Beta’s Substack

I first met Surya Botofasina at a Midtown restaurant back in the winter of 2017. Up until that point, Botofasina had been in his New York City hustle mode, whether that meant working in restaurants (like this one) or appearing in Boardwalk Empire. On that day, I was there to chat with him about his childhood spent at Alice Coltrane Turiyasangitananda’s ashram in California. That conversation became part of Luaka Bop’s ever-transcendent The Ecstatic Music of Alice Coltrane Turiyasangitananda set.

James Chance passed away earlier this week. Back in early 2003, Ryan Pitchfork asked me to go interview him at his apartment in the purgatory that is the Upper West Side on the occasion of a long-overdue CD box set. As a rather recent Brooklyn transplant, I got nosebleeds if I ever went north of the L and I was slightly bewildered to be this far uptown.

Marian Zazeela passed away last month. And J reminded me that Dream Lines, an exhibit of her drawings, was up for a few days more at Artists Space, so I trekked down to Tribeca for a chance to glimpse her work just in time. Wait, that’s not right. Time was Zazeela’s real medium; how you’re soaking in it, how you might glimpse light across a tiny slice of it. If you’re putting ink to a piece of paper, can you do it so as to trace the infinite?

As a family, we’ve only made it through about half of Cowboy Carter. B however –as is a 7 year-old’s wont– became obsessed with “Jolene.” I wish I could say that on our recent beach holiday we listened to hours of Balearic tunes (trust, I had a playlist of heavy hitters all ready to roll) but in fact it was more often than not “Jolene” on repeat, as B had traced it back to the Dolly Parton original. More Dolly hits followed.

At the turn of the 21st century, I moved from Austin to New York City. Did I think I’d still be clinging to such cement twenty years later? Not at all. When I left Texas, I had been writing for my roommate’s homemade magazine which gave me the still crazy notion to reach out to complete strangers and start prying into them and asking what makes them tick. That magazine never made it to another print issue, so these inaugural correspondences wound up elsewhere.

Still getting sorted after a whirlwind end of April. But here are a few titles worth highlighting for May’s iteration of Bandcamp Friday: Greg Foat - Live at Can Rudayla, Ibiza I am merely human, so in no way am I able to keep up with UK kosmiche keyboard voyager Greg Foat’s many, many, many, many, many releases. Somehow, Brent Sirota can. When I asked him for the cream of the crop, he listed seven titles. Myself, I am opting for this live joint recorded poolside in Ibiza.

There’s something Lethean in the songs of California-based singer/ songwriter Jessica Pratt, where as you listen you begin to forget about time and the past. Her fourth album Here in the Pitch is out this week. It’s somehow been five years since 2019’s Quiet Signs, which seems unbelievable, but also just about right, as time has a way of loosing its strictures within her own music.

We were about to embark on the 3+ hour drive out to the Upper Mojave Desert and were in dire need of a soundtrack for that landscape, when the ideal email landed in my inbox. It announced a compilation of New Age electronic music from the early 1980s through the 1990s surveying the fecund Mexican music scene.

I don’t recall where I first came across the Sound Collector Audio Review. If it was at a record store in the Village, it was no doubt at a spot long shuttered (thinking Kim’s, Other). But I knew I wanted to write for it. I had already fallen in love with Sound Collector, a meticulous, perfect bound, early ‘00s era music magazine that introduced me to the music of Animal Collective, Black Dice, and a bunch of other bands now lost to time.

This month’s edition of The Lot Radio features a special guest. I can’t say who, but let’s just say school was out for the week so I was in DJ Dad mode. And my special guest was way more interested in sipping hot cocoa and laughing at all the Minions memes that listeners shared in the chat. We had just returned from a much needed week of sun in the desert and rain in Los Angeles.