Tennis Lessons

If the secret a few years ago for getting into Harvard was learning to play squash, then the secret around the same time for getting me to love your music was living on a sailboat. I first found Tennis when they were in between albums and likely summering somewhere in the Pacific Ocean, and by that time they were already a form of Coloradan royalty and unavoidable both in the Denver music scene and many more important elsewheres. When I discovered they’d been picked by the David Lynch Foundation to perform some of the music from his films at an event in LA, I started hearing a bit of leering 80’s synth seemingly indicating I was missing out on something significant. And that was confirmed after I put on my headlamp and descended into the caverns of their (at the time) upcoming album Yours Conditionally.

Fast forward a number of years to when I was living in LA, and I ran into them at one of the mythological backyard cookouts which hold up a great deal of the meaningful heft of the city’s social infrastructure. It’s not reductive to say that the macro levers of the Los Angeles oeuvre are Power and Lust, but underneath the overpasses of those artery-esque architectures you’ll find an endless garden of less primordial delights. Moments of expansive consciousness and collective awakening are everywhere if you’re willing to look, and the only advice I can give anyone moving there who wants to get into the deeper and more meaningful portions of the city’s Great Big Game is just to go to the fucking party.

Tennis and I had been friends for a few years at that point by way of some work projects and a 3 hour interview at their Denver apartment, which featured them telling me some incredible stories about their lives and me having a sudden onset of explosive diarrhea that it was (I’m absolutely certain) impossible for them not to hear from the bathroom down the hall. How they ever forgave me for probably ruining their living space forever is beyond me, and I was sort of expecting an invoice in my email inbox when I got home later that night. But away we went, and a few years later there at the party we were.

I didn’t take many mental notes during our convo, I aspire to being a living notebook to some extent but don’t write in the margins of my important moments as much as I would like. Nevertheless, I will never forget the way the light coming out of both of them felt like a furnace to me for the duration of the evening. Being around people who are so insistent and awake to who they are is inspirational in the real meaning of the word. It really does feel like a form of divine guidance; a light you can see through the trees when you’re lost in the forest of yourself. And the hour or two we spent drinking wine in the corner and gushing about whatever was on our minds left an imprint in me that I didn’t even know I needed. I’d started asking people around that time if they thought maybe heaven was an airport, more of a place designed for sending you into beauty rather than gathering it in, and if that happens to be the case then my time with them that night was one of the more important conversations I’ve ever had in a concourse.

I’ll admit that these days I feel like I’m becoming less and less linear, so I can’t remember if I decided to remix one of their songs before that night or after. But whatever the case may be, I woke up this morning thinking about them and spent a bit of time around dawn on my patio drinking some coffee and smoking a Hestia while saying, or perhaps praying, a bit of gratitude for the two of them and the music they’ve created so far. Which led me to remember an ancient Dropbox file of something I made from a few clips of one of my favorite songs of theirs “Modern Woman”. I like taking something in the opposite direction of its original intent and seeing if I can still capture the core of it, or at least what feels like the core of it to me. I don’t know if I really managed to do that at all here, it felt like it at the time but I decided not to use any instruments and instead just fuck with raw audio clips from the song itself and frankly my track might blow ass. But I figured I would share it as a bit of a nightcap for the story above and I’ll post the link to the original song and the remix below. Happy Friday.

Modern Womb - Tennis Flip - Link