V/A - Measure, Pour & Mixtape: Music for Cooking
If you made music the way you cook, what would it sound like? For this tape compilation, we invited artists to consider the connection between food and sound, music and cooking. We envisioned an auditory cookbook of songs, poems, field recordings, and aural experiments, inspired by recipes, food preparation processes, dishes, and the experience of eating.
We asked: How does attention to sound—the sputtering of the oil, the popping of the kernels, the hum of a rolling boil, the repetitive thump of a mixer—help you to be a better cook? What would an audio recipe sound like? How is a recipe like a musical score? Where do you find space for improvisation between the notes and instructions? Could the multivocality of a community cookbook be translated by a choir? What food or dish or process is deserving of an ode? What do you like to listen to when you’re in the kitchen? After over a year in which dining together en masse was not possible, what is it about the experience of collective eating that you want to express gratitude for? What is your food hymn?
The compilation includes a benediction to be sung before a meal by BELLS (Kandice Holmes), a layered sound collage “Tabbouleh” by Avey Tare of Animal Collective, and original food odes by the likes of Lou Turner, Sally Anne Morgan, and legendary folk musician Michael Hurley. Together, all of the tracks—or ingredients, if you will—deepened and expanded our original vision, mixing, cooking, and baking together in a hearty, warm, and inventive aural menu for the most nourishing of communal meals.
Measure, Pour & Mixtape: Music for Cooking is a FerroMaster C456TM cassette tape professionally dubbed by National Audio Co. in a limited edition of 300, with cover art designed by Sally Anne Morgan of Ratbee Press, liner notes by Emily Hilliard, and sound editing by Josesph DeJarnette.
Measure, Pour & Mixtape Tracklist:
Side A
1. Andy McLeod & Sarah Bachman - Whistlin' Down the Rows
2. Sutari - Kuchenny (Kitchen Song)
3. Avey Tare - Tabbouleh
4. Bells - Union
5. Big Trash - The Apples, The Tree
6. Sally Anne Morgan - Grain Song
7. Magic Tuber Stringband - Bill Hensley's Hoppin' John
8. Lavender Blue - Chocolate Beet Cake (For Someone You Love
Side B
9. Michael Hurley - Clatskanie
10. Lou Turner - Ride the Melting
11. Jess Tsang - Follow the Steps
12. PIQSIQ - Akuglugu: Then You Stir
13. Makka West feat. Michelle Dove - Earth Array
14. Little Mazarn - Thanksgiving
15. Crystal Good - Food Poem
16. Ziona Riley - Folly of Tomato
Sutari
Crystal Good
Little Mazarn
PIQSIQ
Features previously unreleased tracks by Michael Hurley, BELLS, Avey Tare (Animal Collective), and Magic Tuber Stringband.
Artist Bios:
Avey Tare
Avey Tare (David Portner) is a musician, songwriter, and co-founder of the band Animal Collective.
Andy McLeod is an multi-instrumentalist who researches, performs and teaches American traditional music. Specializing in 6-string guitar, he draws from a wide range of influences in the American fingerstyle tradition. Listeners may recognize his style of playing in a school shaped by the music of masters such as Elizabeth Cotten, John Fahey, Lena Hughes, and Sam Mcgee. In addition to his love for traditional music, Andy loves to create drone, improvisational music and original compositions.
Sarah Bachman is a self-taught visual artist from Virginia. She loves to create any type of art that reflects her life and experiences, from paintings of haunted houses and beer drinking banjo players to sculptures in which she delicately encrusts found items in seashells collected from along the banks of Virginia’s rivers. Though from a musical family, she came late into her own practice, learning how to play music in adulthood. She makes her recording debut with the release of this tape.
Bachman and McLeod share a creative and romantic partnership of many years. They have both spent the last decade working primarily in agriculture and landscaping, and share a love for the world, folk traditions, and animals.
BELLS, led by multi-disciplinary artist Kandice Holmes, expands from solo performance to a sprawling psychedelic-folk and experimental ensemble. Based between London and Greece, the name is symbolic of the desire for their music to ring out peace, justice, call people together, and raise up praise. Kandice’s prophetic lyricism takes inspiration from the wisdom and poetry of the Psalms, ancient songs that speak of hope despite the circumstance.
Past collaborative releases came in early 2020 with friends Kikagaku Moyo, with traditional folk song ‘Gypsy Davey’ released by SubPop, followed by a spoken word piece on ‘DREAD/TKOE’ in late 2021 by longtime loves Voka Gentle.
Big Trash is the nascent guitar-song solo project of Elisabeth Fuchsia, a classically-trained violist who has previously performed and recorded with various bands and solo performers including Footings, Ned Collette, Bonnie "Prince" Billy, and Pile.
Crystal Good is hard to put in one category, the poet and performer prefers: artist, advocate, and entrepreneur. She is a three-time Ted-X talker, Folkreporter and founder building BlackbyGod.org, author of a poetry collection titled, “Valley Girl" and is a known US Supreme Court nominee dissenter. She serves in the completely made up but totally real office of Social Media Senator For The Digital District Of West Virginia and sells panties on the internet: BoomBoomPanties.com
Michael Hurley is an American folk singer-songwriter who was essential to the Greenwich Village folk music scene of the 1960s and 1970s. In addition to playing a wide variety of instruments, Hurley is also a cartoonist and a painter.
Lavender Blue is the vessel for the songwriting and guitar playing of Kayla Zuskin. Also an engineer, producer and multi-instrumentalist. Located in Asheville, NC, Lavender Blue can best be described as indie, slowcore, alt rock with a dash of americana; these styles can be heard on the debut record “Dusk” and the most recent EPs, “Slow Down” and “ I Get Lost”. The experimental record, “In Dreams” and the collaborative record “Big Blue” explore the realm of electronic and acoustic soundscapes as a backdrop to everyday life.
“The music of Little Mazarn is a cool float a few feet from the ground through a dimly lit, almost familiar forest. It is quieter than silence, big as everything, still but always moving. If you’ve ever had flying dreams, or an amazing night time bike ride on LSD, this might be a world for you. Chords are made up of notes; Little Mazarn gives them all their own moment. There are NO superfluous notes played here.
Lindsey’s kind and twisting voice ambles along over the spare sounds of Jeff Johnston’s saw bowing, Ralph White’s electric mbira wanderings, and her own slow banjo. Like DJ Screw, Bohren & Der Club of Gore, and anyone who chooses to walk instead of ride, Lindsey realizes the amazing power of slow… slow… slow music. Lindsey is at once a baby and a wise old man. Get in this canoe at dawn on some Texas river that remembers when Comanche slept under the stars.” -Thor Harris
Makka West feat. Michelle Dove
Makka West is a multi-instrumentalist from Durham, North Carolina. He is the creator of And How! and a member of the ensemble Yairms. Michelle Dove is a writer, teacher and musician living in Alamance County, North Carolina, where she is a member of Ex Iguana and the electropoetry band Streak of Tigers.
Sally Anne Morgan plays haunting psychedelic Appalachian folk drone that invokes the rhododendron thickets, creeks and mountains of her local landscape in Western North Carolina. Sally plays with the Black Twig Pickers and House and Land, dedicated practitioners of traditional music re-cast by appreciation of modern improvisation, minimalism, microtonality and drone from across the globe.
With a style perpetually galvanized by darkness and haunting northern beauty, sisters, Tiffany Ayalik and Inuksuk Mackay, come together to create Inuit style throat singing duo, PIQSIQ. Performing ancient traditional songs and eerie new compositions, they leave their listeners enthralled with the infinity of possible answers to the question “what is the meaning of life.”
With roots in Nunavut, the two grew up in Yellowknife, Northwest Territories. After years of forging hard won skill, they developed their own form blended with haunting melodies and otherworldly sounds. Approaching adulthood, they realized throat singing was not only a musical expression, but a radical, political act of cultural revitalization.
As PIQSIQ, they have recorded three studio albums and perform improvisational looping live, creating a dynamic audience experience that changes with every show.
"Ziona Riley’s songs are ephemeral yet rooted–echoing traditional folk and songwriter traditions at the same time as outsider spitfire lyricists like Michael Hurley, Connie Converse, or Dory Previn. Her songs are crafted with great depth and vulnerability, seemingly coming from the deepest corners of her experiences and by doing so, reaching the universal." -Lou Turner
Sutari is the power of three female voices and a rich musical imagination. The artists continue the traditions of Polish folk singers. Their work set a new direction in thinking about traditional music in Poland. They experiment with various vocal techniques, polyphony, traditional Polish rhythms, and explore the musical potential of everyday objects used as instruments. They arrange traditional Polish songs as well as compose their own, based on various female musical traditions.
Sutari was selected to present their work at the largest international world music fair WOMEX 2015 and is one of the very few Polish and European groups to have recorded a musical session at cult American radio station KEXP.
They made their debut in 2012 at Polish Radio’s “New Tradition” Folk Festival, where they won the jury’s second prize and the audience award. Soon thereafter, they were declared the most interesting new folk group of 2012 in Poland.
They released three albums WIANO (2014), OSTY (2017), SIOSTRY RZEKI (2020). Their last album is a trance and polyphonic dialogue with folk traditions, woven around themes of nature, freedom, femininity and sisterhood. The album was nominated for the FRYDERYK 2021 award in the World Music category.
They also create their own kind of musical theater shows (Watermelon), collaborate with musicians from all over the world (single BIAŁOWIEŻA with El Buho in 2021) and lead singing workshops.
Jess Tsang is a percussionist, researcher, and improviser based in Brooklyn, NY. She is endlessly examining how objects shape our lives, and how that might be translated into music.
Jess is a founding member of both guitar and percussion duo party of one and experimental improv trio See You Next Yesterday. She has presented her lecture recital on the history and ideology of incorporating found objects into percussion music at Harvard University and the Transplanted Roots Percussion Symposium in Brisbane. In addition, she is the founder of listenbeer, a series of multi-sensory concert experiences merging craft beer with experimental music. Jess has appeared in performances throughout North America, Europe, Asia, and Australia and was a 2018 Eighth Blackbird Creative Lab Fellow and a 2019 OneBeat Fellow.
Lou Turner is a writer and musician based in Nashville, TN, where plays music solo as well as in the band Styrofoam Winos. She is the author of Shape Note Singing (Vegetarian Alcoholic Press), and her most recent record Microcosmos (SPINSTER) was named a Best Album of 2022 by NPR Music.
"Magic Tuber Stringband is Durham, North Carolina-based duo, made up of Evan Morgan and Courtney Werner. Their primary instruments are guitar and fiddle, but they are not married to these particular axes and follow their instincts when they feel other instruments are called for. Playing music with its bite rooted in the Piedmont tradition, Magic Tuber mostly write their own material, while exploring and expanding dynamics of string interaction that are as old as the hills." - Byron Coley