A Healing Sonic Odyssey that’s also Smacking

A Spyplane Chune Session to melt your outermost edges and release you back into the world reborn

Welcome to Blackbird Spyplane.

Our interviews with Nathan Fielder, André 3000, 100 gecs, Danielle Haim, Mac DeMarco, Jerry Seinfeld, Matty Matheson, Michael Stipe, Phoebe Bridgers, Seth Rogen, Emily Bode, Alison Roman, Sandy Liang, Tyler, The Creator, Maya Hawke, King Krule, Steven Yeun, John C. Reilly, Clairo, Conner O’Malley, and more are here.

Spyfriends request & share advanced recommendations in the Classified Only SpyTalk Chat Room.

— Jonah & Erin

Music — Mamma mia, what an art form.

And sound?? Don’t get me started about how tight it is when sonic waves are so big, robust & bright they almost seem to have healing properties.

So imagine my delight last week when 1) great music, 2) beautiful sound & 3) Blackbird Spyplane converged in a blessed triple nexus.

Graphics by Alengo and Yaroslav Kushta, Getty Images

Yes! I (Jonah) had the honor of playing a selection of beloved chunes over several hours at the OJAS HiFi Listening Room in SFMOMA’s Art of Noise exhibit…

Maybe you’ve been already, or maybe you saw footage on IG when people like Mark Ronson, Fred Again, Beck and others came through to operate the system. The listening room looks like a lunar module, and it sounds profoundly warm and enveloping, like as if your mother played a Steely Dan-grade sax solo for you inside the womb.

As the museum puts it, it’s “an immersive audio installation” where people can come “experience exceptionally high-fidelity music playback on a completely custom-built sound system,” courtesy of OJAS mastermind and Spyfriend Devon Turnbull.

And for 3 1/2 hours, your boy Young Spyplane was in command.

Photographs of the OJAS HiFi room during my set by Erin Wylie and Anthony Nguyen, plus the covers of some of the records & CDs I played.

I alternated between standard-length songs and very long ones, playing a bunch of favorite pieces of mine & Erin’s: Tape-loop drones, dub-reggae classics, some rap, some grunge, a couple masterpieces of million-dollar ‘80s studio rock, and more, from William Basinski, Joanna Newsom, Dawn Penn, Scientist, Pusha T, Laraaji, Terry Riley, Pearl Jam, Kate Bush and other artists we keep in heavy rotation at Spyplane HQ…

It’s borderline hallucinatory to pay such close attention to music for such a long stretch of time. This is an experience, of course, that’s all too rare in our distraction-ravaged present, but real talk it was probably pretty rare in pre-Internet times, too, because it’s an intense commitment…. But brother it was amazing.

Some Spyfriends came through and hung out for the full set. Other people wandered in and out. The room was full the whole time because I kept things surprising & engaging and BBSP does not catch Ls !!

There were some unexpected highlights, e.g., I f**k extremely heavy with Spyfriend John Carroll Kirby’s “Cascatta di Malbacco” — a contemplative, continually blooming piano piece seemingly inspired by the Ethiopian legend Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou — but I still didn’t anticipate that more people would come over and ask me what was playing during that piece than any other. John’s piano sounded so aching and expansive in that room, though, it made sense.

The last song I played was the main event: Sleep’s churningly vibey, hourlong 1996 stoner-metal classic “Dopesmoker.” We’ve written about our love for this strange cult masterpiece a few times before — including in our recent smash-hit Salute to Long-A** Songs. The lyrics describe a weed-smoking tribe wandering the desert in biblical times, getting faded epically. This narrative is set to crashing, enormously heavy, weirdly soothing riffs. The song puts you in mind of Black Sabbath and Tibetan chants. It is an incredible, ridiculous, transcendent piece of music, and it did not disappoint on these speakers.

Your boy personally went into this with no chemical assistance whatsoever, but when it was all over I felt like I’d been suspended in some strange hypnagogic state between waking & dreaming. I felt like my outermost edges had melted. I felt like I’d been staring into the sun, but with my ears?

A lot of Spyfriends who couldn’t make it — and a few who did — have gotten in touch asking us to drop the playlist. As I understand it, SFMOMA is planning to post every HiFi operator’s selections after the exhibit closes, on August 18th, which is tight.

In the meantime, I wanted to share the Spyplane OJAS Sonic Odyssey Legendary Playlist directly with Spy Nation:

• You can find it on Apple Music HERE.

• You can find it on Spotify — less the Joanna Newsom track, because it seems queen might be “too real for Spotify” — HERE.

You should be able to cop pretty much all of it at Bandcamp or your friendly local record shop, too, to commune with the physical-media vibes, put more money in musicians’ pockets, and give these corporate streamers a miss.

We recommend you listen to this playlist on great speakers, and possibly even sit a few feet in front of them in a dark room, on the floor, with your phone in a different room, far away from you. Or you could of course just put it on headphones, keep it pushing, and let it soundtrack a chunk of your day.

Either way the chunes will rip, and by the end you will not be the same person you were at the start, because your molecular composition will reorganize itself and you will become at least 33.3% more wavier after exposure to the Rare Spyplane Melodic and Rhythmic Sequence.

P🌑E🌑A🌑C🌑E until next time!

The B.L.I.S.S. List — a comprehensive index of Beautiful Life-Improving Spyplane Staples — is here.

Mach 3+ city intel for traveling the entire planet is here.

Check our list of the world’s 35 slappiest shops, where Spyfriends have added a ton of favorites in the comments.

The Coolest Museum Shops are here.