First blog post of the year–it’s hard to believe that we’ve been doing this thing (at times painfully sporadically) for a year or so. Dang. It has been quite a ride the last couple of months: we have gotten a little bit used to sarah teaching and made our peace with being truly adult with full-time jobs and meeting each other halfway; I have my second new job in two months after leaving my lousy midtown job–this one is a writing job (what’s up MFA) within the educational publishing field. Weird and hopefully awesome. I’ll let you know…
Oh and christmas came and went and with it brought a boatload of media: we bought ourselves an HDTV (which is SO PRETTY) and got a lot of TV on DVD as gifts. We now own all of Veronica Mars and the entirety of Twin Peaks (which I will enjoy watching over and over–I’ve been watching the whole series about once a year for the last many years). I do love me some David Lynch that way that you love your close friends–I can go for awhile without seeing anything Lynch, but every time I do, it’s fantastic and never gets old. But I’m a sucker for the surreal and dark humor, so keep that in mind. I remember watching Twin Peaks with my brother and understanding why people I knew spoke of it in reverent tones. I caught it in my mid-teenage years with B, who must have been (to use a neologism) tween-ish, which was after it was on television, because I was too young for the first time around. But oh, it was immediately compelling, even before I could truly grasp What The Hell was going on. And it holds up, let me assure you. If you haven’t ever watched it, you ought to. If you haven’t seen it in a while, watch it again. I suspect I have a serious shit-eating grin on my face during most of the episodes.
For the last six weeks, I have been working for Scholastic, doing what amounts to indexing for the California State adoption of Scholastic’s scripted curriculum program Read 180. It was good work, not sexy by any means, but it let me work pretty much on my own, headphones on, without talking to many folks for the majority of the day. I got to listen to music for hours a day, and it let me get back in touch with many of the records I had forgotten about that were of the electronic bent: Mouse on Mars, Boards of Canada, Alog, Dosh, Fennesz, etc. And I actually got to spend time with the first Burial record that came out last year (oops, 2006) and appreciate what the kids are talking about when they talk about dubstep, and I found out that I really liked that record a lot. I bought on a whim because I found it used and I had read lots of good things about it, even though the intricacies of the European club scene music has never held the least amount of interest for me. But when enough people say something is good, it overcomes my innate contrariness and makes me think it’s at least worth checking out. It was and is. Starting out as something I wasn’t sure I liked at all, it became one of the albums I listened to most in 2007. And his new one, Untrue, that just came out recently, looks like it’s going to take the same tack into my heart. It is remarkable in its ability to make me think of darkness and rainy streets in the city (I think New York, I suspect Burial thinks London) and sustain the mood. And it’s ostensibly dance music! I didn’t think I’d like it, either. Oh and no one seems to know who what his name is, which is pretty cool, admittedly.
Other music that (threatened to make me: cry, throw things, break dishes, wreck my car, run into people on the street, wack people next to me on the train via my gesticulating, or rather) killed me this past year:
Mapmaker by Parts and Labor
American Winter by Brian Harnetty
Brazil 70 by V/A on Soul Jazz Records
4 Corners by Adam Lane, Ken Vandermark, Magnus Broo, Paal Nilssen-Love
Entertainment! by Gang of Four
Mirrored by Battles
Kala by MIA
Music Has the Right to Children by Boards of Canada
Les Ondes Silencieuses by Colleen
and a bunch of other things more, I’m sure. But that’s what I can think of.
I hope things are good with you.
7 Comments
6 January 2008 at 5:41 pm
i just don’t get it. i have the first record too, and i’m not hearing what everyone else is (i’ve spent a reasonable amount of time with it). to me, it sounds like slightly more minimal trip hop — a crystallized tricky record. or massive attack. which is fine, but i don’t think it’s a decade-defining sound or anything… sounding like the alienation of a big city in the rain is not really very novel. mollie and i were talking about this — it’s boring. i know boring. i like boring. i know good boring when i hear it, but it’s just… boring.
7 January 2008 at 6:21 am
I do understand your position. I honestly can’t say what it is about these records that have captured me–something of an elegiac quality + mood + time of year + momentum of simple beat + my ability to tune it out from time to time while I do mindless cut and paste work = a record I can listen to over and over. I think being able to ignore it has also been important to me recently. It’s like some pretty, dark ambient music, except it has a beat. I wouldn’t say it’s boring–I’d say it’s vapor-ous.
7 January 2008 at 9:13 am
yeah but see, wasn’t that the point of music for airports? and you know i loves me some eno. i do understand the ignorability for repetetive tasks thing. i just don’t get why everybody’s having such a shitfit about the record.
7 January 2008 at 9:14 am
the new earth record is pretty great by the way
7 January 2008 at 10:19 am
The thing is, I’m not sure that everyone is having a shitfit about it. Realistically, I have read wonderment from UK sources and an abiding acknowledgment from folks in the states–maybe it’s a British thing? I never really got all the Garage, Two-Step stuff. But I know pretty much nothing about the UK club scene. Maybe it is just a suffusion–I’ve listened to it enough that I’ve internalized it. And once something is internalized, it’s harder to dismiss. Oh well, I like it, and we will have to disagree on its merits.
7 January 2008 at 10:26 am
And really, listen to “Raver” on the new one–it’s sad and hopeful and I think, damned pretty. Maybe that’s all I need to be….with a halfway decent beat. I’ve been into the rhythm thing recently.
7 January 2008 at 2:55 pm
fela!