2012 Angry Men

Hello to all that. 

Standard Issue:

(1) Beach House [Bloom]
(2) Tennis [Young and Old]
(3) Purity Ring [Shrines]
(4) Alt-J [An Awesome Wave]
(5) Flying Lotus [Until the Quiet Comes]
(6) Frank Ocean [channel ORANGE]
(7) Grimes [Visions]
(8) Hospitality [Hospitality]
(9) Chromatics [Kill For Love]
(10) Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs ‎[Trouble]

Honorable Mention:

Bonobo [Boiler Room Mix : Feb 2012]
Voices From The Lake [Voices From The Lake]
Clams Casino [Instrumental Mixtape 2]
Levon Vincent [Fabric 63]
Menomena [Moms]

Albums that I only really started listening to this year, but came out sometime before then:

King Krule [King Kurle]
Ten Ft. Ganja Plant [Hillside Airstrip]
Nosaj Thing [Drift]
Daniel Ellsworth & the Great Lakes [Civilized Man]
Bon Iver [Bon Iver]

11 Oceans

The year in which wub-wave became clichéd at half the usual number of beats per minute.

Standard Issue:

(1) Real Estate [Days]
(2) The Weeknd [House of Balloons]
(3) tUnE-yArDs [w h o k i l l]
(4) SBTRKT [SBTRKT]
(5) The Field [Looping State of Mind]
(6) Cults [Go Outside]
(7) Neon Indian [Era Extrana]
(8) Washed Out [Within and Without]
(9) Starfucker [Reptilians]
(10) Royal Headache [Royal Headache]

Honorable Mention:

Star Slinger [Fabric Mix April 2011]
Purity Ring [Ungirthed 7″]
Shabazz Palaces [Black Up]
Tycho [Dive]
Cut Copy [Zonoscope]

Albums that I only really started listening to this year, but came out sometime before then:

Steve Reich [Music for 18 Musicians]
Toro y Moi [Causers Of This]
The Clean [Mixotheque NZ Vol. 1: Tally Ho!]
Richard Wagner [Wilhelm Furtwängler dirige Richard Wagner]
Small Black [New Chain]

2010 or MMX

There it is. Gazing in the mirrors on our shoes to see what pops
out. Hobnobbing with the hyper-colored 90s, 20 years later.

Standard Issue:

(1) The Radio Dept. [Clinging to a Scheme]
(2) Bikini [RIPJDS]
(3) Caribou [Swim]
(4) Deerhunter [Halcyon Digest]
(5) Small Black [New Chain]
(6) Crystal Castles [Crytstal Castles]
(7) Robyn [Body Talk]
(8) Sufjan Stevens [The Age of Adz]
(9) Baths [Cerulean]
(10) Konono Nº1 [Assume Crash Position]

Honorable Mention:

Everything Everything [Man Alive]
Halfby [The Island of Curiosity]
Kanye West [My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy]
Optimo (Espacio) [fabric 52]
Love is All [Two Thousand and Ten Injuries]

Albums that I only really started listening to this year, but came out sometime before then:

John Cage [Sonatas and Interludes]
Neon Indian [Psychic Chasms]
Bitte Orca [Dirty Projectors]
Empire of the Sun [Walking on a Dream]
Benjamin Britten [Peter Grimes]

Also, check out this ranking
thread at the populist site, reddit.

Dressed to the Ought Nines

This was the year of automatically-syncopated transhumanist pop music. The machines have gotten in on our cultural racket. And so a conformant review for a year of conformity.

Standard Issue:

(1) Animal Collective [Merriweather Post Pavilion]
(2) Au Revoir Simone [Still Night, Still Light]
(3) Kid Cudi [Man on the Moon: The End of Day]
(4) Passion Pit [Manners]
(5) St. Vincent [Actor]
(6) La Roux [La Roux]
(7) The xx [xx]
(8) Discovery [LP]
(9) Generationals [Con Law]
(10) Memory Cassette [Seek Magic]

Honorable Mention:

Yeasayer [Odd Blood]
Phantogram [EP]
Esser [Brave Face]
N.A.S.A. [The Spirit of Apollo]
YACHT [See Mystery Lights]

Albums that I only really started listening to this year, but came out sometime before then:

Duke Ellington [The Best of Duke Ellington]
The Blow [Paper Television]
No Age [Nouns]
Vella Vella [The Bay of Biscay]
Miami Horror [Bravado]

Life: A User's Manual

In an empty business district on the weekend I feel like a salmon swimming downstream during the spawn. Everyone rushes out of town while I rush towards the vacuum left behind. I begin to play the tape backward until the last keyframe.

Here are some pairs of places visited and books read…

Montpellier: The Master and Margarita
Petrolia: Life, a User’s Manual
Seoul: Clockers
Hiroshima: Blindness
Shikoku: Out Stealing Horses
Kyoto: Persepolis
Brighton: Darkness at Noon
London: Moby Dick

While flying to Seoul, I had a novel experience. As the plane made its way across the peninsula I dozed with eyes closed. In the uncertain belt between alertness and wandering thought there was a flash and bump. The sensation was written off as an artifact of near-sleep until the captain announced that the plane was struck by lightening.

Six weeks ago my wife gave birth to our first child: Akira. Bit by bit I’ve relived the moment by feebly expressing our joy to my friends and family. The philosopher within capitulates before questions like “what is it like to be a parent?” Perhaps the answer is something like this.

2008 is enough

This year was avant-earnestness. Ardently chittering away our stories of parties, sounds, and structures long since derived. The strumming is clicked and sanded down.

Standard Issue:

(1) Lykke Li [Youth Novel]
(2) Sea From Shore [School of Language]
(3) High Places [High Places]
(4) French Kicks [Swimming]
(5) Kleerup [Klerrup]
(6) Los Campesinos! [Hold on Now, Youngster]
(7) No Kids [Come into My House]
(8) Cut Copy [In Ghost Colors]
(9) Gang Gang Dance [St. Dymphna]
(10) Crystal Castles [Crystal Castles]

Honorable Mention:

Flying Lotus [Los Angeles]
Hercules and Love Affair [Hercules and Love Affair]
Atlas Sound [Let the Blind Lead Those Who Can See But Cannot Feel]
Sebastien Tellier [Sexuality]
Why [Alopecia]

Albums that I only really started listening to this year, but came out sometime before then:

James Murphy and Pat Mahoney [Fabriclive 36]
Jens Lekman [Night Falls Over Kortedala]
Various [Nigeria 70]
Beach House [Devotion]
MGMT [Ocular Spectacular]

The Photonic Gutter

My memories have an indistinctly glint. Rainwater in the gutter of narrow streets blithely lit by 明かり. These project back on simulacra of San Diego’s feral humans. Thoughts drift to the space between Las Cruces and Albuqueque where you find nothing but radio waves and a town named after a quiz show. In Taketomi-jima there are walls made of coral and see-through crabs. In Firenze, standing above and below The Last Judgement you feel an ebb. In Siena you can cut Rosemary from the bush and eat effortlessly.

Fictionally during this time collected were McCabe’s The Butcher Boy, Lethem’s Fortress of Solitude, Shteyngart’s Absurdistan, Bowles’ The Sheltering Sky, McCullers’ The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. Unfinished are Thiong’o’s The Wizard and the Crow and Pamuk’s My Name is Red.

Catsoulis’ Designing Embedded Hardware is like the modernized and miniturized version of Horowitz and Hill’s Art of Electronics. But both of those were outdated by the memristor.

Yoshiko and I have moved to Asakusa. Frosty exhales and prowling tortoiseshells were left behind for an outcropping across from a music studio. The river, 浅草寺, small shoe workshops and new-old ways of doing things here agree with what we imagine Tokyo to be.

2007 ways from Sunday

This year was micro-gazing: little flecks of audio tug at your memory by way of the eardrums. Not sustained long enough to name the source. Only long enough to sublimate into scattering, pleasing tones.

Standard Issue:

(1) The Field [From Here We Go Sublime]
(2) Menomena [Friend and Foe]
(3) Justice [†]
(4) Damaik [Micalavera]
(5) Mathew Dear [Asa Breed]
(6) Amiina [Kurr]
(7) Gio Boratto [Chromophobia]
(8) Healamonster [Nine Tons of Blood]
(9) A Sunny Day In Glasgow [Scribble Mural Comic Journal]
(10) The Besnard Lakes [The Besnard Lakes Are the Dark Horse]

Honorable Mention (Or: bands with single-word names):

Stars [In Our Bedroom After The War]
Battles [Mirrored]
Maps [We Can Create]
Feist [The Reminder]
Spoon [Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga]

Albums that I only really started listening to this year, but came out sometime before then:

Cut Copy [Fabriclive.29]
Mahogany [Conectivity!]
Girl Talk [Night Ripper]
Asobi Seksu [Citrus]
People Under the Stairs [Stepfather]

Happily, Married

This weekend Yoshiko and I were married. In the weeks and hours surrounding our moment, we had several wonderful receptions for the several wonderful people in our lives. Photographs describe these receptions better than any words I might devise. A warm thanks to everyone who traveled great and small distances in order to see us begin our life together.

無口か無想

It would seem that I have little to say or perhaps little time in which to say it. Yoshiko and I busily fill the moments planning a wedding party for each of our countries.

I briefly visited Melbourne and the southern hemisphere for the first time. I also had the pleasure of spending a week in Rome and eating the best meal in memory with Mike Manchester. Just a few days later Cathy and David (his parents) visited Tokyo on their way to Korea.

Having not finished my last set of books I somehow started and finished Mitchell’s Black Swan Green. Nabokov’s Pale Fire and Stewart’s Concepts of Modern Mathematics also crept their way onto the stack. My eyes hunger but my concentration suffers.