Dinner Music 92: The weekly lineup

globetrotting disco, left-field grooves, high-taste dance

Jul 08, 2024

This week the sound is exploring the rudimentary principles of this project — “esoteric grooves.” Those albums that aren’t like anything you’ve heard before, while being exactly what you want to hear. I’ve been thinking a lot about what makes a song tasteful, trying to pinpoint why I immediately like something. What is the quality of taste? In Standards on Taste, David Hume wrote (in 1757!): “Strong sense, united to delicate sentiment, improved by practice, perfected by comparison, and cleared of all prejudice, can alone entitle critics to this valuable character; and the joint verdict of such, wherever they are to be found, is the true standard of taste and beauty.” The thing about senses is that they are sensed, not considered in the moment. So, this week, I’m attempting to sense out what my taste is, what I think “esoteric grooves” are.

Before we get started: On Friday, Horse Opera will be back at Howards in Austin, TX from nine to midnight. I’ll be playing my best left-field disco, afro-beat grooves and a couple of records that I inherited from my dad’s collection. Come by and say hi.

We begin with Ritmo, the fifth album from UK singer-songwriter Judie Tzuke, a synth-ladden, new wave gothic melodrama, with sounds that feel like the freezing ocean stinging you in the face. The cinematic melancholia drips from Tzuke’s voice — strong and crystal clear, with a 1980s coldness. We move into a compilation of songs from the virtually unknown Ghanian group The Psychedelic Aliens, dated around 1969-71. The rhythms are remarkably familiar, with all of the hallmarks of head-bopping psych and garage rock, but interlaced are African melodies and pulses. This might be one of my favorite discoveries of the year. We go back to synths, but this time we get lo-fi sounds from Brazilian group Grupo Controle Digital. This album was pulled from obscurity and re-issued by a Soundway Records, a favorite label of mine, and thank god, because it’s the most fun I’ve had in a long time listening to an LP start to finish. These tracks will put you at Copacabana in a high-cut bikini (or very short swim trunks) sipping a cosmo. If you love the eighties, start here. Two and a half years ago, I wrote about Emma-Jean Thackray’s debut album Yellow and it’s about time to talk about it again. “Everything I release is based around the mantra ‘music to move the mind, move the body, move the soul’,” she said in an interview with The Quietus. It’s difficult to imagine this fully-formed album as a debut, the mastery of her craft is evident in the composition and arrangement, with a mature and tasteful playfulness and sense of good-feeling. Perhaps she’s answered my question on taste: music to move the mind, move the body, move the soul. When I listen to Yellow, all I can think is: this is really fucking good. We end with a lesser-known album from coveted city pop queen Taeko Onuki. If you’re interested in artistic cycles, she has a great (and rare!) English-language interview where she says, “When you do this for a long time, it’s like every seven years a wind comes up behind you and sweeps you upwards. You’d go four or five years paddling along, maybe trying something, but then at that seventh year, it just takes off.”

The playlist

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Paid subscribers have access to the full Dinner Music archive (via Spotify), an after hours playlist, a “New York Grooves” playlist and more — hundreds of hours of groove, soul, samba, disco, electro, post-punk, funk and more, thoughtfully curated.

Monday

Ritmo - Judie Tzuke (1983)

Spotify / Apple Music / YouTube / Other streaming services

Tuesday

Psycho African Beat - The Psychedelic Aliens (1969-71)

Spotify / Apple Music / YouTube / Other streaming services

Wednesday

A Festa É Nossa - Grupo Controle Digital (1988)

Bandcamp / Spotify / Apple Music / YouTube / Other streaming services

Thursday

Yellow - Emma Jean Thackray (2022)

Bandcamp / Spotify / Apple Music / YouTube / Other streaming services

Friday

Copine - Taeko Onuki (1985)

Spotify / Apple Music / Other streaming services

Pair with

Creamy, corn bucatini with burrata. I’m on a real bucatini kick right now. Is it the best long pasta? Yes. Is it totally unreal when it’s handmade? Yes. A very good noodle to summer-ize.
Olive oil aperol spritz. I saw this on Justine’s Table and I think she also added oranges, but I feel like adding olive oil to anything is a good idea?
This essay by Daisy Alioto. “Without good cultural curators we are surrounded by the ice cream truck song, basically.”
Watching Before Sunset. This film came out twenty years ago. But it’s still one of the best movies ever, ever, ever made. I think about it every single day. “Yeah, a memory's never finished, if you really think about it.”