Metorites, Meteors, & Meteroids

Joanna Newsom, St. Andrew-Wesley Church, Tuesday, December 5th. Any takers? This is, in fact, the day before my project report is due, making me rather hesitant to sign on for it myself, but I thought I'd ask anyway. This also gives me a chance to point out that Ys is currently sitting as the no. 3 highest rated album of the year on metacrtic, has gotten the "Best New Music" seal-of-approval/kiss-of-death from pitchfork (oh noes, cheesy indie fux will be all over it now!), who also have a nice indepth interview with her as well.

Basically she's become the toast of the critical world, with all that entails. I have mixed feelings about this, in that it pains me that Ys will be grouped alongside much middling indie pablum, while I'm excited to see so many people recognize this album for the work of wonder that it is. My only hope is that it will have a positive affect of pushing indie tastes into more expansive and interesting areas, rather than becoming a stand-in for musical adventurism in a genre otherwise bereft of interesting ideas...

Mnml

Not enough good things can be said about ohmygosh.se. And really, not enough good things can be said about minimal right now, as I am currently running an INSATIABLE appetite for new minimal tracks. Names that even three or fourth months ago meant nothing to me all of a sudden have become bright stars in my personal music constellation: radio slave, stephan bodzin, pan pot, mark houle, loco dice, gui boratto, ...along with old(er) faves like booka shade, dominik eulberg, luciano, villalobos, mathew jonson, trentemoller, mathew dear/audion, sleeparchive, the Kompakt krew (Total 7 is an excellent example of this), even carl craig...aarrrrrggg! Fantastic.

It's strange because at the beginning of the year I was a bit cool on the whole "minimal explosion" thing, it struck me as often being quite dry and boring, but now the plip-plop dry stuff has somehow turned into insectile mind-invaders (see: pan pot, villalobos, sleeparchive), while erstwhile electro-house has decayed from enriched uranium rods of hook-filled death to depleted uranium shells of trace-elements rave-hooks (see radio slave, stephan bodzin, booka shade). And even though "explosion" is a very relative term here, they played a mostly minimal set in between acts at the Ladytron concert I went to a few weeks ago (good call Kirkham!), and this club night looks to be pretty much right down this alley (anybody wanna go?). K, so, some samples:


The Knife - Like A Pen (Stephan Bodzin Mix) ****this was the track that inspired this whole damn post, download it!!****

Kissogram - My Friend is a Seahorse (Radio Slave Remix)
Pan Pot - Back Window
Audion - Mouth to Mouth

[you may need to login to yousendit to download some of these...it's fairly painless, i've done it already...can i help it that none of these tracks are less than 9:30 minutes??? That's another great thing about minimal: super long songs, yesss!!!!]


Please remind me to make a mix of this stuff! I was going to make a mix closer to the beginning of the year, and by now I could probably make about three pretty good ones. I always hate I never get around to making a mix and then later on when I look back at something I was pretty into I can't remember what all the good tracks were (this totally happened with grime, i had 2-3 solid mix cds worth to put together and never did, and now that i don't really listen to grime that much any more i'm already starting to forget what the good stuff was...).

But really (and going back to the first sentence of this post, that I kinda forgot about) just go to ohmygosh and download the stuff he says is good, cuz it is. That site has played a large, large role in my getting into minimal over the last few months...

Success!

Well, that was considerably harder than I had expected...still would like to make the template a little better, but that was a big enough pain in the ass already.

Anyway, above pic is from Philip Sherburne's latest "This Month in Techno" piece at pitchfork. No one writes about techno (minimal) with more passion or style than Sherburne does. I would definitely recommend checking out the back issues of that column; Sherburne's been on point for a good long while now. How techno is that picture?

"We should have no illusions: liberal communists are the enemy of every true progressive struggle today"

I've made this argument before: why people like bill gates, bono, oprah, no matter how much money they give to charity, always cause more suffering getting to the top then they will make up for with their philanthropy. No matter how much they give, they are only attacking the symptoms of the cause which made them rich in the first place. Thankfully, Zizek says it much better than me. Required reading.

(can you tell I really like Zizek?)
(and yes Dan, this one IS political...)

20% - Presentation to class

A slide supposedly shown at a top secret military meeting, according to the New York Times. Now let's leave aside the rather uninteresting point that the US military thinks Iraq is moving away from peace and towards chaos (I mean, no shit), and talk about the real important issue here: how terrible is this slide design??? I mean waaaay too much text, hardly any whitespace, the chart is pushed over into a tiny awkward space on the side and is red-green coded so any colour-blind members of this meeting (which is likely all male, so has a pretty good chance of getting one of the 1/10 men who are colour blind) won't be able to read the chart properly . Oh god and the text is so thick and heavy and black against the white background you get all sorts of vibrations and other weird optical effects when you stair at it for any amount of time--which is not helped by the underlining of titles, which just makes the whole thing even noisier, without making the titles stand out any more...and they're using red-green for their little classification icons with no indication of whether they are supposed to coincide with the colour codings on the chart (does "routine" unorganized spontaneous mass civil conflict represent a step towards peace?? If not, why the fuck is it green?). That slide is just ug-ly.

Really, with idiots like whoever designed this slide in charge of the US operation in Iraq, is it any suprise they're screwing up so bad over there?

[/design pedant] ;)

ps. i gotta figure out how to change my blog template so I can post bigger pictures without running into my links bar...