BC119 - Five Mixes: Ben Ratliff

Talking mixes, making mixes, and running mixes with the author of 'Run the Song'

Ben Ratliff; photo by Gus Aronson (via)

“I am sure most dancers are martyrs of one variety or another.” Ben Ratliff is quoting Yvonne Rainer in his new book, Run the Song: Writing About Running About Listening (Graywolf Press), and it was hardly the first or only shock of recognition I found there.

This interview began stirring around the book’s publication date. Ratliff had emailed a number of people about it in January, myself included. But I’d forgotten, for all the reasons you can imagine, until I saw a review of the book. Immediately, sight unseen, I envisioned a Five Mixes interview. I figured it was only fair: Ben has been a subscriber and vocal champion of this newsletter from the start. Only after I’d requested a copy from Graywolf Press, when Ben responded again, did I become aware that, as he put it: “Christ, you know, you’re actually in the damn book.”

It delights me to report: I am! Ratliff cites BC001 at the beginning of Run the Song’s thirty-ninth and final chapter—he ends things with a discussion of Theo Parrish’s six-hour “eargoggles” mix (April 2021) for NTS Radio. (“I can’t listen to it all in one run—perhaps someday, if I ever decide to try an ultramarathon,” he writes.) It’s an honor—particularly given the other writers he cites as well as the sheer breadth and ravenous curiosity the book, and Ratliff’s writing in general, documents in toto. The in-order-named list of recordings in the book’s bibliography might be a fun listening guide, but it also covers a daunting range—including at least two other Parrish mixes (one is discussed below), which themselves carry a lot of cargo. Five titles in a row, chosen at random: Xenakis (Works for Percussion); Charlie Parker’s Complete Savoy & Dial Master Takes; Galcher’ Lustwerk’s Information; Bach: Double & Triple Concertos; and The Astaire Story. Ratliff doesn’t just like them all, he hears them well and transmits their essence while bearing down on their very different particulars.

Describing some spring-gloom weather, he writes: “A day for the heads, not the casual fans.” This is hilarious, considering the source: Ben Ratliff is totally a head. Discussing Sonny Rollins after his mid-sixties break from public performance: “By habit and preference, Rollins couldn’t stay away from quoting tunes of all kinds—anthems, nursery rhymes, Tin Pan Alley songs, bebop themes, classical music overtures, whatever.” You don’t say, sir?

Ratliff is not interested in the beginning or ending of his runs or his running music, per se—he wants to be immersed in the middle, to embody or engage in “a question without an agenda”: “The ability to stay upright and engaged—as opposed to keeping silent, dying, or otherwise disappearing—deserves attention. Do it over and over again: that’s the idea. Do it differently, with different inflections, with ease or in pain, outrageously or boringly, but just do it and become yourself.” Or this, many pages later: “Practice as a writer sometimes takes the form of running. Practice as a runner sometimes takes the form of writing. Practice as a listener sometimes takes the form of running or writing—or reading . . .”

We discussed the book, and the sets or shows I chose, over email in mid-April.

You can hear four of these shows (let’s call them) on this SoundCloud playlist, which also includes a link to the fifth.

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MICHAELANGELO MATOS: I don’t imagine the chapters were written in chronological order, because you often condense multiple runs into single essays. What amount of time does the book span?

BEN RATLIFF: You're right—there is a lot of “where I’m going today, what I'm listening to" in it, but I wanted to avoid writing a diary—I don't like reading diaries—and I don't necessarily want the reader to track me through the months and seasons and years. So "now" becomes a little relative. The growth in it represents a growth of ideas about the subjects via editing, not necessarily the chronological growth of the author. But I think these runs all occurred within a three-year period.

Some of the book occurs in places that are not your home. What kind of traveling did you do while you were working on it?

I think the only non-New York City running in the book is in Western Massachusetts. But running in a place that isn't my home, or a place far from home, is a great joy, something I look forward to. At other points during that time I ran in Tokyo, Utrecht, Vermont, Maine, Florida, DC, Massachusetts, various places in the Adirondack region, and a lot in Columbia County, New York.

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A Guy Called Gerald, Essential Mix (BBC Radio 1, October 7, 1995)

MM: I chose this for one basically flimsy reason: On page 149, you say that the violinist Rachel Podger’s recordings of Bach’s violin concertos for duo and trio, specifically the way they play with timbre and time, “reminds me of English drum & bass music of the nineties.” I chose this because it’s one of the era’s definitive sets, and I wanted something that wasn’t retrospective. How did you experience drum & bass during the nineties? Were you paying attention at all?

Thanks for this—it's new to me. Amazing. I did listen to Gerald's Black Secret Technology back then and some LTJ Bukem and Photek and Goldie. It fascinated me for a while, but I rarely went out to the clubs for it and it didn't seep into me too deeply. I think at that point I was into figuring out more about the past-as-present—the past of jazz, the past of Brazilian and Cuban music—than stuff which really implied the future. I feel I’m just getting around to that now.

Elsewhere in the book, you dismiss runners’-guide orthodoxy about beats-per-minute—I believe 130 BPM is the figure you cite as the alleged “optimal” tempo for running—both in your ode to Morrisania, in the Bronx, where you do some geo-biographical listening of Thelonious Monk and Arsenio Rodriguez, both from the area, and also when you discuss a Xenakis percussion piece. About the latter, you write: “Beats per minute has no relation to this music, nor does repetition, nor does discernible heroism or familiarity or the notion of a good mood.” Beyond the orthodoxy you’re poking a hole in here—in general, does musical automation drive you nuts, and why? And did/does drum & bass’s rhythmic trickery tend to bypass that for you?

Hm, drum and bass tempos have always felt slightly too fast—a problem in a good way—something to hang on to or to reconcile with, rather than something normative. I do have a strong preference for slippage and constant variation in rhythm sections, which usually means non-automatic playing. I find myself inside that music a lot more. But does automatic rhythm drive me nuts? It really doesn't. Isn't it all in how you do it? "Sucker MCs" and Soul II Soul's "Keep On Movin" were big for me in the past—Ken Carson is big for me now.

Ben Ratliff, Blowing Up the Workshop 104 (March 2019)

This is the first set like this of yours that I was ever aware of, but was it, in fact, the first time someone asked you to mix a podcast for them?

Actually I asked to do it. I loved Matthew Kent's Blowing Up the Workshop series—the range of it, the challenges those mixes posed—Lukid, Galcher Lustwerk, Beatrice Dillon . . . not that it all expressed a single aesthetic, but somehow it felt unified within its time in history, by a certain attitude, something. Anyway, Matthew was kind enough to let me try one. I'd done one maybe a year earlier for NTS.

How did you end up doing this particular set? How long did you need to make it? Did they give you any directives?

The Blowing Up the Workshop set? No directives at all. A more interesting question is: why did he let me do it? I'm grateful that he just said sure and I didn't even have to audition. I had a pile of things I wanted to use, and a borrowed mixer, and I just did it in an afternoon. I had felt that the Ramayana Monkey Chant had some strange, hidden, rhythmic relationship to the Bo Diddley beat, so I wanted to see what would happen if one tried to beat-match them manually. Predictably, they fall way in and out of sync, because they both swing so hard, but that's what I hoped. I used some sounds I made while bicycling in China, and a bit of a tape someone gave me of Symphony Sid's late night jazz radio show in 1961—one of my favorite recordings, from my favorite year, impossibly haunted. And then I guess I was paying attention to very gentle and very violent music during that period, so I was thinking a lot about range. Range is all I've got, really. It's my only idea. I could never pull off being a specialist.

What was your college radio show like? What would your college radio show today be like?

I practically lived at WKCR while I was at Columbia. I learned a lot there, among real teachers, about jazz and many other things. The idea there was that you took over a long-running show—you rarely invented your own. It wasn’t free-form radio. Strangely enough I was never a jazz DJ. I did a country program—that was the time of Dwight Yoakam's first EP and a kind of New York country scene existed, small but cool. For a while I did an overnight "new music" show—what we called New Music back then, which was then included the classical tradition as well as, let’s say, everything handled by New Music Distribution Service, which would include V-Effect and Roscoe Mitchell and Jeanne Lee and Etron Fou Leloublan, and all that. Like the Ear magazine way of looking at the world, if you remember Ear magazine. I did a program of recordings of writers reading their own work—mostly poets—this was in the mid-80s, before the audiobook made that idea kind of everyday. So a lot of records on Caedmon and Argo and some American cassette labels I can't remember . . . sometimes we'd have writers come read live on air—and it was New York, so we could invite real personages.

Laurel Halo, Public Knowledge: Carrier Bag of Music (Camden Art Centre, May 2020)

MM: How did you come across the Laurel Halo set? Was it sent to you by a professional? Are you on an Ursula K. Le Guin mailing list?

Ursula K. LeGuin's essay "The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction" had one of those Arthur Russell second-life moments at one point— such moments happen more regularly now, where people, documents, ideas from the past become furiously chic in a para-academic way. It’s gotta have something to do with the internet. A lot of people in my sphere seemed to be talking about that essay, writing about it, making music about it. The set had something to do with the rerelease of the essay in standalone book form by a UK publisher—I think the publisher was encouraging musicians to make sets about it. And I follow what Laurel does, in general—so for those two reasons it came toward me.

The Camden Art Centre, which commissioned this set, is a school as well as a museum. You write about teaching in the book. Does running ever come up in discussion there—do students bring it up? Do they listen while running, and have they ever reported any perceptual changes in the music as a result?

I teach many students who run, some of them seriously, but I don't find out about it until after years of knowing them, if I ever do. This is starting to change only because I mention running more often—and I'm fascinated by what they report about listening and running. I'm only at the beginning of this with them, so I don't have much to report yet. They're different from me in that they mostly have earphones on all the time when they go outside, as protection, so perhaps they don't feel quite as much difference between running and walking vis-a-vis music. I'm generally curious where this will all lead. It might be interesting to teach a course that has to do with running—running and writing, running and listening, running and music, even running and reading.

There's such a disjunction in the world of writers and teachers between, uh, the intellect and the body. I think that movement of the body is seen as a little bit unserious. I think this is a problem.

Theo Parrish, We Are All Gorgeous Monsterss (Sound Signature/SoundCloud June 2020)

MM: Were you listening to DJ mixes with any regularity before you began running, or did they become part of your diet as a result of running?

Until about 2012 I really hadn't thought enough about the kind of thing you know so much about—the magic and logic of the DJ mix. My spell-casting DJ ideals were all radio-based—DJ Red Alert and Chuck Chillout on New York radio [cf. BC014], Gil Bailey on WHBI in Newark, Pat Duncan on WFMU in East Orange—but I didn't think of individual DJ sets as, let's say, rituals—I thought of them as ways to deliver the news, to put forth records. And I didn't until the beginning of NTS, which took over my life for a while. NTS gave me many heroes. What I am admitting to you may disqualify me from your interview entirely. [Ha!—MM] But then the protocols of the radio set and the live set can be so different, can't they? I remember being at Nowadays in Brooklyn on a Saturday night to hear Lena Willikens DJ—I was with Piotr Orlov, and I asked him why the set didn't sound more like the weird, introverted sets she makes for NTS. I think he thought I was crazy. I didn't like that set too much. I heard her again at a club a few years later and loved it—a slow build, a bit perverse . . .

But my pattern of nightlife might have been welded in place by twenty-five years of living by the jazz-club clock—I'm used to being done by 11 at the latest. I had morning deadlines. I had kids in my twenties. I'm an early riser, I run in the morning. Basically, being out after midnight doesn't agree with me. So I have an idea about what DJs do which isn't really correct. Who knows, that may change.

Had you been familiar with Theo Parrish as a producer before you began zeroing in on his mixes?

Sort of. It was through people like yourself, and Piotr Orlov, and Mike Rubin, and Philip Sherburne, and definitely Chris Richards, that I became aware of Theo Parrish, but first and particularly for his "ugly edits." Then his mixes, then his more typical productions, then his larger project, his larger ideas. “Georgeous Monsterss” seemed to me a great work of listening, among other things. It really did my head in. Then its disappearance felt like part of the work.

Obviously, I’m greatly flattered to be cited in this book. In that chapter, you ask the question of which active verb you’d use to describe a DJ set, and my answer has now for a while been, “the performance.” That’s what I think of a DJ set as—a performance of recorded music. How does that strike you?

Yes—practice, ritual, performance. Sounds right to me.

Arto Lindsay and Ben Ratliff, Your Favorite Song (NTS Radio, July 25, 2024)

MM: This show is a discussion between two people, not a DJ set, per se. How did you come to know your co-host, Arto Lindsay?

I first wrote about him in the late nineties and came to know him through normal journalistic means, via the pretext of the interview. I started traveling to Brazil in the late nineties to get my head around the continuum of music I was interested in—carnaval culture, choro to samba to bossa nova to the tropicalists to samba-reggae to forró to manguebit to funk. He and his band at the time—including Melvin Gibbs and Andres Levin—would go to Salvador during carnaval, and I got to know him there a little better. We had other friends in common. Well, he was a friend, but also a guide for me—since he was producing musicians in America, Brazil, Japan, Italy—his idea of breadth, or range, was a great challenge and encouragement to mine. Still is. He always has a surprising way of looking at things. A New York Times critic isn't supposed to get too close to the musicians they're writing about. It's in the ethics code. I observed this code pretty well until I left the paper.

You’d shown this program to me when it first came out, but I didn’t get to it until shortly before reading the book. Fifteen minutes in, describing “I Only Have Eyes for You,” Arto Lindsay hit me right in the face while describing the Flamingos’ singer: “He is enjoying saying the words perfectly.” It’s just about the most accurate description of anything that I can think of. A lot of what you write about in Run the Song—and elsewhere, particularly in Every Song Ever—concerns itself with instrumentation and even engineering: you have more to say about the way the singer of Dry Cleaning is mixed than you do about what she says, per se. Do you find that running brings you closer to words in the same way?

Running defamiliarizes words! So in a way I can hear them more clearly. I love words. But in music I consider them distinctly in second place. They don’t deserve that treatment, but it’s the only way I know to consider what a song is as a totality, as music-and-words, rather than just as a text-based message. Words are bossy. I have to be bossy back to them. I have to condescend to words a little bit before I can appreciate them.