Can only be:
Flying Lotus – Los Angeles.
The future of hip-hop, right here. Loose beats, growling bass, gorgeous samples, nods to both Stone’s Throw and Jackson – this was a huge coup d’etat for Warp. Last year I called Steinski the Kurt Vonnegut of hip-hop; Flying Lotus is thusly the genre’s Phillip K. Dick.
Honorable mentions to: Zoe Keating – Natoma, Two Fingers – Two Fingers, Alvin Curran – Inner Cities I, Bullion – Pet Sounds In The Key Of Dee
Three huge winners:
Best Yang: The MFA – Throw It Back (We Will Destroy You) [Border Community]
I’ve been waiting for this New-Order-Meets-James-Holden-and-then-they-all-go-to-New-York-in-1979 masterpiece for FIVE YEARS…and I’m delighted to say that it’s still that good. Throbbing drums, huge pads, ghostly male vocals, and ray of light synth lines; this is everything good about the dance music of the past 40 years.
Best Yin: Elika – You Win Hearts
This track blindsided me on the aforementioned Ulrich Schnauss mixtape, and became a personal fall/winter anthem in no time flat. I maaaybe listened to it every morning on the way to school, usually on repeat, and I never do that. Your mileage may vary, but I’m still in love.
Best Tao: Misstress Barbara – Dance Me To The End Of Love [Iturnmen]
Yep. Still a techno cover of a Leonard Cohen tune. Still a bit of a rip of her ‘Barcelona’ track from two years ago. Still sets dancefloors on fire, against all odds. Still gets me singing along. Still an unquestionable winner.
Honorable Mentions:
Tycho – Coastal Brake [Ghostly]
Nicolas Vallee – Acid Punch [Dusty]
Rcid – Rcid 003 [Elefant]
Blu Mar Ten – If I Could Tell You [Blu Marten]
Marshall Jefferson – Mushrooms (Justin Martin Remix) [Tronic]
Vitalic – Poison Lips [Different]
Phil Kieran – Don’t Look Far Away [Cocoon]
I could write about these for days, but here are the standouts of the standouts:
Best Reason To Go Out: Kenzie Clarke – NYPD
A masterpiece of post-post-disco, simple as that, to say nothing of the latent storyline. If this mix does not make you want to go out and dance with a beautiful member of the opposite sex, you probably have no pulse. Find it here
Best Reason To Come Home: Rhythmicon – Tonight
One of the terrible secrets behind the stratospheric rise of dubstep is that, like drum & bass, you can turn it in to pure sex, if you want to. Sure, there’s room for savage basslines and huge drops, but there’s also room for honey-dipped vocals, lush pads, and impeccable programming. See the above comments about having no pulse, and you’ll start to get the idea. Get it here.
Best Reason To Wake Up On A Cloudy Day: Ulrich Schnauss – ASIP Exclusive Mix
And, breath out.
The most honorable of honorable mentions to: Hybrid, Booiamrudolf, Matt Edwards, FaltyDL, Wood & Soo, Limbo, Culoe De Song, Lazer Sword, Eskmo, Mr. Scruff, Wesbeanz, Patience Automate & Generic, and Chloe Harris. Love, love, love.
Welcome to the end of the decade. Ooof. Regardless, here are the best (out of so many good ones!) concerts of 2009. The decade can take care of itself.
Beethoven – Concerto for Violin and Orchestra in D Major, Op.61
My dislike for Beethoven (snigger) is a well known thing, as is my dislike for the mix issues inherent in concertos. With that said, yowza! It is apparently possible to, by sheer force of will, drag music from two hundred years ago into the present and make it feel current, urgent, personal, and vital.
Messiaen – Vignt Regards sur l’Enfant-Jesus
Ever heard someone play piano for two hours and fifteen minutes? I thought I was going to die by the end of this piece – I can only imagine how the player (one Alastair Edmonstone, who apparently TOURS the damn thing) must have felt. Parts are ethereal, lush, and gorgeous, parts are jackhammer brutal, just about all of it is incredible.
Sonic Lab – Spring 2009
A few choice quotes from the program notes here: “telepathic improvisation”, “Aligning himself with post-war Dada”, “to re-invent the string quartet”. Look out.
Gavin Bryars – Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet
LaSam put this on during New Currents in the spring, and it was just utterly, utterly beautiful. Simple as that.
Honorable mentions of the highest order to: Video Games Live, Yan Li’s LEFT, Sonic Chamber Singers, Daniel Biro’s vocal concert, Andrea Young’s , LaSam’s other shows, the JACK quartet concert, Hollas Longton’s impossible graduating recital, and the recent Liszt Friday music apocalypse. Serious business
I was having a talk with a friend about new laptops / phones, and that led to me thinking about how I communicate with people, outside of in-person conversation. So I made a list. This really needs more data and better, but it will do for the moment:
Phone – Calls: 3 (60, 60, 22)
Phone – Texts: 6 (24, 26, 28, 24, 29, 22)
Computer – MSN: 6 (27, 27, 21, 20, 24, 26)
Computer – Gchat: 2 (26, 27)
Computer – Facebook: 6 (26, 21, 22, 21, 20)
Computer – Twitter: 2 (24, 24)
Computer – Skype: 1 (24)
Medium, number of people I talk with regularly there, age of the people in question. Totally unscientific, with some overlap. Interesting, however, that my computer is more useful than my phone, and that Facebook is just as useful as MSN. Also, look at the ages.
Anyone else have comparable data? I’d love to see how much of a luddite I am.
People tell me this one was good, so I’m posting it. You’ll see the kind of noodling I try to do live, for better or for worse:
1: Arnold Schoenberg – String Quartet No.2 – IV []
2: Two Fingers – Moth Rhythm [Big Dada]
3: Hybrid – Keep It In The Family [Distinctive]
4: Two Fingers – Keman Rhythm [Big Dada]
// Gyorgy Ligeti – Lux Aeterna []
5: Thom Yorke – And It Rained All Night [XL]
6: Limbo – Tin [Tide Pool]
//Stravinsky – Symphony Of Psalms []
7: The Beatles – Eleanor Rigby (Fractal Remix) [Tide Pool]
8: Hybrid – Everything Is Brand New [Distinctive]
9: Lostep – Theme From A Fairy Tale [GU]
10: Fractal – Oceanography [Pacific Front]
11: BT – The Antikythera Mechanism [Binary]
Imagine a fabulous dinner party. Imagine that the following wonderful people are invited:
Now imagine that entrance music will play for each of them. In fact, imagine that you can download a mixtape of the music at the party right here…because you can. Now, listening to the music, and knowing a few of the above people, in what order did people arrive?
The Music:
Alvin Curran – Inner Cities I
Burial – In McDonalds
Holden – A Break In The Clouds (Plushapella)
Hybrid – I’m Still Awake
Beethoven – String Quartet No. 12: V
Atmosphere – Like The Rest Of Us
Dvorak – Symphony No. 9: II
Bjork – Who Is It
Handel – Dixit Dominus: VI
Talking Heads – Once In A Lifetime
Sigur Ros – Gobblediegook
Bach – Brandenburg Concert 3: I
Kelley Polar – Entropy Reigns (Ewan Pearson Remix)
The Rolling Stones – You Can’t Always Get What You Want (Soulwax Remix)
Justice – Tthhee ppaarrttyy
Vitalic – Poison Lips
2 Fingers – Bad Girl
Varese – Deserts 1
Richie Hawtin – Spastik
Fairmont – Flight Of The Albatross (Reef Carribbean Remix)
Radiohead – Bodysnatchers
The Clash – This Is Radio Clash
Gershwin – An American In Paris
Donald O’Conner – Make ’em Laugh
The B-52s – Downtown
Billy Idol – Dancing With Myself
The Beach Boys – Denny’s Drums
The Blues Brothers – Everybody
Jurassic 5 – Swing Set (10 Beautiful Girls Mix)
Herbie Hancock – Chameleon
Miles Davis – Sid’s Ahead
The Herbaliser – 8 Point Agenda
CSS – Music Is My Hot Hot Sex
The Cheviot Ranters – Corn Rigs Tunes
The Kop Choir – You’ll Never Walk Alone
Tchaikovsky – Symphony No. 6: III
Art Of Trance – Madagascar (Ferry Corsten Remix)
Aphrodite – Spice
Mahito Yokota – Blue Sky Athletics
Manitoba – Happy Ending
The People:
Amanda Farrell, Alex Richards, Alex Jang, Andrew Clark, Alia Yeates, Andy Clequin, Cassandra Miller, Charlie Van Kirk, Chelsie Kadgien, Chris Reiche, Colin Moller, Dave Miles, Eric Buchanan, Emily Farnsworth, Gerald Deo, Hilary Dawson, Hollas Longton, John Spurr, Jennifer Mitchell, Jessy Reynolds, Jess Smith, Jordie Yow, Josh Doherty, Justin Holmes, Kathleen Genge, Kim Shepherd, Kira Hall, Kyle Smith, Mary Clark, Nadia Pona, Nathan Friedman, Oriane Fort, Pat Littlejohn, Rob Cross, Ryan Noakes, Shima Takeda, Thomas Del Motte, Vanessa Yaremchuk, Walter Moar. They’re all great.
(Bonus points will, of course, be awarded for those who guess music other than their own)
Things are starting to return to normal…where normal means a lot of schoolwork, as opposed to an impossible amount of schoolwork. Some quick hits, then:
– A short piano piece I wrote last year was played by Xenia Pestova at Open Sound West in November. I am eternally in her debt.
– My friend Bethi is a genius. She’s been posting a song a day for all of November, all of which are brilliant, heartfelt, hilarious, or all of the above.
– Last Night A DJ Saved My Life, by Bill Brewster and Frank Broughton, is essential reading for anyone interested in dance music in the slightest. And the charts! There are charts! I must hear them all.
– I’m playing at Dub Riddims 4 on December 12th at Sunset – first as half of ITERATE, and then playing one of the strangest (and I think best) DJ sets I’ve ever concocted. Come down and see, do.
– Watched Ghost In The Shell again, and was struck very hard by the questions it was asking about memory and humanity. As “the net” becomes more vast and more limitless, cyberpunk works become more and more prescient.
(Edit, 2022: yikes, let’s add Le Guin, Butler, Jemisin, etc – this probably needs a total rewrite, but we’ll caveat it for now)
My sister asked me to make a list of Important Sci-Fi for her boyfriend to read. I came up with the following. This, I think, says a lot about me. In no particular order:
Robert Heinlein: Starship Troopers, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, Double Star, Stranger In A Strange Land
– Admiral Bob is…Admiral Bob. The most fun of the Big Three, and the only one who could actually write a story that was a story.
Arthur C. Clarke: Rendezvous With Rama, Childhood’s End
– Art Clarke was gay, helped invent radar, and lived in luxury in Sri Lanka for most of his life, after Becoming Famous. Also wrote 2001, which is not even close to his best book…which is Rendezvous With Rama, which is also the best pure/hard sci-fi book ever written.
Isaac Asimov: I, Robot, Foundation, The Gods Themselves
– Dr. Asimov was a much more boring version of Arthur C. Clarke, but he wrote like a large man (which he was) falling off a log.
Frank Herbert: Dune
– Sci-fi’s Grande Novel, like The Lord Of The Rings, but in fewer books. Famous for being filmed very, very badly, but it’s a hell of a thing, really. Not many authors sum up all of their talents and interests so well in a single volume.
William Gibson: Neuromancer, Pattern Recognition, Spook Country
– Out of all the learned and wise men on this list, Gibson, who “knows nothing about computers”, may have pin-pointed our future the best. Also turns an exceptional phrase – maybe the second best writer on the list.
Neil Stephenson: Snow Crash, Cryptonomicon
– Gibson is the king of cyberpunk…but Neil Stephenson is his post-modern prophet.
Jules Verne: 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea, Journey To The Centre Of The Earth, Around The World In 80 Days
– Verne basically thought Science was great…
H.G. Wells: The War Of The Worlds, The Time Machine
– Wells was little iffier on the whole idea of Science…
Edgar Rice Burroughs: A Princess Of Mars
– And Burroughs just used SCIENCE TO PUT MEN ON MARS AND HAVE MAD PULP ADVENTURES WITH BEAUTIFUL RED-SKINNED WARRIOR PRINCESSES. Take your pick.
Alfred Bester: The Demolished Man, The Stars My Destination, Virtual Unrealities
– But then Alfred Bester, of course, actually wrote pulp that stands up under the weight of what is becoming a century of time pretty damn quick.
Ray Brabbury: Farenheit 451, The Martin Chronicles, I Sing The Body Electric!
– The best pure writer on the list, by far…but Farenheit 451 is also one of the most vital books on the list.
Anthony Burgess – A Clockwork Oranage
Aldous Huxley – Brave New World
George Orwell – 1984
– On the subject of writers, science fiction becomes literature awfully quickly…as witness these three dystopian classics.
Philip K. Dick: Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep, The Man In The High Castle
– And no one writes a dystopia like Phil Dick, of course. The man could have made Jesus feel bad about human nature.
John Brunner: Stand On Zanzibar
– Brunner is another product of the…fourth? wave of sci-fi, I guess, before it became a caricature of itself. Like Dick, he doesn’t have happy things to say about the rising tide of humanity
Spider Robinson: Stardance
– Spider, on the other hand, does: Spider loves everyone, has boundless faith in his species, and it shows in his writing. A nice switch, at least.
Walter Miller: A Canticle For Leibowitz
Brian Aldiss: Greybeard
– Two divergent views of post-apocalyptic earth: one bombastic, one just depressing.
Orson Scott Card: Ender’s Game
– A novel about children being trained to defend earth from an alien invasion is, let’s face it, a helluva MacGuffin. Luck for Card, he wrote one hell of a story about it.
Iain M. Banks: Excession, Inversions
Charles Stross: Accellerando, Halting State
– Science fiction writen by people who are still alive and interesting! Stross sparkles, is quasi-cyberpunk, and flits from idea to idea like a moth between flames. Banks writes boundlessly imagiative novels that look like space opera, but are not.
Douglas Adams: The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy
– Really just British comedy with sci-fi trappings, but fun as all get out.
Roger Zelazny: Four For Tomorrow, Lord Of Light, This Immortal
– Zelazny is an enigma, but a brilliant one: keep an eye out for what he doesn’t tell you.
Dan Simmons: Hyperion, The Fall Of Hyperion
The best space opera ever written? Probably.
Fred Pohl: Gateway
Joe Haldeman: The Forever War
– Two more from the post-utopian era, about time-dilation and mysterious asteroids…and actually about people and their myriad flaws.
Harry Harrison – West Of Eden, Make Room Make Room!, The Stainless Steel Rat
Someone who never forgot his pulp roots: Dinosaurs, legendary thieves, and crushing overpopulation (with Charlton Heston! Yes!)
Five minutes to breath before starting on class design. Please allow me a moment to say that I cannot wait until next term.
Moving on, but on the subject of the personal: How much of what you put on the internet is censored? That is to say, how does your public, online persona relate to your actual self? And how does it relate to your private self?
Now, I have friends who use the internet as a highly personal lifeblog, with access only given to people they trust. I have friends who use the internet as a very thoughtful and professional thing. I have friends who use the internet to store witicisms and recipies. I have friends who are more public on the internet than they are in person.
What’s this going to be like for people who grow up in a post-Twitter age? Will we every reach a point where everyone just knows everything about everyone else? Will that be a good thing, or not?
(If I was Spider Robinson, I’d talk about Twitter-as-empathy, but lucky for you I’m not. With that said, I’d love to sit Spider and William Gibson down and watch them talk about this sort of thing.)
Moving on: I played an amazing Halloween gig at Hush, featuring some of these tunes:
Vitalic – Poison Lips [Different]
Kano – Ikeya Seki [Kitsune]
Van She – Techno Music (Vemixed) [Modular]
Gossip – Love Long Distance (Fractal Edit of Fake Blood Remix)
Phil Kieran – Don’t Look Far Away [Cocoon]
The MFA – We Will Destroy You (Original Mix) [Border Community]
The MFA – We Will Destroy You (Bear Dub) [Border Community]
The MFA – We Will Destroy You (Luke Abbott Remix) [Border Community]
Rcid – R001 [Elefant]
Rcid – R002 [Elefant]
Rcid – R003 [Elefant]
DJing has been on my mind of late, especially in terms of the post-scarcity world of music that we all live in. What do you do when everyone has the big jams? Do you play them anyways? Do you be honest and only play the ones you like? (Seriously, that Vitalic track is so good.) Do you dig deeper, even if you’re really into some of the big tunes?
What filters your music, other than your own taste in music? That’s the question, really.