It turns out that I will need to visit the Empire State Building in order to go to MoMA. Pretty ridiculous, I realize. Maybe I can add a scavenger hunt into the mix?
The album, as a discrete entity of artistic output created with the intention of having its suite of recordings enjoyed serially, is dead. Musicians continue to produce albums, sure, and will for the foreseeable future, but their importance has been downgraded to that of publishing middleware, mere frontispieces that are immediately cannibalized upon birth for their individual songs by influencers and fucking AI’s who add them to playlists to build their brands. This is driven, of course, by technology-enabled changes to consumer behavior - why listen to an entire new album when a playlist can contain songs from multiple new albums that align with your interests? Moreover, what if that playlist could organically evolve over time as its governing algorithm more fully defined a profile of your preferences? The answer is that the album as a format is intended to be a unified listening experience, its construction as a suite of individual songs/pieces not some mere caprice but a foundati...
And after a prolonged send-off of plangent well-wishing and affections, I find myself wending my way down a nameless road, an immense old-growth forest hunched over me as though it were straining to preserve its angle of repose and thus avoid eroding on top of me. I’m driving a moped. It’s raining and the sun is setting, the darkening verdure expanding to edge out the already attenuated light seeping through the canopy. I’m bound for Montana, and I know this in the way one knows about the impending future in dreams, not as occurrences one can foresee by drawing inferences from preceding events, but in that gnostic, intimate way of knowing that always outclasses the empiricism of waking life. Similarly, I know that I am expected in Montana in an unreasonable amount of time. I can’t be traveling any faster than 25 mph, which bodes poorly for my prospects. Of course, I may as well not concern myself with covering a certain distance (600 miles) within a certai...
Daft Punk's Random Access Memories cover art Prologue 2013 was a *great* year for music. There were exceptional releases each month from established acts, left-for-dead acts , and several very exciting rookies. Anybody who keeps up in earnest with popular music should have found themselves juggling a profundity of riches, even outright overwhelmed by them. Usually, by early December, I have a reasonable idea of what my rankings will look like, and while this year my top choices have been static for several months, I really had to scramble to fill out the rest of my list. As late as the second week of December, I was still discovering 2013 releases that warranted inclusion. This is in part due to my decision to expand my reading habits, which led me to publications such as The Quietus , perhaps the closest approximation of an English analogue to Pitchfork. It reviews albums and bands that are not even on Pitchfork and progeny's radar, such as Grumbling Fur's ...
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