopeful sentimentality to try to pull myself out of my funk, some words about daring to be happy, taking a chance on love and life. I called it “A Giant Step”, but that title didn’t stick.

In parallel I’d been toying with the idea of sampling some archival footage of the West’s last great philosopher (and personal hero), Bertrand Russell. I didn’t have a song for what I’d found, so when I started producing “Giant Step” on the computer, I stuck Russell on the intro, just as a whim. And then suddenly I heard what Russell was saying in that clip … it was about acting “vigorously” in spite of one’s doubt, about how modern philosophy was there to help you dare to live, even without the certainty of religion.

Making music is full of serendipitous moments, but this was the best one I’ve had yet. The song is more appropriately called “The First Step” '

10:40's The First Step has now been released as one of the songs on Higher Love Vol. 2, a compilation on Brighton's Higher Love label. You can get it here. It's a slow burning, sombre and emotive piece of music, the voice of Bertrand Russell surrounded by the laid back groove and the spectral female voices that join whispering, 'fools rush in'. It's a different take again from the feelings Elvis provokes and from the ones summoned by Spiritualized, a new feeling, and it shows how music can transform itself, shift its shape over time, one person taking a song somewhere else. 

The rest of Higher Love Vol. 2 is uniformly superb too, from the skittering sunset vibes of Perry Granville to the blissed out twinkling of Joe Morris, the heady brew of Secret Soul Society and enormous symphonic, spinning, giddying sound of Mass Density Human, and plenty more besides- if you need a soundtrack for the dog days of August, you'll find one inside Higher Love Vol 2.