Planetarium III

Deep listening in deep Ridgewood and briefly knowing that state of pure unknowing

Despite the single digit temperatures, the mountains of perilous gray and black ice that made walking a city block a harrowing nighttime adventure, not to mention the hourlong ride each way on the subway, I found myself deep in Ridgewood twice this past weekend, making what has become an annual pilgrimage to experience one of Chee Shimizu’s Planetarium set(s). The first one happened back in 2023, as reported at length here:

Who is Chee Shimizu? Here are a few chats with the man. And here’s what I wrote then:

“A DJ’s DJ’s DJ might describe his influence somewhat, but that feels too rarefied. Shimizu is one of the most open-eared listeners I’ve encountered. He’s made me question lifelong prejudices towards certain sounds and genres. Flip past an unknown record and miss an entirely new reality. His continued sense of discovery and curiosity is something to aspire to. From my vantage, Chee is vital to my listening in the 21st century.”

Before that event, Chee had not played in New York City since the end of the 20th century. Last Friday marked his third annual visit. It’s a true honor to be in the room on such occasions. (I realize now that I never fully attempted to unpack his set from last year, save for this line in another post: “a flummoxing, wholly unknowable set from Chee Shimizu that had me questioning everything I knew as music.” It’s an aural scar that I put my finger on every once in awhile to remind me of how deeply it cut.)

Tonight was a real treat, in that Zach Cowie served as opener, a Planetarium headliner and sonic table setter of renown. In that previous post, I also talked about Z’s set: “It was the type of minimalism I’m always keeping an ear open for. Later on, a friend and I would shake our heads in wonder. He called it “non-religious holy music” which seems apt. The set doesn’t exist online, alas, but I emerged feeling clarified, hoping to return to that church and that nameless denomination.” Though it appears that two years on, that set is now on the internet, instantly accessible, enigmatic and breathtaking, and totally worthy of immersion:

He started by saying that most of the set would draw from recent music that could be purchased at most local shops, then opened with a selection from my favorite album of last year, Amina Claudine Myers’s “Ode to My Ancestors.” The way the soundsystem is set up now, it felt like both Myers and those ancestors were present in the space. And it only got deeper from there. Earlier in thenight, I caught a glimpse of his copy of Giusto Pio’s immaculate Motore Immobile, one of my all-time favorite pieces of music and kept hoping its rapture would arrive. But he never got to playing it and outside of one other tune (Jessica Williams’s astonishing “Half Circle Song”), I was thrillingly drifting over terra incognito for the next two hours.

There’s a thrill in listening to lots of new music, finding things worthwhile, yet also having a secret golden path of the now revealed and thrill at all the wonder that is with us here and now. Zach’s ear for harmony and the magical mystery of a wordless vocal is unsurpassed. My mind drifted deep into blackest inner space and yet the intention was so evident in each selection that even in the total darkness of the space, I immediately could sense where Zach’s expression ended and when Chee Shimizu began.

While maybe not as brain-breaking as last year’s set (which at one point I was certain consisted solely of a 90-minute percussion piece that teetered on the brink of madness and the designation of “music”), Chee’s set situated me in that sweet, fleeting state of pure unknowing, the music taking me somewhere beyond word and thought. It was beautiful stuff. My mind would flit on concepts like “modern classical,” but then there would be these “free jazz” horns. Or wait, was it the other way around? So many elegant violins, but then these hypnotizing drums that could hit you through your sleeping bag. It’s Japanese? European? American? Does country or era matter?

How could Chee find so many songs that seemed to entail walking around in a forest as part of the recording process? Or –as what one point to complete consternation– a piece that consisted of splashing on the surface of a body of water as means of keeping time? Are his shelves organized by the elements: birdsong, crunching leaves nature walks, running water? It was a beautiful mystery that grew all the more profound the more I could let go of thoughts and concepts. Chee even finished with a beloved George Lewis piece that I both knew and owned yet which seemed delectably unrecognizable in that moment:

I took no notes, didn’t look at my phone, open my eyes, nor did I turn on that auto function on Shazam. The lights slowly crept back up and everyone laying on the ground emerged from that sweet daze. Which meant I had no hope of finding some fragment to hold onto when I tried to recall what transpired that night in daylight hours. It was a challenging night of listening, deep and obscure listening yet everyone was open to the experience.

(Burying the lede here: this season’s Planetarium will conclude in April with a special evening for the Cosmic Music book. If any of the above sounds totally in your zone, tickets for that event are available here: Planetarium: Celebrating The Life, Art, and Transcendence of Alice Coltrane Turiyasangitananda)

I mention the music and the selectors but leave out the most intangible element, which is the sound itself. The audio set-up at Planetarium is crucial, giving a physicality and presence to the most ephemeral aspect of these sound waves. I hesitate to use this word, but there is something magical about how it all comes together, an alchemy in the air that charges the particles. And at show’s end, it almost feels uncanny, how these speakers give life to a record, how the act of listening can kindle something deep inside of us, the receptive audience.

In the end, I have no hidden gems or secret weapons to share here. Even if I could track all of those records down or make a YouTube out of them, would it be the same, even when physically holding them in my hands? These records seemed to exist in a parallel dimension, pulled through some secret portal by Chee and presented to us for a rarefied moment, then refiled back in that other place, that better timeline, that brighter world. But it gave me hope here in the darkness as well. And then it was time to go back out into below zero degrees and take the train back into reality.