PSB Press Play — "Whale Fell"

New Playlist featuring Orchid Salon, Steve Lacy, Patch+, Nirosta Steel, proun, and more.

I just returned from a top secret mission. The best part about leaving New York is you get to go back.

The woman serving us at Hills of Herat, an Afghani restaurant with two locations (I drove to the wrong one first) asked us if we were a band? Are we roadies for a band? Yes, everyone laughed, we’re something like roadies. It would have been too complicated to tell her. But anyone with a vested interest in mainstream pop culture has likely seen what we were getting up to. All the videos have reached the meme pages.

A good question I saw on the internet, recently: Do whales ever travel so far into the depths of the ocean that they drown, unable to surface before taking a breath?

My friend CJ often said his favorite dreams were of swimming with whales. I’ve never, despite trying, been able to find one. Most of my dreams occur on land. I have tried to dive deep, gradually overcoming the bodily reflex to gasp. There is some comfort in the quiet beneath the ocean, or within the relatively calm confines of a lake. My brain still screams.

I did see a majestic flank rise over the ocean once, color of labradorite—was it that vessel that contains the largest heart, the largest brain of all the singing animals?

Recent research published in Nature explores an extensive “whale fell” off the Australian coast, about 7,000m deep. The research notes that there are over 700 individuals per square kilometer: a graveyard as historic as Père Lachaise, or the Recoleta Cemetery in Buenos Aires.

This trench contains a curiously dense collection of whale remains, which have drifted down to the ocean floor and become food for a myriad species of sea stars, bone boring worms, and other strange creatures that establish colonies along the broken bodies of the Earth’s grandest, cleaning and decomposing the skeletons. The trench has existed for millions of years, and so among the skulls are those of extinct species. There is a suggestion of “accidental mortality”—that extraordinary depth of the trench presents a curiosity to certain whales, who venture deeper and deeper into the crushing blackness in search of something, and that they become lost, or perhaps transfixed by their surroundings, and fail to return to the surface in time to fill their lungs, which are the size of industrial AC units, and can inhale thousands of liters of air.

This weeks playlist has much to love….