Dinner Music 68: The weekly lineup
Oceanic sound feeling, mid-century blues jazz, sunday sounds
This week the sound is about stillness and slowing down. It’s still the beginning of the year, we’re getting our bearings. The music is full of cosmic, slowed down synthesizer, heavy grain, minor chords with garbled wham and minimal ambient tones. There’s a bit of everything. Most of the albums are instrumental, save the very first.
We begin with Bill Callahan, an artist I return to again and again when I need to quiet my mind. The song Riding for the Feeling is the first Callahan song I ever heard and continues to be a favorite. His deep voice resonates over simple guitar chords, like an echo into nowhere. We move into a place of hazy nostalgia with Water Your Flowers, an instrumental album from Moon Mullins. The album was mixed by Katie Von Schleicher, another artist that has been featured in the Dinner Music playlists quite a bit. The sound has oceanic feeling, that “sensation of eternity.” It can make you forget yourself, just for a little while. We hold onto that feeling with Speedy West’s album Guitar Spectacular, but in an entirely new way. The sound transports you to somewhere brand new — a liminal space of honkin’ and tonkin’ your way through a dreamland. If you liked the general sound in Priscilla, start here. Next, we have Dougie Stu’s debut album Familiar Face, which is an apt way to describe the sound coming through. It reminds you of something, but you can’t quite put your finger on it. The album draws from heavily from smokey, minimal sounding jazz from New York City and Chicago in the mid-century, like Alice Coltrane and Miles Davis. There is a freshness that comes through, too, with an urgency that sings through glittery interludes of subtlety. We end with that mid-century blues-jazz sound from Charles Kynard, whose sound centers on the round, muted sound of the organ, taking it from church-quiet to rollicking as fast as you could say play it again.
Enjoy.
The playlist is here:
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Monday
Apocalypse - Bill Callahan (2011)
Spotify / Apple Music / YouTube / Other streaming services
Tuesday
Water Your Flowers - Moon Mullins (2022)
Spotify / Apple Music / YouTube / Other streaming services
Wednesday
Guitar Spectacular - Speedy West (1962)
Spotify / Apple Music / YouTube / Other streaming services
Thursday
Familiar Future - Dougie Stu (2020)
Spotify / Apple Music / YouTube / Other streaming services
Friday
Afro-Disiac - Charles Kynard (1970)
Spotify / Apple Music / YouTube / Other streaming services
Pair with:
Farro Malfaldini with Wild Mushrooms. Simple, easy, down to earth dinner that is as good as it is pleasing. Add in protein if you want or fancy it up with truffles or pine nuts.
Bobinet Piak Rosé. It’s piak season! These are some of my favorite wines — crisp, a hint of fruit, medium body. It’s a nice cold season rosé, with all the right notes of red without the heaviness. Plus, it pairs with… everything?
Red leather gloves. Can I be chic and warm at the same time? I don’t know, truthfully, but, damn, I’ll try. It’s cold as hell y’all, stay true.
Black Cardamom candle. Y’all, this candle smells GOOD. I am cardamom’s number one fan and this is no exception.
This frog blanket. !!!!!!
Thank you, thank you.
Have a great week.