THE TEMPEST is a very different play when you're old.
A few days ago, a dear friend who's directing a production of THE TEMPEST for a professional children's theatre company (in which children are the actors, to be clear) asked me to suggest on-the-buoyant-side house tunes that could combine for pre-show music for their production - their opening scene is scored with a darker, minor-key pop-dance track; could I recommend tunes to precede it as "house music" (to accompany audience entering the space and awaiting the opening curtain), that the ensemble could also warm up with?
Why, yes. YES.
But instead of suggesting a few tunes, I overthought it, because that's what I do.
I mixed an hour-long set of TEMPEST tunes, from trip-hop to downtempo to future funk and indie dance, and uploaded it to hearthis.at/phoole and soundcloud.com/phoole for any use the company might find for it. Hearthis.at's player doesn't seem to like iPhone browsers very much, so that's why I added it to SoundCloud as well.
Here are the tunes in the set:
This is from Bird Peterson’s Halloween Spooktacular album, and it’s also from Camille Saint-Saëns’ Carnival of the Animals, evoking the swirling deep.
Rory Hoy is one of my favorite artists, influenced heavily by the Big Beat movement. He’s written THE book on the subject (THE LITTLE BIG BEAT BOOK). He also lives with autism, and he advocates for accessibility for disabled people in the world electronic music scene. His last name is also just very fun to yell.
Patricia Taxxon is another of my favorite artists, and she is trans. While this tune is instrumental, she is unafraid to share her voice in many of her tunes, and she is a fearless pioneer in synthesis, musically and otherwise. The moon elements in this playlist are for Caliban, the moon-calf.
Louis La Roche is not just one of my favorite artists - he is an artist whose work cracked a chasm in my personal life, when I was at a critical inflection point of healing from complex trauma. A person in my life whom I idolized, who was toxic, but from whom I ardently pursued approval, revealed their poison to me in their reaction to Louis La Roche’s music, and the resulting shockwaves wrought tectonic upheaval in my heartscape. You’d hardly know this kind of tune could cause that kind of life change, but, maybe you would, after all. This tune is from his most recent album, ANGLIA SQUARE, a career-defining, uplifting, filter-house tour-de-force.
The Supermen Lovers are an insouciant, indomitable French indie force for cultural disruption, and the electro-saxophone-vocoder solo-thing is all-Caliban.
MAETA brings deep ocean beats from Japan in this tribal groove. I’ve had this track in my library for ages with not a thing to use it for - until this project granted me a deeper-house moment for its deployment. This kind of sound is a bit deep for a Phoole-&-the-Gang Friday-night folly, but it is at home on a beach between storms.
Another of my favorite producers is Finland's Rony Rex. I like how the vocalist's rougher voice counterpoints the legato groove.
I love the rainy plink-plunk synths, crisp snaps and boomphy bass in this one from Justin Faust, yet another favorite indie dance producer I play fairly often on Phoole & the Gang.
Phooligans love this tune, and I play it quite often on Phoole & the Gang - it’s simultaneously pop-feeling but weird, cute but freaky. Nathassia brings 80s-synthpop-throwback glitter with supernatural shimmer and exhilaration in the solos with that string descant soaring over the mix.
10 - Sea - Fellsius
Fellsius is a Tokyo artist whose chunky foundation-shaking grooves run right into the Heavy-Disco, MoFoHiFi-adjacent, turbo-funk sound I have chased since my earliest DJ forays.
This tune reaches back to the saddest, most beautiful Daft Punk tune, “Something About Us,” from their album DISCOVERY, my favorite of their albums. If you haven’t seen the anime movie of this album, Interstella 5555: The 5tory of the 5ecret 5tar 5ystem, produced by Toei Animation, directed by Kazuhisa Takenouchi and supervised by Leiji Matsumoto, I beg you to see it - the scene with “Something About Us” in it is heart-vaporizing and debilitating. Recovery from that scene is not possible, but it must be endured. And then this tune is also…Adele, so it reaches a hand forward to join the recent past and the roots of Future Funk.
"Who has pinchy things?" is something master illusionist Chris Ivanovich says in his act, and it makes me laugh out loud, and therefore, I also say it, all the time. Crabs have pinchy things, there are several mentions of crabs in THE TEMPEST, the play takes place on an island...so this song feels essential for me in this context. Plus the video is adorable.
Supernatural delight! Our pre-show revels now are ended in a union of water, sand and moon, in a dance with minor-key dangerous depths. Some of the most devout Phooligans love the original tune’s chord progression too much to let anyone mess with it, so I've never played this on Phoole & the Gang. But it feels at home here on this isle full of noises, sounds, and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not.
"...every third thought..."
I overthink everything.
This post embodies overthought.
Phoole & the Gang, as a project, is composed primarily of me overthinking things.
I didn't know that I did that until recently. It's very new and novel to me that I'm a chronic overthinker.
Growing up in a chaotic household, with addicted, emotionally-abusive parents, can cause that. Complex trauma damages and changes brain structure. My CPU is built differently from that of someone who grew up wanted, encouraged, and protected. I automatically engage in a wide range of behaviors out of pure survival drive. I'm working on it. It takes a long time to rewire these circuits.
As I was auditioning tunes for this set, I had to corral my hyperactive brain, to keep it away from the edges of overthought bluffs. I had to say, out loud, to myself, over and over, "Do not think about the text. Do not think about Prospero. Do not think about what the play means."
For the children who are running from spirits on Prospero's island in this particular production, I imagine the Miranda/Ferdinand young-love story will hold huge power, the let's-try-some-more-treason story will bring exciting intrigue, and the Caliban-versus-commoners story will drop slapstick delights.
But, wow, I'm 53 years old, all of my joints hurt, I'm in the US at the bitterest end of the year 2024, bearing down on Year Five of one pandemic just as a fresh pandemic is spinning up to join it, with a Fourth Reich massing, dragging my wife back into a closet with me and nailing boards across the doors.
I can't stop thinking - and overthinking - about Prospero.
I don't want to stop doing live interactive in-person improvisational entertainment. I don't want to not be Jane the Phoole with people, live, in the moment, ever again.
This Friday's Phoole & the Gang show is Show Number 500, which feels devastatingly momentous.
I'm trying to keep it light, with a goofy Indianapolis-500 automobile-racing theme.
I try not to think about how I would much rather be in the room with people when they're hearing the music I'm playing.
I try not to think about how much Phoole & the Gang demands of me, which is also entirely my fault, because the whole show is so over-thought - I'm so committed, so dug-in, feeling like every show needs to be high-spectacle AND high-touch AND high-quality, regardless of the obstacles to real, live interaction thrown by inevitable gaps in tech, the cloud, and the unavoidably-vulnerable signal path.
I don't willingly want to break my staff, or drown my book.
I don't want my charms to be broken.
All of that shit is against my will.
I don't want the audience to let me go.
I want to keep my magic.
I know it's not up to me.
PROSPERO Sir, I invite your highness and your train To my poor cell, where you shall take your rest For this one night, which (part of it) I’ll waste With such discourse as, I not doubt, shall make it Go quick away—the story of my life, And the particular accidents gone by Since I came to this isle—and in the morn I’ll bring you to your ship, and so to Naples, Where I have hope to see the nuptial Of these our dear-beloved solemnized; And thence retire me to my Milan, where Every third thought shall be my grave. (5.1.301-312)
As Show Number 500 looms in a couple of days, I really don't know what will happen to the show after that. There are too many imponderables.
I may need to take a couple of weeks off before Phooletide, to spend some quality time recording a demo for a project I've been simmering for several years, for which the time feels more ripe than ever before in my life.
I have a tendency to just...keep going, and since I don't know what else to do, I will probably keep on making the show. Disco is resistance, after all.
It's weird how every time you write about overthinking being due to having a childhood where you didn't feel secure, I'm in the middle of overthinking something and it turns out I desperately needed a reminder of why I'm like this. Except it's not weird at all because I'm always in the middle of overthinking something! So thank you, once again, for the reminder. 💜