Well, MUTEK. Tim Hecker, Shackleton, Holly Herndon, Robert Henke, Archie Pelago, Magic Mountain High, Ricardo Villalobos, Pinch, Lee Bannon, The Mole + Family, and all those troublemakers at Picnique the day after (Ricardo, Pinch, Move D).
Also big big big love to Sub|Division for their entirely great five year party
As ever with concerts, the ‘honorable mentions’ should really get as much love as those mentioned in more detail…
Erin Gee – Swarming Emotional Pianos
I saw lots and lots of the iterations towards this show, and I am nothing like an unbiased observer of my friend Erin’s work, but I have to tell you, this thing was immense.
Sibelius – Violin Concert in D Minor
With Byungchan Lee on solo duties, the McGill orchestra knocked this one out of the park.
Holst – The Planets
Ok, ok, so McGill has a good orchestra, sure, good talk. Them playing a historical favorite of mine was probably overkill.
Those honorable mentions: John Chowning’s Voices, outdoors at ICMIC; the grad recitals of Nadia Pona on bassoon and Amahl Arulanandam on ‘cello; magic from the Universite de Montreal care of Myriam Bleau’s Soft Revolvers and Patrick Saint-Denis’ City?; shoutout to McGill’s own Eliot Britton for Metatron and to McGill opera for A Midsummer Night’s Dream…and, again to the orchestra and Jane Archibald for Strauss’s Four Last Songs.
Objekt – Flatland [Pan]
To quote a good friend of mine in IRC, “what is happening”.
FKA twigs – LP1 [Young Turks]
Well, what is happening here is that a supremely talented youngster is shaping the world in her image – as it should be.
Caribou – Our Love
This is the least consistent of the last two Caribou albums – the sloppy dance tropes can go, but the but the life-reaffirming high points are so high.
Honors out to: Plaid – Reachy Prints, Forest Swords – Engravings, UNESCO’s Anthology of African Music, and Bach’s Six Partitas, as played by Glenn Gould.
Jam City – EARTHLY III
Because it has such a sense of itself, of chromed-out Ballardian futures.
Daniele Baldelli – Beats in Space, August 2014.
Undeniable jams from one of disco’s cosmic originators.
Leon Vynehall – FACT Mix 429
The blurb for this says “organic, natural-sounding house music”, and that’s really all that’s going on here…but it is going on so so well.
Honorable mentions to Acid Arab’s RA Mix, Kode 9 doing RA 400, Jacques Greene, my man AFK, Mala x Loefah from 2006, Jackmaster’s XLR*R mix, Claude Speed for FACT, DJ Food’s Children of the Sun set, Ron Hardy live from 1987, and so many more.
I also have lots of catching up to do, to say nothing of 2014 year-ends.
– The bar optimizer: Graph theory meets drink mixing.
– The Entire Screen of One Game: Hoooold on, this is a bit of a headbreaker.
– The math of segregation: With adorable polygons.
– Insane projection mapping: This stuff just keeps getting better and better – I suspect it is going to break out sooner rather than later.
– Killed by Police. Owwwch.
– The Humane Interface / Jef Raskin: I’ve been reading a lot of Spider Robinson of late, who was a huge fan of Raskin…though I can’t think that Spider ever used any of Raskin’s ARCHY prototypes, because they look a little insane. It is interesting to note, however, that many of the ideas talked about in the Canon CAT have made their way into modern phone interfaces.
I have opinions about academia. Here are some of them:
– Money. There needs to be more of it. This is not a new sentiment, but it’s a shame when I can triple my income by getting an “industry” job, relative to a friend of mine who researches neuron pathways in the brain.
– Focus. Academia is really good at producing academics. It is not so good at producing “highly trained personnel” for any other field. Some sort of magic pathway for these people would be welcome.
– Bullshit. There needs to be much less of it. Fewer forms, fewer hoops to jump through, etc.
– Community. There needs to be more of it. I don’t know if that’s a responsibility of the institution, but the institution in question sure can help with it.
Happy solstice, one and all.
– I got a paper about Xenakis accepted by CIM 2014, which is happening right now! Thanks to the musicologists for trusting a programmer to know things.
– Tom Armitage says some Things about the Internet of Things.
– Africa Express does In C, and maybe steals the album of the year award.
– E-Stonia, of course. Anyone one who wants to predict the future should visit Estonia at least as much as they visit, say, San Francisco.
– More and more people that I follow on the internet are moving to newsletters: Warren Ellis, Eliza Gauger, etc. I am not yet sure why this is. Perhaps because words on newsletters are not owned by what Uncle Bruce Sterling calls The Stacks, or perhaps simply because they like the form better than the blog / post / tweet. I just wish I could point them to my RSS reader somehow.