2011 RETROSPECTIVE
so last year i restricted my requisite “best of” list to albums that had been released in 2010. this year i am going to try a different approach. 2011’s list will be a summary of my music/art/cultural phenomena discoveries of the year and will not be limited to this year’s occurrences. as always, this is in no particular order. here goes.
MUSIC
new orleans funk
full disclosure: david simon’s show tremé is what really opened the door to this for me. i’ve always been a fan of old school funk/blues, but watching this show made me explore the genre a lot more. and the best thing, it doesn’t get old.
inell young - what do you see in her
danny white - the twitch
luk thung
i lived in thailand for 18 years and never really listened to any thai music. well, there was this thai rap group thaitanium who i listened to during my early club years… i just read their wikipedia entry and one of the members is from “south side of phuket”… you probably have to have some knowledge of thailand to understand why that is a very funny thing to claim. anyway. back to the issue at hand. luk thung. luk thung, which means kid from the field, is a style of music that developed in rural thailand. there is a big cowboy scene in certain areas of thailand - i mean literal cowboys. dudes that dress like it’s the old west: cowboy hats, boots with spurs, the whole shabang. they even ride around shining on horseback. it’s a bizarre scene that carries through to the music. it’s thai country, sort of. not to be confused with north american country, this version is influenced by blues and even metal - riffs taken from sabbath songs abound.
riem daranoi - jai ten
gil scott-heron (RIP) and jamie xx - we’re new here
this is one of the best remix joints i’ve heard. i’m super into jamie xx’s minimalist approach to contemporary electronic music and, of course, i love gil scott-heron (RIP). the two go together seamlessly.
†‡† - ghetto ass witch
first of all, this is the best album cover of the year. i mean, seriously. you can’t go wrong having a picture of a scantily clad lindsay lohan (is that lindsay lohan?) over some old religious dudes and jesus. and, just in case that’s not enough, throw in a pentagram. that’s it. you got it. i’m not a fan of them gothics, dressed in black with the make up and the boots, being all like, “hey look at me i’m so introverted and different but WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU LOOKING AT”, but i would most definitely get down with these goth ravers. throw in some samples from dialogue in the wire and i’m even more sold. also, apparently the way you pronounce “†‡†” is “ritualz”.
tennis - cape dory
classic feel good music. this husband and wife duo recorded the album after crewing on a yacht for a year. cape dory is perfect for: days on a yacht, days at the beach, driving a car in the country, driving a car in pretty weather anywhere at all, sitting at a park with your friends, sitting at a park, taking a walk on a pretty day, walking in the woods, walking in a field, chilling by the pool, and drinking mai-tais at the swim-up bar.
burial - street halo EP
burial can do no wrong. his stuff just keeps getting better, and, this time, it’s going in a new direction. the trend in post-dubstep seems to be that it has this funky underlying beat thing going on. burial creates these trends. it’s new, it’s fresh, but it still makes you get this warm, fuzzy, bittersweet feeling. the moments of pure beauty just keep coming.
balam acab - wander/wonder
this kid is only 20 years old. i love the internet, because it has the capacity to allow people to become wise beyond their years. especially in music. this fan-made video is especially dope.
a$ap rocky - livelovea$ap
dude from harlem kills it southern rap meets new york style. at times, very reminiscent of (throwback inducing) bone thugs flow. half his tracks are produced by clams casino, who is arguably the best producer of the year. (see new shit from lil b, soulja boy). i know the whole world gon be feelin this.
kurt vile - smoke ring for my halo
this is the type of music you can play for your parents and know they will dig it. also, kurt vile is just one of those kinds of dudes that i would love to chill with. this album works perfectly in so many different situations it’s unreal.
SACRED BONES RECORDS
amen dunes’ “through donkey jaw” has to be one of my favorite albums of the year, and i can see it becoming something i listen to for years and years. sacred bones records are the purveyors of true, good music. aside from amen dunes, this year they’ve put out great albums from psychic ills, woods, crystal stilts, zola jesus - all of which deserve a spot on this list.
jefre cantu-ledesma - love is a stream
i haven’t listened to drone/ambient in a while. really since college, i guess. i saw this guy live in a cathedral and it was beautiful. i listen to this regularly and it’s beautiful. there’s something about the hazy distortion in music like this that really gets me. best when listened to with headphones. get in your own space.
mississippi fred mcdowell
twangy blues guitar and raspy voice. no drums. just stripped down, OG blues. god, this shit is so good.
dmitri shostakovich - string quartet no. 15 in e-flat minor op. 144
i used to listen to this a lot in high school. it has now been rotated back into my life. it is so subtly powerful, it’ll have you feeling things you didn’t know you were capable of feeling.
of course, i’m leaving out plenty of things that have served as soundtracks to the last 12 months of my life. but that’s ok.
ART
alexander mcqueen (RIP) at the Met
this was one of the most unique exhibits i’ve ever seen. i’m not too up on the haute couture thing, but this definitely made me want to get my act together. time to start exploring that world.
ryan trecartin at PS1
big up to the internet once again, shout out to the ADD youth. way to overload my senses in most every way possible while keeping me interested.
do ho suh at lehman maupin
time to start following another career. i didn’t know about this guy until i saw the show at lehman maupin. it was this vivisected model of an apartment building that had been crashed into by a hot air balloon. the details in every room of this apartment building were so precise, so real that you felt like you were getting a gauge of each inhabitant’s persona. incredible, to say the least.
ai wei wei’s imprisonment
john wayne gacy’s show in vegas.
not that i saw this, but it gives me the creeps so hard that i wish i had. i don’t know who would ever want this shit in their homes, but props to the gallery for having the guts to show this. this is some real, real outsider art and it makes me so scared i’m having conservative feelings about the existence of the show.
THE WORLD
REVOLUTION
arab spring
#OWS
it’s obligatory to mention these things, but really, it makes me happy that all this has happened. by and large i think this is a good step towards something better.
young people in general are finally making me feel proud. fuck complacency, even if i’m a hypocrite for saying it. it’s about time.
southern sudan’s independence
herman cain
anthony weiner
thailand floods
you must see this. thailand has had its share of troubles lately. big up to the prathet thai massive.
FOOD AND DRINK
st anselm
milk bar
pork belly dishes
fresh oysters
sazeracs
old fashioneds
HONORABLE MENTION
action bronson - for bringing back the old school east coast flow
danger mouse and daniele luppi - ROME - for making my days feel like a spaghetti western
john maus - we must become the pitiless censors of ourselves - for being so wonderfully weird and having the best album title of the year
sun araw - ancient romans for providing me with meditative backgrounds to many tasks
the caretaker - an empty bliss beyond this world - for helping me walk through nyc in a vinyl dream
keep getting more interesting, world.
song of your day
i started a new blog a couple months ago called “song of your day”. basically, it’s an outlet for the songs that get stuck in my head. generally the songs i post on there are ones that i wake up with in the morning. anyway, it’s just for fun.
this is the first sketch of a piece called hymn for summer that i’m working on.
SUMMER
i have many goals.
right now i am working on a project of song sketches that i will hopefully put out on CD-R by summer’s end.
i am trying to stay away from making electronic music for a while. or at least purely electronic music.
i am going to make a film about summer.
i am working on a new issue of tropic.
i found these photos of a russian beluga researcher who swims naked in the freezing water with them because she claims that they don’t like rubbing up against her wet suit. she can hold her breath for 10 minutes and 40 seconds because she does a lot of yoga.
TROPIC OF CONVERSATION
head over to the website of my latest artistic endeavor,
http://www.tropicofconversation.com
to see what I (and a large number of artsy friends.fiends) have been up to lately
I started out clicking strategically… and by the end was just wildly clicking and dancing in my chair.
CLICK THE SQUARES.
THE WHOLE WORLD NEEDS TO KNOW ABOUT THIS.
THIS THIS THIS THIS!
(Source: mandaflewaway)
2010 retrospective
so i’m going to try to do a real blog posting. with all the 2010 nostalgia going on all over the web, i decided to make my own best of 2010 list.
ariel pink’s haunted graffiti - before today
i’ve been loving ariel pink for a few years now, but before today really takes the cake in terms of its “what the fuck is this is awesome” factor. i could listen to AP’s 80’s tv jingles flow in and out of the tracks for hours. “butthouse blondies”? what? luvz it!
deer tick - the black dirt sessions
it took me a lot of listens to even start to like this album. when i first heard it i was incredibly disappointed. i really only started listening to deer tick in 2010, or maybe later on in 2009. i was and am really into war elephant, and i thought the black dirt sessions took an entirely different tone, which it does, that didn’t suit my fancy at all. it took me maybe 4 or 5 listens to realize that this album is just as wonderful. i love john mccauley’s snarled voice. listen to him croak the fuck out in this track at around 3:45. it’s wonderful.
coyote clean up / fur - lackadaisical ep
i can’t get enough of the 4 coyote clean up tracks on this thing. with all the dubstep and its various incarnations that have been emerging this year it’s refreshing to hear something that really adheres to the idea of dub itself. i just downloaded the new coyote clean up album, downhill exxxpress, last week and haven’t been too impressed by it so far, although there are a couple of jammers.
james blake - klavierwerke ep
as i write this, i am salivating over the full length lp that is taking obscenely long to download right now. i am grateful to hear dubstep without the whole wobble thing going on. it’s been a while, at least for me. also, klavierwerke has just the right amount of weird/interesting to keep me totally engaged with every listen.
salem - king knight
i have gone through various stages of obsession with this album. i am so into the slowed down/pitchshifted hip hop vocals and world music samples that bleed through this album, not to mention the moments of beauty that shine through the dark and murky walls of sound on king knight. in fact, i like this album so much i’m putting up two tracks.
i wanted to put the track “killer” here, but i can’t find it online because all the youtube links have been taken off. that’s ok though - this music video is sick.
caribou - swim
i will never not like caribou, so maybe anything he does is golden to me. i have heard lots of opinions from different people about this album, but i think it’s great. it’s sort of a hybrid of andorra and the milk of human kindness in that it has the shimmering, magical qualities of andorra with some of the more beat-driven stylings of the milk…
woods - at echo lake
it’s not just the whole almost falsetto thing that is going on with the vocals, but is it just me or is woods reminiscent of a stripped down neil young? this album isn’t really covering any new ground, but it’s certainly a continuation of what they had going on before it - and that’s totally fine with me.
abe vigoda - crush
what the fuck happened here? i am still in shock, i think. i used to think of abe vigoda as this totally psyched-out, tropicalia punk deal, but crush totally redefined them as a band. they’ve still got these bouncy riffs floating through the album’s tracks, but now they’ve got some morrissey cred. also, doesn’t this song remind you of xiu xiu?
julian lynch - mare
this dude is amazing. he embodies the type of music i would have liked to been writing myself a couple years ago. his sound is just so good. nuff said. check out this track.
deerhunter - halcyon digest
yes, the album is way more accessible than anything they’ve done before, but why the fuck is that a bad thing? i hate it when people complain about stuff like that. they’re probably my all time favorite band, honestly. they make the kind of music that i am one day going to sit down in my cushy armchair with a glass of scotch to listen to whilst gazing wistfully into the distance reminiscing about my youth. deerhunter has perfected something here.
tame impala - innerspeaker
i am actually still so stoked about this album. thank you, australia, for doing the only worthwhile thing you have done in… wait, ever. thank you for bringing back rock and roll. innerspeaker is like discovering psychedelic drugs and the beatles’ “she said, she said” simultaneously. for a good laugh, look at this list of australian music: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_of_Australia
tame impala is not even on it. that’s probably a good thing, though, it could damage their credibility.
morning benders - “excuses”
not so much the album, big echo, but this song, and especially, this video:
beach house - teen dream
more drifting, floaty vibes from beach house, teen dream picks up right where devotion left off.
zola jesus - stridulum II
did you know this chick is only 19 or something? this kind of reminds me of lydia lunch. her voice has such a heavy presence; it is layered over these smooth pad sounds and minimal drums and it sounds like something i’d like to listen to on an ocean voyage.
un prophète
this french movie about a young arab dude surviving in prison. it was a bad year for film, but this was a pretty good flick.
that’s all i’m putting up for film, actually. i read through this to jog my memory:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_in_film
but everything fucking sucks. seriously, what a shitty year for movies. youtube, however, had its share of hits.
and, on the eve of world war 3 (i think i’m joking), we had:
BP oil spill
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deepwater_Horizon_oil_spill
WikiLeaks fiasco
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WikiLeaks
julian assange rapes swedes
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-11047025
thailand, my crib, goes red with rage
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Thai_political_protests
a guy killed a shark with his feet last week http://macedoniaonline.eu/content/view/17081/48/
paul pierce does this sick shit last week
in order to download the tracks below in album form, head here.
you can download it for free or at any price you wish to donate.
yesterday was my senior project installation at bard college, where i exhibited look who’s talking//glow old.
this is a short video of look who’s talking, a sound installation using two cameras, four speakers and max/msp programming. it’s best heard with headphones.
here is my artist’s statement:
Over the past year I have grown interested in the ways in which we are being monitored. I began to notice that the advertisements in my Gmail inbox did not only pertain to what was contained in my inbox, but also to what I was doing on the Internet. Google searches changed too; searches for movies, restaurants or businesses produced results in my neighborhood, even though I had never specified where I was. Facebook began suggesting photos of friends for me to look at. It was all a little disconcerting, but in order to use these online services I had to consent to these things I did not find to be all that agreeable. My notion of privacy had been obscured, maybe even lost. Then, in April of 2010 the Library of Congress began archiving the entirety of Twitter’s postings, claiming that they are an immense impact on culture and history. Every input has an output; every action, a reaction.
I started to consider how the users of sites like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube elected to allow themselves to be monitored and recorded. We are presented with the knowledge that we are being watched, yet we choose to continue on. This was the impetus for Look Who’s Talking.
Over the course of a year I compiled a collection of field recordings taken in public spaces ranging from restaurants to international airports. These, in addition to sound recordings taken from publicly available YouTube videos, form the installation’s sonic environment.
Using a webcam and Max/MSP programming software, Look Who’s Talking analyzes the camera’s feed to interpret the observer’s motions. Depending on how the participant moves through the installation’s space he or she triggers different recordings from the room’s speakers. Your every move is monitored, and, like on the Internet itself, you are the observer, the participant and the creator of your environment.
The visual component of the piece is a sort of users’ privacy agreement; just as when one signs up to a website, one cedes the rights to one’s privacy to the site. The wall projection of a surveillance camera mounted on the ceiling is the only hint given to the participants as to how the sounds are being triggered. The viewers are warned of the consequences to their actions, yet in order to experience the piece they must give in to the surveillance.
Glow Old, a CD with pieces recorded over the past year as part of an ongoing project under my moniker of the same name, also seeks to produce something new using found materials. Drawing from genres and musical styles as diverse as Latin American cumbia, Turkish traditional folk, hip-hop and contemporary electronic darkwave, among others, Glow Old combines such elements into a musical surveillance; samples from all over the world and spanning many time periods are brought together with my own music.
the album is also available for download at my bandcamp site
another track from the upcoming release
PSEUFI
