A Fate of Knowing Too Much
Unknown Artist - Ya Yumma (Oh, Mother)
I’ve been reading Rob Sheffield’s Love Is a Mixtape and thinking a lot about my own relationship with music, how I consume it and how I connect to it and the osmosis of tape making and deejaying. One day I was talking with a friend, and I admitted to him that I was terrible with song titles and as I think about that I’m certain that lapse is because of how I process a lot of my music now, which is to say that I don’t; I mostly absorb it. Everything is a series of clicks. It’s too easy. But there is a special exchange created when you make tapes; the act is physical, and because of that, those song imprint upon you. I know my tapes. And my tapes bring back memories, not like albums do, but like how the scent of clove cigarettes always takes me back to my high school friend Gigi Perkins and her green VW Super Beetle, and the recollection that she and our other friend Amy were the only people who visited me when I was in the hospital, aged 14, having undergone brain surgery.
I have another tape, unmarked except for the words “Stereolab + Ethiopian Song” on the label. I recall that I’d recorded the Stereolab EP with “Flourescences” on it so that I could play it over the stereo at the video store I worked in the mid 90s. But that only filled half of the first side so I had the tape in the deck, ready to hit Record when anything caught my ear. Always important to have a cassette on standby. One afternoon, possibly the happiest song I’ve ever heard (still, to this day) began playing on the radio and I wisely depressed the Pause button and caught as much of it as I could onto the magnetic tape, forever etching it into nameless memory.
Maybe it’s even more special to me because no matter how much I try to find out any information about it, I’m sure I never will and that’s ok and maybe even dont want to because then it’s not some mystery transmission like the time EH and I sat in the Vancouver dark at 3:30 in the morning zoning out in his room to a raga that sounded like it was being beamed in from outer space and I’m still so glad we never knew what that was all about but we that both remember it being magical. The moment is embedded in us, if not the music.
This song is like that. I have no idea who it is. I don’t want to know who it is. I don’t want history, I don’t want context.
I just want it to exist.
SERMONS! is brought to you by Jamie Ward, a multidisciplinary artist currently in Texas. You can also find me on Twitter and Instagram.
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