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?
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 ...
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...
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