Join crucial selectors for curated delights on a killer system at our Sound & Vision shop in DTLA.

No single statement better encapsulates In Sheep’s Clothing’s mission and philosophy than one spoken by the great Pauline Oliveros, who coined the term “deep listening.”

“Deep Listening is a process,” she said. “I want to expand the range of the music that I hear, not by changing the music, but by changing myself.”

Every new song changes us, rewires our brain to catalog the experience, the melody, and the moment. Oliveros captures this in a 2008 TED Talk when she discussed the genesis of “deep listening” as a concept and term. The experience occurred in an underground cistern, where she demonstrated the acoustics of the space by playing a recording of a balloon popping inside it. She then posed a question and answered it.

Why would three musicians squeeze through a manhole-sized opening with their instruments to climb down a 14-foot ladder into a dark underground cistern? For us, echo and reverberation can be fascinating. Consider what fun it is to sing in the shower; perhaps it brings out our inner Narcissus. The balloon pop you heard represents the remarkable 45-second reverberation time in the Dan Harpole Cistern in Port Townsend, Washington, where the three of us played the music that is sounding now. The name Deep Listening occurred to me after our recording in the cistern. We had come there to experience the unusual sound; recording was really an afterthought that resulted in the release of Deep Listening by New Albion Records in 1989. And that was the birth of the Deep Listening Band with Stuart Dempster.

This spirit of communal audio immersion is foundational to our mission, and across the next four Friday afternoons we’ve invited excellent Los Angeles DJs Juan Izguerra, Masha Mar, Passionfruit, and Mishka to dip into their personal collections and select albums that will be played on a system powered by San Francisco-based hi-fi company Western Acoustics. Though not a vast cistern, it’ll accurately represent the cistern’s sonics. The company was founded by Liam Porr, who selected albums from Marcos Valle, Roy Ayers Ubiquity, Ana Roxanne, and Sade that were played in their entirety last Friday at Sound & Vision.

His aim for Western Acoustics likely resonates with a lot of us. He spoke to ISC’s Tana Yonas earlier this year about founding the company. “For Western Acoustics, my head was around realistic living environments. I’m a young guy; I live in a regular apartment with a small living room. And I want to be able to have a music system that integrates well into a room that has a lot of other different purposes.”

We’ve got Western Acoustics’ Type 2 speakers set up at the shop, which are the company’s striking bookshelf speakers. Porr describes the Type 2s as as bit more accessible than the larger Type 1s. “It’s a small bookshelf size speaker that’s about 16.5” tall by 10.5” wide. It’s meant to be more like a relatively near-field listening speaker system that works well really in smaller rooms and ultimately sounds good in the home in general.”

We’ll be hosting our weekly listening sessions at In Sheep’s Clothing each Friday until Aug. 2 from 3-6 p.m., at Sound & Vision, our collaboration with dublab in downtown Los Angeles.

Schedule:

July 12: Juan Izguerra
July 19: , Masha Mar
July 26: Passionfruit
Aug 2: Mishka

Below, mixes from Masha and Juan.