poorboyoftroy

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...

Natural filters applied Like all supplicants of literary cyberpunk, I’ve devoted a decent amount of armchair time to parsing the oft-quoted William Gibson-attributed maxim, “The future is already here -- it’s just not very evenly distributed.” Despite having some serious attribution issues, it is a favorite of technology optimists and a mainstay of douchebag keynotes for all sorts of industry conferences. It is generally interpreted as some version of the following -- that human progress realized in “the future” is generally technology-enabled and that those on the lower socio-economic rungs have less access to the technologies (the Internet, ubiquitous computing, etc.) with which “the future” manifests. A footnote would point out that, yes, many technologies have been distributed down the socio-economic ladder as they have become cheaper to manufacture at scale. There are other futures, though, largely outside of the experience of the global upper and middle classes. From Bhopa...

For a sedentary person, I spend a lot of time thinking about public spaces. This isn't to say that it's particularly productive or profound thinking in nature -- but it borders on the prolific. Whether it's weekend farmers markets, coffee shops, large institutions spanning indoor and outdoor spaces like the Woodland Park Zoo, public transit, or the de facto agora that is the Central Public Library, the ritualization of public life engendered by the combination of architectural and urban planning design (as well as the omission of any design intent) is of endless interest to me. My commute unfortunately doesn't involve public transit at the moment, but I believe strongly in it and vote accordingly. Seattle's public transit funding and infrastructure is on the uptick, but it has a lot of ground to gain in what is an intrinsically west coast, car-besotted city in the midst of a population boom. Dedicated bus lanes and the recent expansion of light rail help, but w...

Because the Internet is suffering from a dearth of content, especially from anonymous assholes with no journalist credentials, I have decided to throw my hat into the ring and contribute content at a staggeringly more aggressive pace than I have previously. I'm talking listicles, I'm talking social commentary on the state of the contemporary Internet, I'm talking general social commentary, I'm talking...well, actually, that about covers all possible content permutations. I'm kicking things off with my write-up of my top 5 albums of 2017. Gird yourselves for a wild ride... OK. Here we go. With the list. 1. Jlin - "Black Origami" Full disclosure: when this album released in May, I decided right then and there that it would be my favorite album of the year, that nothing could displace it from that accolade barring some sort of "OK Computer"-level event. I regret nothing. Jlin is peerless in both her particular toolkit, the footwork subg...

Like the Platonic ideal of a New York Times 36-hour vacationer, I will be spending the weekend in Los Angeles. Herein find my travel rider, LA rev v.2.9.4 Existential night terrors: they're going to happen and happen frequently. While physically restraining me, I'll need you to recite the Tibetan Book of the Dead until I acknowledge the inherently illusory nature of empirical reality.  I expect a new, spontaneous ekphrasis on the 110/105 Interchange each day, each applying a different school of art criticism.  Pools are part of the landscape, not to be touched. Beaches “ “. I’m not coming to pitch, but if we come up with a great idea for an anthologized YouTube Red series about the dream/erotic life of Twitter bots, I'm in.  Butter coffee is not a thing. I'm all about dystopia tourism provided there's coffee and maybe a nosh in close proximity. See note above re butter coffee . Fatherhood has annihilated my tolerance for alcohol, so kindly marshall eve...

The chance to begin again in a golden land of opportunity and adventure.

I feel a little bad for #Burners this year (no, not #Berners). Burning Man, set to begin in one week, is very much, err, blotted out in the popular imagination by Monday's eclipse. To be fair, I'm not sure Burning Man maintains the same level of public or media interest it did in the halcyon days of the 1990s, back before it became commoditized/sanitized by Silicon Valley, when it was discussed by those who didn't attend as tantamount to a neo-tribalist orgy somewhere in the Nevada desert. All I know: nobody is talking about it, and everybody is talking about the eclipse. I would imagine, too, that some are foregoing Burning Man in favor of a trip to the nearest latitude in the Zone of Totality ("ZoT" because when else will we get to use that acronym). I have no idea what people are hoping to get out of the eclipse. It's a down year in a dark era, to be sure, so perhaps the general need for something, anything to distract us from the Trumpocalypse has latch...

As I age, so do my musical tastes, which is to say, genres and musicians I had previously dismissed in my 20's as moribund or risibly out of vogue have become suddenly much more intriguing simply by virtue of the passage of time. New Age music appears to be the latest beneficiary of this ineluctable process. Just as I've started to flirt with eastern religions and literature, so have I started listening to artists who incorporate musical, cultural, and spiritual traditions from the Subcontinent and Southeast Asia into various western musical genres, sometimes to stunning artistic success. Alice Coltrane, Bill Laswell, and Steve Roach, though fusing their appropriated material with very different western genres, have all produced excellent albums that honor their respective traditions. My interest in Laraaji actually precedes any engagement with New Age music as such, and this is entirely due to the fact that Brian Eno produced his debut album, "Ambient 3: Day of Radian...

Portland has a very distinctive retail infrastructure, one that elicits strange, public rituals and leads to experiences of unbridled, non-value add whimsy. An example of this: rounding the corner at SE 32nd and Hawthorne, one encounters a small parking lot dominated by a red, double-decker bus that houses, you guessed it, a coffee shop. It has tables, like a restaurant Tov Coffee  is much like every other food cart in Portland: larger than food trucks in other cities and just as questionably mobile. But Tov is so much more than a "mobile" retail space for upscale casual dining: it's its own vibrant, fully immersive world. Close, but not too close, quarters I was overwhelmed by the density of build-out and human activity in the back-half of the lower-level. Two baristas, a commercial espresso machine, and at least 3 people waiting on drinks -- it shouldn't all fit, not this comfortably, but it does. The custom purple paint job, which extends ...

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Don't tell the bros of  Callus Coffee , Seattle's newest coffee pop-up shop, that 2017 may be a little too late to get in on the trend of infilling America's urban cores with third-wave coffee bars bearing unfortunate, esoteric names. 2017 is a year of political upheaval, a year when the wheels of #resistance are turning, resolutely focused on forestalling #Trumpocalypse by galvanizing the American left in a united front the likes of which we haven't seen in generations. It's time to retrench, for us all to focus on our essential values and ensure that our democratic institutions have the fortitude to provide for a viable future. This requires constructive anger. Apathy is not acceptable -- if you aren't angry, you aren't alive. It's difficult to maintain one's righteous fury when sampling the single-origin pour over offerings and mulling the purchase of artisanal coffee mugs at a new coffee bar in a former industrial district, all the while dicking...

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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...