Natalie Mering (aka Weyes Blood) is a Los Angeles-based singer-songwriter, and musician. She got her start in the Portland underground noise rock scene while touring with bands such as Jackie-O Motherfucker and eventually started putting out her own music under the moniker she’s now best known by. If you’re most familiar with the ethereal baroque pop on And In The Darkness, Hearts Aglow and Titanic Rising, which are both among my all time favorites, be sure to check out the spooky ambient drone on her 2007 “Weyes Bluhd” debut, Strange Chalices of Seeing. Natalie has a really special knack for tapping into some kind of cosmic emotional state through her music which is especially apparent if you catch her live (she’s touring The World now). Lucky for us, Natalie is here to tell us what she’s been into.
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I read this book when I was 18 and it fully changed my life. I had never read such an eloquent take on the auditory feast that surrounds us. It certainly validated my obsession with environmental sounds and industrial horror shows like military jets ripping through the fabric of the sky… Schafer is a Canadian composer who talks at length about how Sound is so esoteric, it alludes to institutionalization, but never has been like the visual arts. The inherent subjectivity of sound makes it so difficult to formally discuss…yet we aren’t willing to admit that we’ve designed our industrialized society to mostly sound like shit. Sound is a bit of an afterthought. But we sit within the vibrations of the jarring sounds we create all the time. Maybe if we cared about what things sounded like, our environment would reflect a rich buffet of natural auditory phenomena and intentionally curated spaces, and then maybe we’d all feel physically more in tune?
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This is a recent watch for me and it too, changed me. I still can’t believe a movie like this exists. Orson is a beast and maybe at his best, because he is so unashamedly exposed. He uses his dusty golden-age-of-cinema toolbox to create a medium of almost documentary, mostly avant-garde rollercoaster... telling a fable? Story? JOKE? What even is this movie, but brilliant and insane and I can’t say anymore cause it would ruin it. Just watch.
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I feel like my dog and I are always straining to communicate. I think at this point we effectively do. I use a higher voice for him so he knows I’m talking to him specifically. Usually I repeat the same phrases and words in weird ways to convey the emotional meaning of what I’m getting at. I ask questions. He twirls, makes little sighs, sneezes, yawns, and occasionally makes a vocalization that’s so demanding and full of canine yearning to speak that I become very impressed. We’re trying to break through to each other and we occasionally do. I am blown away by the interconnectivity of all living beings. He just wants another treat. And the cycle continues.
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Nothing like ending a long laborious day with a quick YouTube search for the most recent episode of Jeopardy. It’s like my five o clock news, except the news is I could never be a contestant. But. That said, I love attempting to keep up after realizing that I could. Almost (barely). My parents were not watching Jeopardy in our household. For years I assumed the whole thing was wildly inaccessible, as network TV was… I assumed wrong. Being a little traveled sponge is enough to get some of the clues and it's on YouTube. Turns out Jeopardy is for everybody! Kinda. It’s like having a tiny race where you watch very capable people restore your faith in humanity with their lightning speed aptitude for facts, and every once in a while you get to pop your head in and feel like you still have half a brain too. Good day ender.
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I sometimes just put movies on to listen to their sound design, and then go do something else while it blares on in the background. Mostly old movies from the 1940’s. The designs are so consistent, the score is so sweeping and trill, the dialogue so crunchy. Modern movies have a bit more textural randomness and slam effects but occasionally they sound amazing too as a background, it’s just more juiced (and they also sync modern songs…hmm) If commercials weren’t so heinously obnoxious these days I’d say a blaring TV in the background would be the most nostalgic… Forensic Files has an amazing sound profile and usually plays for many hours at a time on network TV. But old movies always have romance. They have the strings that have become synonymous with human drama, and its nice to have that slowly unfolding somewhere in your living space while you distract yourself with other things.
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Speaking of fake! This would fit into a much wider category of joy and intrigue in my life; anything that travels down the “uncanny valley” ranging from animatronics to bad cgi, but wax museums are the original uncanny valley. I love going to a tiny busted wax museum and feeling the staleness, the mediocre representation of life… It’s such a strange phenomena to pay money to witness fake people, and take pictures with them when they’re close to reality. I love the tacky theater of it. I love the societally sanctioned morbidity of it.
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This fits into a wider category of things I enjoy starting with the ocean, seaside towns and piers, swimming… but oysters weirdly are like a bite sized version of how intoxicating the ocean can be. Not all oysters are created equally. Some are a little sketchy, underwhelming, or just a nice snack you pretend to like more than you do because you probably paid a pretty penny to have them. But, when an oyster is just right, extremely fresh, full of depth and brine, it sends the ocean straight to your dome, behind your eyes. You can taste the whole sea in it, you can almost even taste the swimming - dunking your head and getting a little seawater up your nose. It’s a full body thing. After four or five oysters like that you can take over the world, or just have really good sex.
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