Please Heat This Eventually
Omar Rodriguez-Lopez & Damo Suzuki; "Please Heat This Eventually, Pt. V"; from Discogs `
I’ve always thought that digging is one of the best ways to get to know a place. Record stores, flea markets, thrift shops—they all have the fractal geography of the place they’re situated in, a fractured map of the community, the outside world of listeners. You start flipping through a bin without knowing what you’re looking for. Maybe you’ll find nothing, or maybe you’ll find something you’ve been looking for years. The feeling of imminent discovery is addictive, something we chase when we’re on the hunt. It’s also the moment at which a place reveals itself to you in a single object.
Digging in a specific store hits different—the curatorial force behind a brand name like “Electric Fetus” or “Newbury Records” means that you implicitly trust the buyers that bring things into the store. There’s a bit less spontaneity, and the knowledge that you’ll probably pay more for an impressive find due to more rigorous selection, but that’s not to discount the knowledge that you’ll likely come across something good.
I cultivated this ethos initially through a trip I took to California. We were visiting my aunt and uncle, our first big family vacation in a while, and my first trip to Los Angeles as a sentient being—I had been as a preverbal child and only have fleeting memories of those days. My uncle played tour guide, driving us around in his big SUV, showing us new neighborhoods, foods, sights, sounds. We walked down Santa Monica, saw the tar pits, and went to “In-N-Out”; not much more you can ask for. Over burgers, my cousin—fifteen years my senior—told me about Iron Maiden. I just wanted to drink my shake.
But I was able to make the case that we should stop by Amoeba Music-—the legendary one in Hollywood. It was talked up on the message boards: my first real pilgrimage to what I imagined was the holy city of record collecting. It hit me hard. I knew it was going to be profoundly weird in the same way that I knew my homeland was humdrum. The sheer scale of it; bin after bin to thumb through, the sense that every sound ever made was within reach.
Please Heat This Eventually, the collaborative EP by Omar Rodríguez-López and Damo Suzuki, was what I was trying to find. It came out during that fascinating post–Frances the Mute period, when Omar was releasing a flood of solo records—trying to figure out his own musical identity, who he was outside The Mars Volta, who he wanted to work with.
Damo, of course, was already legendary for his improvisational performances in Can and as a solo artist. Around that time he was doing his “Sound Carriers” project, where he’d roll into a city and perform live with a group of local musicians—no rehearsal, just spontaneous collaboration. The single song split across two sides captures that spirit: a single, long arc of sound, stretched past the boundaries of the pop or rock form, not quite free jazz, just… open.
The group assembled for it was great—a mix of woodwinds, textured space, and those free-form vocals that Damo is famous for. It was messy in the perfect way to reconfigure my teenage brain, like other records had.
I think I bought the Frances the Mute single that day, but I couldn’t find Please Heat This Eventually. A few days later I went home, 12” single stowed vertically in the gap between my window seat and the fuselage. Wouldn’t you know it—I finally came across a copy at a small record store close to home, a persistent reminder that distance allows us to appreciate where we come from, or—to strain a metaphor—the soil we’re planted in.
Verdict: Keep
What soil were you planted in? Did you dig yourself out?