It's a beautiful day to be desperately alone in the woods.


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Tycho: ambient music for those who are succeeding in our contemporary economy?

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Cover art for new Tycho LP "Epoch" There's a moment roughly 30 seconds into " Montana ," the second track on Tycho's breakout 2014 album Awake , when you realize that the people who created this music can't possibly have experienced any adversity in their lives. For nearly 6 minutes, its mannerist, echo-ey guitar noodling melds with hazy synths and just noticeable bass over competent live drumming. It sounds great, the type of warm, organic electronic music that makes you feel as though the world is a place of unsullied wonder filled with promise and opportunity and absolutely lacking in the structural hurtles that have come to define our political moment. The euphoria it inspires is the pleasant, genteel kind bi-coastal types get from legal marijuana, a euphoria from which you can quickly sober up before heading back to your six-figure tech job, not the Rimbaudian sensorium-fucking kind which, though you might survive it, you will not come out of it who...
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Anish Kapoor and The D.C. Singularity

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Washington cycles out its losers every 2 years, thanks to term limits and/or a mercurial electorate. After the indicators shift ever so slightly on the spectrum of the two party political system, a new regime sets to work rectifying the real or perceived shortcomings of an outgoing government that, no longer around to scurry to/from meetings on the Hill, is quickly forgotten. This exodus of incumbents and their staffs occurs so suddenly and unceremoniously, though, that one wonders if there isn't another, say, entropic, force speeding the unfortunate masses out of town. Enter Anish Kapoor's "At the Hub of Things," an extraordinarily clever and engrossing fiberglass sculpture that, for more than 20 years, has sat in the bowels of the Hirshhorn Contemporary Art Museum. Situated as it is in an all-white alcove with track-lighting positioned behind it on the ceiling, it offers two entirely different experiences depending upon whether the viewer approaches its profile o...
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