Gorky's Zygotic Mynci - "Can Megan"

A psychological puzzle: I always moderate my language for the sake of politeness; I walk in an affected, bizarrely prim manner; I only ever eat sloppy joes and mincemeat pie. Why?

A clue: I listen to Gorky's Zygotic Mynci every single day. Why?

An Answer: My editor Max Maki's roommate's favourite band is Gorky's Zygotic Mynci, and as I spend 12-15 hours per day being edited (I'm an illiterate perfectionist), and as Max hasn't left her house since she was 7, when on her first and only ever outing she was burnt by the sun so severely that she ceased to be physically manifest whatsoever, I end up spending a lot of time with Max's "spirit", her roommate, and ergo Gorky's Zygotic Mynci. Which is fine, because I like Gorky's, but also not fine, because whenever I hear their music, I become extremely paranoid. Everything takes on a sinister aspect when Euros Childs begins crooning in his "sweet" falsetto. The walls start to close in on me, my friend's eyes cloud over with... are those murderous connivances? The ethereal Max Maki continues to hoist beer mugs and ice-cream cones, a kind of unmoved mover.

There's a sub-genre of pretty folk or folk-pop music that includes artists like Skip Spence and Simon Finn, as well as Gorky's, and is characterized by an underlying complete fucking insanity. You are lured in by the quiet, understated beauty of their work, and don't realize, until it's too late, that this music is primarily an off-kilter expression of the artist's extreme emotional vulnerability and/or deteriorating mental health.

But listen closely to "Can Megan" - there are clues. The Rhodes organ, for instance, is an insane instrument. It sounds like a precarious manic episode spent on the verge of tears. The rocksteady guitarist is drunk and the Philadelphia soul horn section is slow and lazy from too many downers. Consider please the low-mixed electric harpsichord. Is that not insane? And, of course, the song ends with this refrain: "You make me crazy," sung over and over again.

I assume that "you" refers, in this case, to the fact that the Welsh pronounce 'll' like Semites pronounce 'ch'. A fact that can leave no Welshperson untouched by insanity. [Buy]

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Charley Patton - "Prayer of Death: Part 1"

Rarely have a voice and guitar been so perfectly symbiotic; they mirror each other, respond to one another, each consoles the other, they reconcile themselves to their mortal fate, keep on rolling together.

Patton was the subject of John Fahey's Masters thesis and here you can hear the roots of Fahey's slow, dense patterns, singing treble lines, and existential concerns. [Buy]