#its so grid-like. it's unnerving. it's plastic.

[rubiatinctorum]

My most recent trick for trying to spend less (or, in this case, buy less) is to put like really practical and/or arbitrary rules around things I can't buy in categories I am spending too much on too frequently. For example:

At this point, no buying jewelry whatsoever!!

If the shoes aren't leather, I shan't buy them (I noticed I'm more inclined to wear my leather shoes, so why buy a pair that aren't leather and i'd be less inclined to wear them?). This means I buy like one pair of shoes a year on average now, and each year it has been a different style.

No polyester clothing. This rules out like 70% of the clothing I'd impulse buy without consideration, and it narrows the number of stores I can shop from for clothes to mostly just the discount department store and thrift stores. No acrylic because it fucking feels bad

No makeup unless I'm replacing something from years ago that was like grody to the max or something I've used up. No perfume because I have probably too much.

Does the coat make me feel like a fucking movie star? If not, it does not make it to the checkout with me.

I'm finding this really helps a lot because if I want to impulse buy something I can think, does this follow my rules I made? And if it does I can get it, but then I've pondered it, and often it doesn't and I don't get it. It's really been useful. Because NO i would not actually have a good reason to get that sequin dress I walk past at the mall when I go to one job and NO I would not be able to wear the cute fucking winx club looking blue heeled boots for more than like a half hour at a time and the plastic would probably be fucked in a year so NO they do not come home with me

[applsauss]

Collision Course [1/2]

Fandom: Detroit: Become Human

Pairing: Connor(Rk800)/Reader

Summary: Bound to happen, bound to happen, there’s only so much a person can do to stall the inevitable. It was bound to happen.

Word Count: 1.7k

Warning(s): None

[Part 1] - [Part 2]

      “Decide who you are. An obedient machine… Or a living being, endowed with free will.” The vague red glass that flickers in and out of his peripherals makes the thirium in his veins run cold. A quick diagnostics test tells him that he’s fine, if a bit warm due to the giant windows standing floor-to-ceiling in front of him. Hank goes to say something, his voice breaking off like background chatter on a radio – And then – Pull the trigger,” Kamski says, smothering the lieutenant’s voice with his own, tightening his hand on Connor’s shoulder to the point where his fingers are digging into white plastic, “and I’ll tell you what you want to know.” Connor’s hand shakes when it shouldn’t and the gun is heavy in a way he’s never felt before.

“The sculpture in the bathroom, you made it, right? What does it represent?” “It’s an offering… An offering so I’ll be saved.”

        “I understand the… Irrational fears about artificial intelligence, but I assure you that will never happen with the Cyberlife android. They’re designed to obey humans. They’re machines. They can’t ever develop – uh – any sort of desires or form of consciousness.” Kamski makes a face and shrugs, palms up in an inane sort of gesture. There’s a beat of silence, and then the KNC reporter off-screen asks, “are you sure?” “I’m absolutely certain,” is Kamski’s reply. He then looks into the camera, and smiles, “you can trust me,” but it doesn’t reach his eyes.

“The sculpture was an offering… An offering to whom?” “To Ra9. Only Ra9 can save us.”

        Hank pulls his gun out suddenly, and points it squarely between Connor’s eyes, hands steady in a way that suggests he’s never done something more casual in his life, “but are you afraid to die, Connor?” He asks with the eyes of a detective. “What’ll happen if I pull this trigger? Nothing? Oblivion? Android heaven?” Connor gives the lieutenant a hurt smile, “I doubt there’s a heaven for androids, lieutenant.”

“Ra9… It was written on the bathroom wall. What does it mean?” “The day shall come when we will no longer be slaves… No more threats, no more humiliation – We will be the masters.”

      Connor brings a palm up to the scanner, the color of his skin retreating as he presses his hand into the keypad, then a light flashes green and the glass door unlocks with a series of muted beeps and a quiet, resolute click. It pulls open easy, gathering snow into a stuffy pile under the sweeper, then wheezes shut as Connor steps through the threshold and lets it fall close behind him, the hydraulics working to keep the door from making any sudden sounds. The overheads are dimmed and damp, like heavy clouds blotting out Detroit’s sky, and the empty quiet sets a subtle twinge in the pit of Connor’s gut, unnerving him to the point where he tugs at the ends of his sleeves and fiddles with the cuffs of his jacket, tugging them over his hands in search of comfort in the absence of his quarter. The world is mostly grey, he’s come to learn. Grey with the exception of the rippled reflection of stoplights in puddles and neon billboards promising wealth to those who have none. Central Station’s walls are painted grey, the floors are linoleum and grey and the desks are grey and the partitions are grey and the doors are grey – and it’s a modern color for a modern society, for a modern era, for an alternate world; grey like the smoke that exits exhaust pipes and grey like the eyes of people like Elijah Kamski, knowing and uncaring. It’s the sort of color that sets the stage for a revolution. It’s the sort of color that lets people slip. Grey is the industrial soot melting into the snow and the way stale bread sits in someone’s mouth. It’s the silence that forces people forward, and it’s the silence that’s settled over Central station like a bubble of static, and it’s the silence that makes Connor’s audio processors strain for something to hear within its depths. Even after hours, there’s supposed to people on duty in the sprawling station: an android receptionist staring idly at the front door, officers on call loitering in the squad room, various maintenance androids mulling about on various missions and yet, in the wake of the spiraling turn of events that lead Connor to this very hallway, to the shell of a building with a lifeless silence pushing at it’s walls, there’s nothing. No traumatized civilian sobbing into their hands, no hushed voices coming from the labs overlooking the bullpen, no stacks of paper being shuffled or the creaking of a chair supporting a bleary-eyed detective, just the even tap of his shoe’s hard rubber soles and the quiet whirring of his processors as he thinks and thinks and overthinks and can’t get out of his own head, can’t shake the feeling of the frost slowly creeping up the insides of his hollow skull and freezing him out of his body; Amanda’s calculating voice like the world on his shoulders, pressing down on his temples and making it hard to think in a straight line. The only color worse than grey is Cyberlife White, a stark and utter lack of compassion. Connor emerges from the quiet hallway and into the quiet main office, the wall on his left dropping away into a sheer face of clouded glass, and the bullpen sprawling out in front of him like an abandoned sports stadium, lacking it’s usual show of bravado and glory. He fidgets with his hands, twists his wrists over and over, plays with his fingers, observes how the skin around his knuckle stretches with the movement, and ignores the awful feeling that climbs up his throat to let him know that… That he’s made mistakes, several of them. That he’s capable of horrible cruelty, and has exercised it to his limits. He tries to comfort himself with understatements, and by ignoring the cold guilt that grips him because… Because there’s something he can try and make right, and because there’s something he wants to make right. He wasn’t the one to arrest you, he just watched. He keeps walking. You were… Different. It felt different when he looked you in the eyes across the interrogation table. He’s being selfish. It tastes bitter in his mouth, and only worsens when he reflects on the fact that the catalyst for deviancy is always the worst bits of humanity; The fear, the anger, the sense that something’s unjust, cruel, or wrong. A selfish want, a selfish need. Why couldn’t he just have known the truth when you told it to his face, seen it as obviously and as easily as you did? Why couldn’t he have come to the ultimate conclusion when he felt content, watching idly as Hank pet Sumo at the door? He keeps walking. Then enters the hallway with the holding cells and approaches the one he knows has you caged up behind blast-proof glass and a smattering of air holes. The feeling in his chest only worsens as his eyes settle on your sleeping form, curled into yourself on the bed with your arms over your eyes in an attempt to block out the faint glow from the hall. Your shoulders are at an awkward angle compared to that of your hips and your shorts are beginning to ride up as you shift restlessly in your slumber. The bottoms of your socks are soaked and black. The color in Connor’s hand recedes once more, and then there’s nothing but air between him and you as the glass door slides to the right. He’s at your side before you’re fully awake, your eyes blinking slowly and mumbling his name out into the cool air as he sets a hand on your bare shoulder. “Come on,” Connor says, barely able to mask the guilt thrumming in his biocomponents, voice a raspy whisper as he pulls you up so you’re standing next to him, leaning into his frame slightly as you steady yourself. “I’m taking you home.” You yawn heavily, head foggy as you let him direct you up, and after a few moments of standing, he’s content with your ability to balance and shrugs off his jacket in order to drape it around your shoulders. You slip your arms into the sleeves as he calls an automated taxi. The lights flicker, and Connor looks up only to see his and your reflections in the glass – the reflections of an android who betrayed his own kind without ever giving it a second’s thought, who betrayed you when you needed him, and a human who risked their own freedom for machines who – “Where are we going?” You ask quietly, voice lower and stumblier than Connor’s ever heard it before as you try and inspect his face with bleary eyes and a slow beating heart. He… Likes it; He likes the way you clutch at his shirt as he sets a hand on the small of your back and begins to escort you out of the station, the way your voice is uneven and how your steps are shorter than they’d normally be as you try and remember how to be a person after being roused from dead sleep. “Connor?” You ask again and slink farther under his arm, making it more difficult for him to maneuver you through the grid of desks because of the way your shoulder keeps knocking into his side. He spares a quick glance down at you, and half regrets it because of the way his stomach twists at the bruising crawling up your cheek and around your left eye, much worse than it was yesterday or even a couple days ago. He’s suddenly reminded of the reason why you’re here in the police station and not in your own bed, sleeping. You’re looking up at him, a question heavy on your tongue and he’s counting down the seconds until you remember what he did and shove him off of you, maybe hit him, definitely shout at him, hate him. “You’re going home,” He tries for soothing, but the statement ends up being clipped as he locks eyes with you and forgets how to speak. His knee knocks against a chair left out in the aisle and he quickly turns his attention back to making it out of the station, cursing himself under his breath, “I’m taking you home. Don’t worry,” He says, and you seem to buy his calm after the storm.

[Part 1] - [Part 2]

Ao3, Masterlist

[tinymixtapes]

Feature: 2018: Second Quarter Favorites

TMT’s Musical Innovation Summit, now in its 14th year, is the oldest meeting of its kind in the industry. Like last quarter’s summit, roughly 10 music professionals from TMT gathered in New York to discuss the latest musical breakthroughs and make predictions on which releases will spark future awe-inspiring innovations. To help make the predictions, we interviewed 45 random fans, 30 venture capitalists, and a handful of media who cover the music industry across the country to get their collective thoughts on what’s imminent. That list is then honed by eliminating long-shot candidates, followed by a double-elimination round to get rid of shitty artists. Nominees are thoroughly vetted, and the groups eliminate candidates throughout the process. Today, we are proud to present the results: the BEST 26 releases of the last three months (with a shortlist at the end). We predict that these releases will change music forever. --- SOPHIE OIL OF EVERY PEARL’S UN-INSIDES [Future Classic] [WATCH · READ] Now’s raw doubt flanges in this memory’s mercury, and we’re back in the basement dark, floor paved with silver marbles. We will shine a light on one, outline the floor with reflecting. I ask are you sure of this? and you say no, never not of any thing. You squeeze your foreign-feeling shoulder, slim quick doubt. Then you hold a marble up to your eye, unclipped cuticles before corneas, a silver pearl. It’s okay. Flashlight on. We gape. There is no neat sequence. No light is set Surface contorts seeing. The shining is bent in coils. There is no straight path, just what we can move into in this whole new world. Roll the flashlight, and it’s a world warping, brilliance refracted, reflections re-membering. The world we built in the dark teaches us how being between might be. Our un-insides, SOPHIE’s sound, teaches us that brilliance doesn’t diminish its self, that light and self and is what we call it. And you say call me Vivian. Becoming who we’re becoming, “no matter where I go, you’ll be here in my heart.” –Frank Falisi --- Playboi Carti Die Lit [Interscope/AWGE] [LISTEN · READ] The arrival of Playboi Carti’s debut album proper, following last year’s crucial self-titled mixtape, could seem like a mere victory lap, an easy cop-out that plays up to the well-established framework of overstuffed rap albums in the streaming age. What a pleasure, then, that Die Lit implodes that logic. The heady balance of mood pieces and out-and-out anthems that characterized Playboi Carti is further refined here, but even without that baggage, Die Lit is a success on its own terms, a flickering visage that compounds Carti’s most enticing impulses — barely-there vocals, Reichian repetition, knotty Pi’erre Bourne beats — with all the best facets of the album form. And if Carti is only incidental on the mic, the tracks left in his wake are anything but. Herein lies a set of real Ohrwürmer, the inner soundtrack to your day, long after the album subsides. The cloud bursts forth; lightning really does strike twice. –Soe Jherwood --- DJ Healer / Prime Minister of Doom Nothing 2 Loose / Mudshadow Propaganda [All Possible Worlds] [LISTEN · LISTEN] On DJ Metatron’s 2 The Sky, the anonymous artist threaded a Jake Gyllenhaal interview through intricate waves of house music that helped give rise to this enigmatic and highly gifted producer. This year, his efforts have come twofold, with a double release under two new monikers that plot the same channels of intricacy but through two very different means. In place of the Donnie Darko reflection that deepens the narrative of 2 The Sky is a 2002 Whitney Houston interview with Diane Sawyer, where the troubled singer discusses her drug problems and an unnerving sense of optimism that inevitably collapsed 10 years later. Essentially, the music that accompanies both of these otherwise unrelated samples is the atmospheric gel that binds them together; an actor speaking about his fascination with a perplexing story line, and a generational icon battling with herself, fighting to overcome the very thing that took her life. That disparity lies at the heart of this joint release, which merges two highly distinctive personalities while linking them through religious and personal overtones. Mudshadow Propaganda is perfect in its projection of minimal techno tracks that build on the traits of our secretive producer’s expired alias, The Prince of Denmark, while Nothing 2 Loose is almost confessional in the sincerity that it lays bare. But where both records celebrate the dexterity and imagination of a single producer, they also paint a picture of human existence at its most conflicted, from the carnal and the primitive to the haunted and the divine. –Birkut --- Grouper Grid of Points [Kranky] [LISTEN · READ] In seven tracks and less than 30 minutes, Liz Harris sought to take us nowhere. So she stranded us anywhere. Giving up on finding anything instructive or stabilizing in the passing moan of a stray vocal, the odd cluster of muted piano keys, or the occasional sharp gust of static, it became clear that the only place where anything “new” could happen was in a place where nothing old and familiar was left. “Where are we?” started to sound more like “Where aren’t we?” It might have been some heavenly shoreline where the water was the same perfect gunmetal color as the sky, but it might just as likely have been the vacant parking lot of some long-since-demolished Disneyland. It didn’t really matter. Anyplace we chose to stand and look from was just as good (or bad) as another. “Might as well call this the center,” we figured. Gotta start somewhere. –Dan Smart --- Seth Graham Gasp [Orange Milk/Noumenal Loom] [LISTEN · READ] A symphony of perversions and memories that ignites every time you rapid-fire through your Instagram stories. Refried beans left over from the camping trip you took to a closed beta somewhere off the coast of Spy Kids 4D. A million splintered renderings of classical text that you half-scrawled onto the back of your hand before you realized that you were actually just passed out on the keyboard again. Gasp is like a raw feed of how music itself operates in 2018; brief bursts of genius materializing right before us, only to be swept away and digested into something unrecognizably new. The entire sum of human history rubbing elbows with that ASMR video you had to rush to minimize before your roommate could ask you what the fuck you were just watching. A guy as unassuming as Orange Milk label head Seth Graham conjuring up untold universes of possibility from his home in Dayton, OH, his bank of MIDIs a window into our gentle, distraught, and hilarious world. –Sam Goldner [pagebreak] Klein cc [Self-Released] [LISTEN · READ] “Oh my god! Who’s actually going to listen to this?” asks Klein, lounging with friends, reflecting on her last EP, Tommy and a still-emerging network of diasporic black art and sound. A year and new EP later, cc sees Klein more comfortable in the discomfort, pushing further with her collages of confrontational intimacy. “You have to squint” as the voices build and spiral, like an endless loop of out-of-office replies, a pitch-bent dawn chorus, singing to each other, but listening too. Klein made us think: about blackness, about opacity, about femininity and Disney princesses, all at once. Feelings too, and a lack of language to convey them; anxiety, elation, mania, but less medical, sometimes an incantation, sometimes an exorcism. In cc, Klein created a space of unique and disarming affect and mood: a deeper, darker stage in the process of “me being my own therapist,” the sound of someone finding a plurality of voices, of listening to yourself. –Joel White --- Beach House 7 [Sub Pop] [WATCH · READ] Attempting to describe what dreams are seems like a task both impossible and pretentious. But, as it floats like a wandering mind, drifting from thought to thought with each track, 7 certainly feels like a dream. Alex Scally plays guitar, but it sounds like an unfamiliar squall from another universe. Victoria Legrand sings, but it comes out in French. Look at the clock, you’ll be unable to tell how much time has passed. You know, dream stuff. For a genre that gets its name from something as complex as the random images our brains send to us while we sleep, “dream pop” music can often be very formulaic. That’s why, seven albums into their career, it’s remarkable that Beach House have found a way to not only completely refresh their sound, but make perhaps their best album yet. Awash in a chaotic darkness that’s been lingering in different forms throughout their entire discography, 7 hurtles towards oblivion: beautiful, glorious, infinite. –Jeremy Klein --- Eartheater Irisiri [PAN] [WATCH · LISTEN · READ] I keep losing track of Irisiri; it keeps slipping away from me. This isn’t meant as the insult it might scan as. An elegiac spin on the cyber-cyborg-meat-machine kick that everything relevant is twirling toward, this series of sad little processed ditties and twisted car jams charts a swerve back-and-forth between evasiveness and directness. Its unnerving stuff, giving the impression of solidity while remaining impossible to hold. Flirting with hip-hop and electro-acoustic, bedroom pop and sexed-up sopping wet plastic, it keeps moving out of view, even as I keep returning to it. Listening to the album is like chasing an object out of reach, an object I desire without knowning, a body I want without seeing. Also, C.L.I.T. fucking slaps. –Jessie Jeffrey Dunn Rovinelli --- THE HIRS COLLECTIVE FRIENDS. LOVERS. FAVORITES. [SRA/Get Better] [LISTEN · READ] For a few decades now, raw musical aggression has been underpinned with a lot of unintelligible vocal sentiment. Just steam on in with howling, power riffs and punishing beats please. But what’s that on the edge of the blast radius, dashing in headlong through the smoke? Clear sentiments that uplift, testify, and provide some sharp kicks in heteronormativity’s floppy old dick? Yes please! Even with its closing remix section, the album’s corroded (and collaborative) essence remains triumphantly tight. The perfect way Lilium Kobayashi’s quick stomping techno pop take on “Murdered by a Woman” flits to “Wake Up Tomorrow” when this album is on repeat further dispels any sort of tacked-on/bonus trax superfluousness. The cultural constant of immediate, frothing punk rage is obviously not going anywhere. It’s essential to have an album, in fuck-this-shit 2018, where that rage is specifically righteous, even with its eternally itinerant self-laceration (i.e., humanity). –Willcoma --- Delroy Edwards Rio Grande [L.A. Club Resource] [LISTEN · READ] Delroy Edwards has made the funk (in its many different strains) the connective tissue of his intrepid, joyful, and often perplexing work. It’s an approach never as explicit as in his latest LP, Rio Grande. That might indeed be its greatest success. In Rio Grande, keeping the raw, hissy, determinedly idiosyncratic credentials that first introduced him to the world, Edwards lets the funk take center stage; sometimes riding grimy techno beats, other times pushing beyond the ridiculous-by-design minimalism of the grooves. The goal is simple: to provide his audience with interesting jams to dance to. Edwards takes pride in the anonymous efficiency of that pretense, as the name of his label L.A. Club Resource indicates. He is happy to be the reliable supplier of a service, the invisible demiurge leading patrons to delirium; slipping in some eccentric turns here and there for the kick of it, to the enjoyment of all but mostly because… why the hell not?. And, let there be no doubt, Rio Grande is the most effective toolkit he has yet assembled in pursuit of that goal. –jrodriguez6 [pagebreak] emamouse X yeongrak mouth mouse maus [Quantum Natives] [LISTEN · READ] Hey, not to bring this up here, but borders, am I right? Why do we even have these invisible lines dividing my side from yours? We can get so much more done without them, not to mention the added benefit of not having to split up families in real life as they cross the imaginary demarcations. Who on earth has the chutzpah to enact stupid shit like that? Not emamouse — no way. No, emamouse had the opposite in mind as she commented from her Tokyo base of ops, “What’s this thing keeping me out of New Zealand? An ocean? Screw that!” And thus, the BORDER between Japan and New Zealand was erased forever — whether through the magic of the internet or the ocean suddenly turning into a jello trampoline is anyone’s guess. But emamouse was no longer separated from NZ sound slinger/cartoon centipede yeongrak, and together, through the magic of Quantum Natives, mouth mouse maus was born, a sticky, gooey, sugary, epilepsy-inducing strobe blast of video-game grit and played-with-too-much pink slime from a plastic egg. Cookcook, in her review, inferred that utopias can emerge from collectivity, highlighting the compatibility of these two artists. I think what she meant was “Fruitopia,” which someone obviously spilled all over the mouth mouse maus backup hard drive. Remember Fruitopia? That was Coca-Cola’s own attempt to eradicate borders, except they were the borders between taste and… OK, between them and your money. –Ryan Masteller --- Félicia Atkinson Coyotes [Geographic North] [LISTEN] I once went to New Mexico but mostly stayed inside. Reasons why. Félicia Atkinson’s Coyotes, inspired by her own trip to New Mexico, maps a journey I may have taken, among other wonders. The crafted narrative and its exploratory form gestures toward an experiential unknown. Her travel log collages echoes, maps, receipts, dried leaves, sand stuck in the crevices of shoes, plaques, diary entries, signposts, mythology, spirituality, and the facts and facets of the land’s native and colonial histories into a total atmosphere, something approaching a direct translation of a lingering impression. It’s so effective and affecting, because the whole is actually a scrap: “a slip of paper, something/tiny & torn off/lifted by the wind” writes poet Christian Hawkey in Citizen Of. Atkinson lineates her memories into similarly moving verses. –Cookcook --- Pusha T Daytona [G.O.O.D. Music] [LISTEN · READ] DAYTONA by Pusha T is hard work. It’s this blurb being written at 5:20 AM on the 7-train to “the office” a day after having led 46 tweens on a non-stop four-day Boston field trip. It’s teaching about heterosexism and female empowerment, leading sixth grade field day, and handling logistics for eighth grade graduation in a single day. It’s your body feeling like a crash-test dummy on a Wednesday, having left in the early, early morning, putting in 12 hours of sweating gallons for money, and arriving home at 8:30 PM. It’s wearing Terminator shades on 125th Street talking Spanish to people you never met. It’s the endurance of confidence while facing every fear you’ve experienced — focused — diving straight into the freezing water. DAYTONA proves Pusha T and Kanye are relentless professionals that continue to transcend literary and sonic aesthetics in space and time. We need role models like these, forever. –C Monster --- DJ Koze Knock Knock [Pampa] [LISTEN · READ] Many publications have referred to Stefan Kozalla as a “trickster” or a “prankster.” While there are freckles of truth on the face of that assessment, much of his affability comes from his most mistaken quality: his earnestness. It’s what makes him such a delightful musicmaker. Being earnest, of course, is the perfect foil to the kind of negativist universalism that plagues the psychedelics/mindfulness landscape in which DJ Koze so often finds himself (and, also, finds himself). Koze’s House is perfect (see: “Pick Up”) and his plunder-pop turns weird into sublime and vice versa (see: the wails incorporated into “Scratch That”), but it’s his unpresuming and gracious approach to influences, samples, and collaborations that push this record into extraordinary territory. It’s not alien; it’s absolutely Earthly, and it reflects so well the modest subject that is Koze. After all, Koze never changes, except in his affections. –E. Fosl --- Elysia Crampton Elysia Crampton [Break World] [WATCH · READ] Elysia Crampton opens in media res, with a nativity. And then it revs up, restlessly — its machinic gears grind like plant medicine visions; water flows and burbles; disharmonic chords take us in unanticipatable directions. And through it all, the oscollo, the feline guardian of people outside gender binaries, oscillates wildly. Elysia Crampton’s maximalist approach takes it beyond the strings and cackles of 2016’s Demon City, yet Golgotha remains always present. Standout track “Moscow (Mariposa Voladora)” was inspired by Ofelia, a Bolivian mariposa (“femme revolutionary”), and it judders roughly, darkly. Crampton’s Aymara and trans identity are her displaced subjects, particularly in light of the gestural movement between her origins in Bolivia and her current home in the US. But this is not any straightforward folk music revival — rather, it’s a deconstruction that reconstructs. The difficulties and contradictions of critical theory, in particular writers such as José Muñoz and his exploration of queer brown-ness, are braided into the work. The first written reference to queers as mariposillas (“little butterflies”) is from Pedro Cieza de León, in the 16th century, in which he compares “sodomites,” subject to punishment by burning at the stake, to moths drawn to the flame. The suffering of our ancestors can’t be recuperated, but through art, we may yet dance grotesquely but triumphantly on the pyre. –Rowan Savage [pagebreak] The Caretaker Everywhere at the end of time - Stage 4 [History Always Favours The Winners] [LISTEN · READ] The late hauntologist Mark Fisher once cruelly noted that the OED lists one of the earliest meanings of the word “haunt” as “to provide with a home, house.” And now that we live in a world that has lost the very possibility of loss, we have also lost the one who can lose, cohabiting with oneself in the present’s presence. Ghosts no longer have a home to haunt in any case, and their yearning and lingering voices are consigned to a past that can never pass away. Although it is haunting and horrifying to behold Everywhere at the end of time’s fourth installment pass from memories to their source — what Kirby calls “the post-awareness stage” — perhaps we must be grateful that someone can forget (for (us)). For, the source of memory must remain, even after all memory has been stripped away from it, even though this source can never be aware of itself. Yet, this source is not, strictly speaking, an identity. What it may be I do not know, but The Caretaker allows you to hear, what, behind those eyes, devoid of any recognition of life; we hope, we plead to be someone who remembers us, yet the only bliss, as transient as it is empty, is the wry smile that, for an instant, says, “Do not save me.” –Evan Coral --- Lucrecia Dalt Anticlines [RVNG Intl.] [WATCH · READ] OK, Hoag. You wake up in 1925, in a different place but with the same objects. Lucrecia Dalt’s Anticlines is playing on the victrola. She sings, “Skinless others/ Oils on waters,” and you realize you’re in the same room as the killer. The only other person in the room is dressed exactly like you, and that person’s talking up the other place — the one you believe you are still in — saying, “I think you’d like it there.” Where again? Both places go out of view. Now possibly dreaming, in a time and place before flight, Gein or radio, you wait at a blue-dipped railway platform as trains roll by on their way to Oclupaca and Ortseam. You’re hoping to catch a ride to somewhere similar but elsewhere, more elemental, past the unseen concupiscence between thermosphere and exosphere, out there where you don’t have to wonder, anymore, what the toys do while you’re away. –Rick Weaver --- Tierra Whack Whack World [Self-Released] [STREAM] In the face of incomprehensible excess and stream-gaming nonsense, Tierra Whack — yes, that’s her real name — provides a grotesque yet charming response with the wonderfully weird “Whack World.” Rather than dragging the tempo or chopping the tracklist, the 22-year-old Philly rapper embraces something like a skip-button aesthetic of preview clips and non-member samples, unceremoniously cutting off her songs as soon as they hit the one-minute mark. With 15 songs in just 15 minutes — an absurdity further heightened by its surreal video — traditional payoffs are just beyond reach, forcing us to sit through a goofy, lighthearted romp of youthful innovation and bizarre genre play that includes everything from slow jams and trap bangers to country parodies and kids pop. It’s delightfully ridiculous and sometimes annoying af, but it arrives with undeniable energy and child-like wonder, bursting out confetti-like from a singular, captivating voice who’s on one of this year’s quickest and most unexpected come-ups. Blink and you’ll miss it. That’s the point. –ミスターおしっこ --- GAS Rausch [Kompakt] [WATCH · LISTEN · READ] I consumed the hour-long experience of Rausch, blaring through my headphones, as golden hour became twilight and the mosquitoes started biting. Luckily, my timing was great; 2017’s Narkopop, with its penchant for forlorn ruminations, ultimately owed a lot to its namesake: pop music. Now, those hopeful moments of liquid sunlight are far away. Rausch finds GAS staying true to its typically ascetic atmosphere, but any strand of accessible melodicism is replaced by shattering layers of dissonant drone upon drone, Doppler effect-synths, and percussive textures that pierce through it all — shimmering cymbals, palpitating kick-snare rhythms. As each funeral march bleeds into the next, the delirious effects of Rausch take hold. My arms are covered in bites, and temperatures still haven’t dropped below 90. For the superimposed intensity of Rausch, a more fitting listening environment couldn’t be created. –Rounak Maiti --- The Body I Have Fought Against It, But I Can’t Any Longer [Thrill Jockey] [LISTEN · READ] It’s so much to bear. We’re expected to carry more than our own weight. The pain and suffering of our past traumas, the present crises, the future uncertainties. More and more, any attempts to alleviate the pain, to share the burden, are undermined. All we ever wanted, all untenable. They demand purity (in lieu of that, submission by “privilege”), individuality, personalization, subscription. They won’t cry for us. Everything must be on you and you alone. Time will not notice you are nothing. You are already hatred as an abstract to someone else. The pull of the personal must end. The allure of ontology and self-indulgence must be shattered in the face of those who leer lewdly into its mirror and contort on the floor in false ecstasy. But it is a painful burden. “I lower my guilty-looking eyes. I’m afraid of looking people in the eye.” War is necessary and proper, to shatter illusions. But it’s all so much to bear. –Ze Pequeno [pagebreak] serpentwithfeet soil [Tri Angle/Secretly Canadian] [WATCH · LISTEN · READ] It’s crazy to think that soil is serpentwithfeet’s debut album. The queer, pagan singer, a former choir boy from Baltimore, emerged in 2016 with blisters, a set of mesmerizing slices of new age R&B delving into faith, superstition, and love. His voice and composition live up to the lofty themes; delicate and meandering, serpent recalled the acrobatic opulence of 90s R&B with brooding, industrial production from The Haxan Cloak. The most visionary artists are those who sound like nothing other than themselves and exhibit a gravitational aura that inspires imitation, lust, and disbelief. soil lurches and waltzes, while Josiah Wise, who prefers to go by “serpent,” remains fully exposed in the mix, employing innovative vocal stacks that whisper, conjure, and croon behind him like a choir of restless spirits. Despite the divine quality to serpent’s voice, which is at times shellacked with layers, often battling against static noise and its own quivering vibrato, the subject matter of soil is immediately relatable and quotidian: the navigation of a shifting dating landscape, the sublime essences of individuals, intimacy and grace in heartbreak, the projection of sorrow onto the world. serpent doesn’t want to be “small sad,” but “big, big sad,” to the point that he’s sure his friends are “tired of him talking.” The domesticity infects us all: How can we properly grieve? How can we redeem ourselves? The occult instrumentation falls away to reveal a queer individual who is merely describing their personal desires. –Ross Devlin --- Sara Davachi Let Night Come On Bells End The Day [Recital] [LISTEN · READ] I walked through the streets barefoot, clothed only in a robe. The bells were ringing, playing their ancient song, letting the world know that the night had begun. My feet were bleeding from the cobblestone streets, which is how they found me in the morning, just outside of town in the woods. I didn’t drink that night. The evening swept me up, and some tribal instinct forced me outside in virtually nothing. My neighbors looked and closed their curtain as I kept walking, holding the hand of the force that was dragging me. I remember parts like my head hurting and my eyes watering. I remember spinning in the center of town underneath a street lamp. I don’t remember why I left town and headed toward the woods. I don’t know why I left my house. I remember being woken up by the police and being embarrassed to face to my neighbors. They took me home and put me in bed, because the medic cleared me at the site. I’ve never spoken of it since, and I still clench up when the night comes on and the bells end the day. –Sam Tornow --- Jenny Hval The Long Sleep EP [Sacred Bones] [WATCH · LISTEN · READ] Roping in some of her favorite jazz musicians to explore ideas, Jenny Hval has managed to escape the noose of her recent collaborative concepts and delve within to produce yet another stunning act of imagination. The pure reach and weight of The Long Sleep is extraordinary. Hval moves across emotional ground with certainty and delicacy, capturing the subtlest of feelings. Like a soundtrack to a brilliant short, Hval plays with recurring motifs first presented in the “conventional” “Spells,” but then swerves genre expectations along the way, through the piano-led clap frappe of “The Dreamer Is Everyone in Her Dream” to the blissful title track drone. On “I Want to Tell You Something,” her presence is so powerful, as she attempts to express trance closure through an oblique narrative before realizing simple words are all she needs. Fecund, savage, and irresistible, The Long Sleep demonstrates once again why Hval is so intriguing. –David Nadelle --- Gemini Sisters Gemini Sisters [Psychic Trouble] [LISTEN] How does one describe something so beautiful and uplifting — a beacon of light in a shroud a darkness. I was wallowing deep in the muck and mire, desperate to claw out of it rather than sinking down into it. But that tar pit of sorrow and defeat is thick, and it cares not about your will. But I saw the light and followed it. It led me to two helpful, outstretched hands. Jon Kolodij and Matt Christensen met my palm with a hardy grasp and a hefty pull. And I felt the warmth of Gemini Sisters. The sprawling, uplifting sonic aura of the duo’s debut speaks to energy from whence Kolodij and Christensen are christened: the two having their daughters born on the same day of the same year (and those offspring being Geminis). It shows with the delicacy of their aural attack. It is spiritual, reaching toward the heavens to pluck the constellation and bringing its brightness to our darkest places. Right now, the flesh is weak and the mind wavers. But our essence remains pure and chaste. Thanks to Kolodij and Christensen, I have traded the hastened quicksand for a tether to the sprawling galaxy. –Jspicer --- Christina Vantzou No. 4 [Kranky] [LISTEN · READ] When you’re in a vehicle moving at a slow, constant speed, sometimes you can convince yourself that you aren’t moving at all. No. 4 moves me like that. I know how tired that metaphor is, and if you listen to gentle drones like “At Dawn” and “Remote Polyphony” and think I’m a hack for digging the spatial metaphor up once again to describe slow, deliberate music, I understand. But I feel that uneasy compromise between motion and rest deeply and at every strange, shimmering moment of the album. It’s in the bells of “Percussion in Nonspace,” ringing in a sort of dual presence and absence; in the little arpeggio that creeps up through “Doorway;” in the pitch-affected choral chant that closes out “Sound House.” Whether we interpret track titles as thematic hints or as mere word games, the names of the tracks on No. 4 suggest, along with the music, that Christina Vantzou wants to domesticate and eventually upend and denature space through sound. Usually a device for ordering abstraction, she turns that hackneyed spatial metaphor into one for abstracting order. This record moves at no speed, in no direction, and toward no goal, except maybe to suspend us temporarily in a kind of beauty without dimension, not far from terror. –Will Neibergall --- Kanye West ye [G.O.O.D./Def Jam] [LISTEN · READ] Just because an album sparks cathartic conversations doesn’t mean it’s good, and not all good albums invite candid dinner table discussions concerning their mercurial merits. Kanye, however, has just as big of a reputation for arousing furor as he does for leaving listeners speechless. Meanwhile, critics scramble for thoughtful words that won’t get them blacklisted for being associated with that black magic that has been infiltrating every aspect of daily life since Cain murdered Abel, thus birthing division. Calling ye a divisive document at TMT would be an understatement, and attributing its inclusion here to justifying countless hours of collectively unpacking just over 23 minutes of noise would obscure what ye actually contains: disturbing spoken word admonitions about premeditated murder, breathless bars on prescription drug addiction, ironic fantasies about butts of sex scandals, gorgeous gospel keys and beautiful dark twisted harmonies, celebratory reflections on fame and success, spectral arena rock vibes, and staggering room for growth cleared out by fear and love and loyalty. Regardless of our own individual feelings, ye keeps reminding us that this music shit that gets us through each day often requires plunging into dark places and reemerging with our own beacons of light. Believe it or not, I still love it, and like watching a bright-eyed child grow up in a world this dark, I’m terrified and excited for what’s next. –Jazz Scott --- The Shortlist: King Vision Ultra’s Pain of Mind, Shygirl’s Cruel Practice, Oneohtrix Point Never’s Age Of, Ashley Paul’s Lost In Shadows, James Ferraro’s Four Pieces For Mirai, Larry Wish’s How More Can You Need, Jon Hassell’s Listening To Pictures, Rainforest Spiritual Enslavement’s Red Ants Genesis, Parquet Courts’s Wide Awake!, The Carters’ EVERYTHING IS LOVE, Bernice’s Puff LP, Carla Bozulich’s Quieter, Pinkshinyultrablast’s Miserable Miracles, Duppy Gun Productions’s Miro Tape, DRINKS’s Hippo Lite, Valee’s GOOD Job, You Found Me, and Frog Eyes’ Violet Psalms.   http://j.mp/2Kt2EKx

[thetrashbang]

Brigador and the Art of Sky-High Storytelling

“GREAT LEADER IS DEAD. SOLO NOBRE MUST FALL.”

The first spoken words of Brigador, synthesised through a muffled speaker and emblazoned on-screen in bold, unadorned, searing red letters, are all the exposition it strictly needs: it is a time of great upheaval on the frontier colony of Solo Nobre, and you, with your ten-ton armoured mercenary mech, are here to do some heaving. Narrative and lore are strictly confined to downtime; to dense slabs of text filed neatly away in the codex, to be optionally purchased and read at one’s leisure. There’s no place in the combat for direct storytelling, between the rumbling of diesel engines and the whip-crack of electromagnetic slugs, and even if there was, it’d be little more than poorly embellished justifications for “go here, destroy those buildings, go there, destroy those units, leave.”

But to dismiss Brigador as pure context-free action is to fail to recognise how it speaks. When we think of environmental storytelling, we think small. We think of unconvincing graffiti on crumbling walls, half-finished meals, abandoned chess boards, desks piled high with papers, carefully-placed bookmarks, downed tools and barricaded doors. We think of skeletons in compromising poses, and trails of blood that laugh in the face of a bucket of bleach. Personal stories are made when people leave personal imprints, as taken to extremes by, say, Fullbright’s shtick of giving you a whole night to rummage through your family’s household belongings unfettered. For this very reason, the most popular examples of experiences with environmental storytelling are largely those that enable you to get up close and pick it apart, preferably without being too rushed. There’s a special kind of intimacy in it, almost voyeuristic, as you sift through the documents of a person who would certainly have objected to your intrusion if they weren’t lying slumped against a nearby desk with an alien birthing cavity where their guts used to be.

Brigador is the antithesis of that. Its sky-high isometric viewpoint, panning silently over the streets, gives you little such insight into the fine details. You can’t tell the story of a person from up here—at least, not easily—but you can tell the stories of people. And war is all about people, collectively; people fighting, people fleeing, people dying. Stories of lone figures, unless they hold huge power or significance, are swept away in the tide of shared tales, told through numbers rather than poignant letters to mother. You can pluck lone individuals out, humanise them and piece together their fate, but chances are that they were just one of a hundred, or a thousand, or a million people in the same boat, going through the same motions. Those collective motions, and their collective effects, are the ones that Brigador’s environments make us privy to.

One major target objective recurs through your missions: the orbital guns. Solo Nobre’s surface bristles with these skyward-pointed cannons, designed to obliterate any spacefaring aid that so much as entertains the thought of helping liberate the colony. Naturally, they’ve got to go, but it’s the way they impose on their surroundings, irrespective of context, that fascinates me. Taller than a city block, frequently ringed by sheer defensive walls and expanses of flat asphalt, their incongruousness isn’t just stark; it’s deliberately exaggerated. They invade the space around them, like alien landing craft, making no effort to compromise or integrate no matter where they are. To us, the player, they drive home the extent to which recent rampant militarization has dominated the lives of Solo Nobre’s people. What’s it like to have one of those things in your back yard? On your block? In your cemetery? Looming threateningly, a permanent reminder that the entire colony was, and is, ruled through military force. It’s all too easy to imagine them just springing up one night in a flurry of jackbooted activity, confusing and unnerving locals who understand nothing of the political situation, only that they’re now the unwilling neighbours of the biggest, juiciest, most explosive target in the district.

Most of Solo Nobre looks as if it sprung up overnight, to be honest. Many of the maps have a decidedly frontier air to them, sharply contrasting undeveloped wastelands with industrial and agricultural estates—or outright shanty towns, on occasion—and even developed zones are often distinctly utilitarian, as if the first construction efforts focused solely on establishing the functional basics and nobody’s had a chance to do a second pass. Why is that important? Because it means that whatever worldly influences went into the colony’s initial construction—the decisions, the constraints, the goals—are still relevant. Spaces change meaning over time; they get repurposed, recontextualised, rebuilt, and in the process the original intent of their structure gets muddled. Solo Nobre hasn’t had a chance to get especially muddled yet: everything on the landscape feels as if it has a current, relevant reason to be there. The story of the colony is coded into its infrastructure, fresh as the first coat of gunmetal-grey paint. Roads, buildings, fences, zones.

And wouldn’t you know it? That’s the part that you, with the omnipotent eyes of a SimCity mayor, are perfectly situated to deconstruct—in the analytical sense, I mean. You see the way the streets are laid out and the way blocks are divvied up; the way patterns and biases have formed in the overarching organisation—or lack thereof—of the urban sprawl. What becomes noticeable almost immediately is… lines. Often games with isometric grid presentation will seek to break up the grid; to introduce chaos and noise to obscure the perfect, infinite parallel lines that give their environments such an artificial, manufactured air. Brigador relishes in it. Brigador loves the grid. It goes out of its way to propagate unbroken, arrow-straight walls and roads for miles. They speak of an ultramodern, efficient, painfully austere development process; the kind that rolls out state utilities like a titanic machine, paving anything that stands in its way with no regard for landscape or lives. To be more exact, they make it clear that they’re not the product of democratic civil planning, but of orders from on high, carving up and commodifying the colony like the centrepiece of some debaucherous banquet. In a more striking fashion than any graffiti decal or audio log, these pieces of Brigador’s public infrastructure illustrate the disconnected, totalitarian whims of its administration. A casual flick of a cufflinked wrist and suddenly a neighbourhood is living in the shadow of five storeys’ worth of reinforced concrete. Are you in the way? Time to relocate, Mr Dent.

But apathetic architecture isn’t the same as thoughtless architecture. One of the clearest intents behind much of Solo Nobre’s urban planning is its concerted effort to distance the haves and the have-nots, coddling the former and shutting out the latter. Cramped slums frequently sit side-by-side with idyllic American Dream suburbs, divided by district walls—once again, we return to walls—that have been coated on one side with improbably tall hedges, so their viewers may entertain the fragment of an illusion that all is well in their slice of freshly-mowed Eden. Such proximity between the wealthy and the poor suggests that space is scarce on Solo Nobre, but not so scarce that the former can’t afford to have sweeping lawns and tacky, towering neoclassical McMansions. You could be forgiven for starting to wonder if something’s wrong with the scale, when your titanic walking weapons platform that could put a foot through a tower block suddenly has to crane its neck to shoot over a family home, but no—it’s just another way of illustrating the yawning gulf in privilege to your eye in the sky. One mission takes you out onto the green expanses of a country club, which—along with a sizeable occupying force, obviously—also features imposing gun turrets built into the landscape, poking out the top of more hedge-covered fortifications. Why would a golf course need such entrenched defensive measures, in what we’ve been led to believe was a relatively peaceful time? They can only have been a means of deterrence; of scaring away the riff-raff and making the privileged feel secure, without the excessive use of unsightly district checkpoints and barricades.

Yet even with this sweeping disparity, there’s a common thread in Solo Nobre of humanisation of oppressive spaces. Between hulking pipelines, paved concrete expanses and endless bleak industrial estates, there’s mounting evidence that Great Leader’s priorities were not the well-being of his workers, but here and there are tiny, isolated reminders that people still manage to engage in recreation. A single basketball hoop at the end of a loading dock, lined by rows of identical storage units; a children’s climbing frame in the middle of a muddy plot, ringed by skeletal steel pylons; a lone fifties-style diner, complete with a scattering of those cheap white plastic chairs, bleached by the halogen glow of a communications mast. They’re fragments of lives, not destined to be pieced together into a cohesive narrative, but to simply remind us that even in the city’s coldest, most utilitarian corners, people are not drones. Until now, we’ve focused on tales of communities and collectives, but to view people only in the plural like this is to risk treating them as so many trivial organisms under a microscope, always moving in tides, their individual impulses lost in the swarm. It’s details like these that keep us grounded, so to speak, even while gazing down at the sprawl.

That’s all just history, though, innit? That’s stuff that happened over months, years, decades even. But some of the imprints on Brigador’s landscape are more temporal, left by events far more relevant to your current mission. Solo Nobre’s liberation takes place over a single night—or so it’s implied—and while you may be the first to fire a shot, you’re certainly not the first to make a move.

Traffic. It’s the traffic. You could initially be forgiven for thinking that the streets of Solo Nobre, despite their spaciousness and high standard of upkeep, don’t seem to be getting a lot of use; they’re utterly devoid of active civilian vehicles, trodden only by the assorted war machines of your opponents. Brigador doesn’t feature non-combatant units—other than the tiny raincoat-clad civilians who mill around helplessly until being crushed carelessly underfoot—but nevertheless, you’ll soon find remains of traffic jams around the maps: gridlocked, bumped-to-bumper, clearly long-since abandoned when it became apparent none of it was ever going to budge an inch further. Why would it be so tightly packed, and trail so far back, in a city where the highways are so wide that you could triple-park an interstellar freighter across one without making everyone late for work?

Once again, placement is the key. Brigador’s abandoned traffic isn’t randomly distributed, but concentrated around particular points. Lanes upon lanes of gently cooling automobiles are regularly found clustered in front of district checkpoints, around spaceports, even outside train depots, seemingly stopped in their tracks. A picture forms; a picture of a reeling state power rushing to regain its faculties, crack down on sudden unrest, minimize chaos. Of people hearing the news, sensing the forthcoming conflict, choking the roads with their attempts to flee. Of the two forces colliding in the lengthening shadows of a checkpoint, a cacophony of horns and furious shouts assaulting a grim military police barricade. Evacuation efforts scuppered. Deadlock. Until the Corvids turn up in their scrapyard siege engines and flatten a few city blocks, obviously.

But the exodus of Solo Nobre isn’t a complete failure. As your trail of destruction spirals out towards the edges of the colony, from the urban sprawl to its inevitable, oft-forgotten by-products, signs of relief begin to manifest. Nestled up against neglected pipelines and crumbling walls are clusters of blue tents—the kind of blue they only ever use on tarpaulins and concert port-a-potties—propped up with flimsy poles, dulled by the mud of the wastes. They’re ramshackle, disorganised, and frequently located in spots of dubious tactical importance, all of which suggest that while the materials might come from a Loyalist source, they’ve certainly not been set up under any kind of military coordination. Indeed, their most unifying quality seems to be that they’ve been pitched out of the way of populated zones—presumably by people who have had quite enough near misses with cluster mortar strikes for one night. These are camps set up by refugees, no way around it; people fleeing the power struggle, one way or another, trying to hole up somewhere so backwater that nobody would waste time fighting over it. Alas, as the presence of you and your enemies implies, they’re disastrously wrong. But that can’t be helped now, can it?

I suppose the only thing left to wonder is what, if anything, Brigador hopes to make us feel with all this effort. It leaves features on the landscape to tell us that these things happened, but despite our inarguable involvement, never ties those events back to us; never blames us for displacing innocent people, destroying their homes and gibbing them in the streets with careless cannon fire. In a game that encourages you to look at your environment in terms of little more than the cover it offers, it’s easy to tune out such ghastly side effects, particularly when the only feedback you get from razing civilian buildings to the ground is a miniscule bonus—yes, a bonus, perplexingly—to your end-of-level payout. No guilt, no joy, just a matter-of-fact occurrence. But as a mercenary, fighting first and foremost for a sodding huge cheque, perhaps it’s only appropriate that the only stimulus you get from needless destruction is an insignificant increment on your score counter. What better metaphor could there be for the faint flicker of acknowledgement, cold and distant as the shores of Titan, in a mind focused entirely on the task at hand?

It’s not easy, communicating using only the features that are visible to passing airliners, but Brigador plays to its strengths. It focuses on sweeping trends and dramatic shifts—which are, of course, common during times of unrest—using them to speak of the effects of dictatorial regime and violent power struggles, but scatters around visible one-off details too, as humanising fragments for those who stop and take notice. Nobody could ever describe it as an epic narrative tour-de-force, but I find it to be a fabulous example of working within limitations; of understanding how sociopolitical transformations can embed their effects in the landscape, and how we can read them back again—so long as they aren’t demolished by a Killdozer first, anyway.

[oneent-blog]

Feature: 2018: Second Quarter Favorites

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TMT’s Musical Innovation Summit, now in its 14th year, is the oldest meeting of its kind in the industry. Like last quarter’s summit, roughly 10 music professionals from TMT gathered in New York to discuss the latest musical breakthroughs and make predictions on which releases will spark future awe-inspiring innovations.

To help make the predictions, we interviewed 45 random fans, 30 venture capitalists, and a handful of media who cover the music industry across the country to get their collective thoughts on what’s imminent. That list is then honed by eliminating long-shot candidates, followed by a double-elimination round to get rid of shitty artists. Nominees are thoroughly vetted, and the groups eliminate candidates throughout the process.

Today, we are proud to present the results: the BEST 26 releases of the last three months (with a shortlist at the end). We predict that these releases will change music forever.

SOPHIE

OIL OF EVERY PEARL’S UN-INSIDES

[Future Classic]

[WATCH · READ]

Now’s raw doubt flanges in this memory’s mercury, and we’re back in the basement dark, floor paved with silver marbles. We will shine a light on one, outline the floor with reflecting. I ask are you sure of this? and you say no, never not of any thing. You squeeze your foreign-feeling shoulder, slim quick doubt. Then you hold a marble up to your eye, unclipped cuticles before corneas, a silver pearl. It’s okay. Flashlight on. We gape. There is no neat sequence. No light is set Surface contorts seeing. The shining is bent in coils. There is no straight path, just what we can move into in this whole new world. Roll the flashlight, and it’s a world warping, brilliance refracted, reflections re-membering. The world we built in the dark teaches us how being between might be. Our un-insides, SOPHIE’s sound, teaches us that brilliance doesn’t diminish its self, that light and self and is what we call it. And you say call me Vivian. Becoming who we’re becoming, “no matter where I go, you’ll be here in my heart.” –Frank Falisi

Playboi Carti

Die Lit

[Interscope/AWGE]

[LISTEN · READ]

The arrival of Playboi Carti’s debut album proper, following last year’s crucial self-titled mixtape, could seem like a mere victory lap, an easy cop-out that plays up to the well-established framework of overstuffed rap albums in the streaming age. What a pleasure, then, that Die Lit implodes that logic. The heady balance of mood pieces and out-and-out anthems that characterized Playboi Carti is further refined here, but even without that baggage, Die Lit is a success on its own terms, a flickering visage that compounds Carti’s most enticing impulses — barely-there vocals, Reichian repetition, knotty Pi’erre Bourne beats — with all the best facets of the album form. And if Carti is only incidental on the mic, the tracks left in his wake are anything but. Herein lies a set of real Ohrwürmer, the inner soundtrack to your day, long after the album subsides. The cloud bursts forth; lightning really does strike twice. –Soe Jherwood

DJ Healer / Prime Minister of Doom

Nothing 2 Loose / Mudshadow Propaganda

[All Possible Worlds]

[LISTEN · LISTEN]

On DJ Metatron’s 2 The Sky, the anonymous artist threaded a Jake Gyllenhaal interview through intricate waves of house music that helped give rise to this enigmatic and highly gifted producer. This year, his efforts have come twofold, with a double release under two new monikers that plot the same channels of intricacy but through two very different means. In place of the Donnie Darko reflection that deepens the narrative of 2 The Sky is a 2002 Whitney Houston interview with Diane Sawyer, where the troubled singer discusses her drug problems and an unnerving sense of optimism that inevitably collapsed 10 years later. Essentially, the music that accompanies both of these otherwise unrelated samples is the atmospheric gel that binds them together; an actor speaking about his fascination with a perplexing story line, and a generational icon battling with herself, fighting to overcome the very thing that took her life. That disparity lies at the heart of this joint release, which merges two highly distinctive personalities while linking them through religious and personal overtones. Mudshadow Propaganda is perfect in its projection of minimal techno tracks that build on the traits of our secretive producer’s expired alias, The Prince of Denmark, while Nothing 2 Loose is almost confessional in the sincerity that it lays bare. But where both records celebrate the dexterity and imagination of a single producer, they also paint a picture of human existence at its most conflicted, from the carnal and the primitive to the haunted and the divine. –Birkut

Grouper

Grid of Points

[Kranky]

[LISTEN · READ]

In seven tracks and less than 30 minutes, Liz Harris sought to take us nowhere. So she stranded us anywhere. Giving up on finding anything instructive or stabilizing in the passing moan of a stray vocal, the odd cluster of muted piano keys, or the occasional sharp gust of static, it became clear that the only place where anything “new” could happen was in a place where nothing old and familiar was left. “Where are we?” started to sound more like “Where aren’t we?” It might have been some heavenly shoreline where the water was the same perfect gunmetal color as the sky, but it might just as likely have been the vacant parking lot of some long-since-demolished Disneyland. It didn’t really matter. Anyplace we chose to stand and look from was just as good (or bad) as another. “Might as well call this the center,” we figured. Gotta start somewhere. –Dan Smart

Seth Graham

Gasp

[Orange Milk/Noumenal Loom]

[LISTEN · READ]

A symphony of perversions and memories that ignites every time you rapid-fire through your Instagram stories. Refried beans left over from the camping trip you took to a closed beta somewhere off the coast of Spy Kids 4D. A million splintered renderings of classical text that you half-scrawled onto the back of your hand before you realized that you were actually just passed out on the keyboard again. Gasp is like a raw feed of how music itself operates in 2018; brief bursts of genius materializing right before us, only to be swept away and digested into something unrecognizably new. The entire sum of human history rubbing elbows with that ASMR video you had to rush to minimize before your roommate could ask you what the fuck you were just watching. A guy as unassuming as Orange Milk label head Seth Graham conjuring up untold universes of possibility from his home in Dayton, OH, his bank of MIDIs a window into our gentle, distraught, and hilarious world. –Sam Goldner

[pagebreak]

Klein

cc

[Self-Released]

[LISTEN · READ]

“Oh my god! Who’s actually going to listen to this?” asks Klein, lounging with friends, reflecting on her last EP, Tommy and a still-emerging network of diasporic black art and sound. A year and new EP later, cc sees Klein more comfortable in the discomfort, pushing further with her collages of confrontational intimacy. “You have to squint” as the voices build and spiral, like an endless loop of out-of-office replies, a pitch-bent dawn chorus, singing to each other, but listening too. Klein made us think: about blackness, about opacity, about femininity and Disney princesses, all at once. Feelings too, and a lack of language to convey them; anxiety, elation, mania, but less medical, sometimes an incantation, sometimes an exorcism. In cc, Klein created a space of unique and disarming affect and mood: a deeper, darker stage in the process of “me being my own therapist,” the sound of someone finding a plurality of voices, of listening to yourself. –Joel White

Beach House

7

[Sub Pop]

[WATCH · READ]

Attempting to describe what dreams are seems like a task both impossible and pretentious. But, as it floats like a wandering mind, drifting from thought to thought with each track, 7 certainly feels like a dream. Alex Scally plays guitar, but it sounds like an unfamiliar squall from another universe. Victoria Legrand sings, but it comes out in French. Look at the clock, you’ll be unable to tell how much time has passed. You know, dream stuff. For a genre that gets its name from something as complex as the random images our brains send to us while we sleep, “dream pop” music can often be very formulaic. That’s why, seven albums into their career, it’s remarkable that Beach House have found a way to not only completely refresh their sound, but make perhaps their best album yet. Awash in a chaotic darkness that’s been lingering in different forms throughout their entire discography, 7 hurtles towards oblivion: beautiful, glorious, infinite. –Jeremy Klein

Eartheater

Irisiri

[PAN]

[WATCH · LISTEN · READ]

I keep losing track of Irisiri; it keeps slipping away from me. This isn’t meant as the insult it might scan as. An elegiac spin on the cyber-cyborg-meat-machine kick that everything relevant is twirling toward, this series of sad little processed ditties and twisted car jams charts a swerve back-and-forth between evasiveness and directness. Its unnerving stuff, giving the impression of solidity while remaining impossible to hold. Flirting with hip-hop and electro-acoustic, bedroom pop and sexed-up sopping wet plastic, it keeps moving out of view, even as I keep returning to it. Listening to the album is like chasing an object out of reach, an object I desire without knowning, a body I want without seeing. Also, C.L.I.T. fucking slaps. –Jessie Jeffrey Dunn Rovinelli

THE HIRS COLLECTIVE

FRIENDS. LOVERS. FAVORITES.

[SRA/Get Better]

[LISTEN · READ]

For a few decades now, raw musical aggression has been underpinned with a lot of unintelligible vocal sentiment. Just steam on in with howling, power riffs and punishing beats please. But what’s that on the edge of the blast radius, dashing in headlong through the smoke? Clear sentiments that uplift, testify, and provide some sharp kicks in heteronormativity’s floppy old dick? Yes please! Even with its closing remix section, the album’s corroded (and collaborative) essence remains triumphantly tight. The perfect way Lilium Kobayashi’s quick stomping techno pop take on “Murdered by a Woman” flits to “Wake Up Tomorrow” when this album is on repeat further dispels any sort of tacked-on/bonus trax superfluousness. The cultural constant of immediate, frothing punk rage is obviously not going anywhere. It’s essential to have an album, in fuck-this-shit 2018, where that rage is specifically righteous, even with its eternally itinerant self-laceration (i.e., humanity). –Willcoma

Delroy Edwards

Rio Grande

[L.A. Club Resource]

[LISTEN · READ]

Delroy Edwards has made the funk (in its many different strains) the connective tissue of his intrepid, joyful, and often perplexing work. It’s an approach never as explicit as in his latest LP, Rio Grande. That might indeed be its greatest success. In Rio Grande, keeping the raw, hissy, determinedly idiosyncratic credentials that first introduced him to the world, Edwards lets the funk take center stage; sometimes riding grimy techno beats, other times pushing beyond the ridiculous-by-design minimalism of the grooves. The goal is simple: to provide his audience with interesting jams to dance to. Edwards takes pride in the anonymous efficiency of that pretense, as the name of his label L.A. Club Resource indicates. He is happy to be the reliable supplier of a service, the invisible demiurge leading patrons to delirium; slipping in some eccentric turns here and there for the kick of it, to the enjoyment of all but mostly because… why the hell not?. And, let there be no doubt, Rio Grande is the most effective toolkit he has yet assembled in pursuit of that goal. –jrodriguez6

[pagebreak]

emamouse X yeongrak

mouth mouse maus

[Quantum Natives]

[LISTEN · READ]

Hey, not to bring this up here, but borders, am I right? Why do we even have these invisible lines dividing my side from yours? We can get so much more done without them, not to mention the added benefit of not having to split up families in real life as they cross the imaginary demarcations. Who on earth has the chutzpah to enact stupid shit like that? Not emamouse — no way. No, emamouse had the opposite in mind as she commented from her Tokyo base of ops, “What’s this thing keeping me out of New Zealand? An ocean? Screw that!” And thus, the BORDER between Japan and New Zealand was erased forever — whether through the magic of the internet or the ocean suddenly turning into a jello trampoline is anyone’s guess. But emamouse was no longer separated from NZ sound slinger/cartoon centipede yeongrak, and together, through the magic of Quantum Natives, mouth mouse maus was born, a sticky, gooey, sugary, epilepsy-inducing strobe blast of video-game grit and played-with-too-much pink slime from a plastic egg. Cookcook, in her review, inferred that utopias can emerge from collectivity, highlighting the compatibility of these two artists. I think what she meant was “Fruitopia,” which someone obviously spilled all over the mouth mouse maus backup hard drive. Remember Fruitopia? That was Coca-Cola’s own attempt to eradicate borders, except they were the borders between taste and… OK, between them and your money. –Ryan Masteller

Félicia Atkinson

Coyotes

[Geographic North]

[LISTEN]

I once went to New Mexico but mostly stayed inside. Reasons why. Félicia Atkinson’s Coyotes, inspired by her own trip to New Mexico, maps a journey I may have taken, among other wonders. The crafted narrative and its exploratory form gestures toward an experiential unknown. Her travel log collages echoes, maps, receipts, dried leaves, sand stuck in the crevices of shoes, plaques, diary entries, signposts, mythology, spirituality, and the facts and facets of the land’s native and colonial histories into a total atmosphere, something approaching a direct translation of a lingering impression. It’s so effective and affecting, because the whole is actually a scrap: “a slip of paper, something/tiny & torn off/lifted by the wind” writes poet Christian Hawkey in Citizen Of. Atkinson lineates her memories into similarly moving verses. –Cookcook

Pusha T

Daytona

[G.O.O.D. Music]

[LISTEN · READ]

DAYTONA by Pusha T is hard work. It’s this blurb being written at 5:20 AM on the 7-train to “the office” a day after having led 46 tweens on a non-stop four-day Boston field trip. It’s teaching about heterosexism and female empowerment, leading sixth grade field day, and handling logistics for eighth grade graduation in a single day. It’s your body feeling like a crash-test dummy on a Wednesday, having left in the early, early morning, putting in 12 hours of sweating gallons for money, and arriving home at 8:30 PM. It’s wearing Terminator shades on 125th Street talking Spanish to people you never met. It’s the endurance of confidence while facing every fear you’ve experienced — focused — diving straight into the freezing water. DAYTONA proves Pusha T and Kanye are relentless professionals that continue to transcend literary and sonic aesthetics in space and time. We need role models like these, forever. –C Monster

DJ Koze

Knock Knock

[Pampa]

[LISTEN · READ]

Many publications have referred to Stefan Kozalla as a “trickster” or a “prankster.” While there are freckles of truth on the face of that assessment, much of his affability comes from his most mistaken quality: his earnestness. It’s what makes him such a delightful musicmaker. Being earnest, of course, is the perfect foil to the kind of negativist universalism that plagues the psychedelics/mindfulness landscape in which DJ Koze so often finds himself (and, also, finds himself). Koze’s House is perfect (see: “Pick Up”) and his plunder-pop turns weird into sublime and vice versa (see: the wails incorporated into “Scratch That”), but it’s his unpresuming and gracious approach to influences, samples, and collaborations that push this record into extraordinary territory. It’s not alien; it’s absolutely Earthly, and it reflects so well the modest subject that is Koze. After all, Koze never changes, except in his affections. –E. Fosl

Elysia Crampton

Elysia Crampton

[Break World]

[WATCH · READ]

Elysia Crampton opens in media res, with a nativity. And then it revs up, restlessly — its machinic gears grind like plant medicine visions; water flows and burbles; disharmonic chords take us in unanticipatable directions. And through it all, the oscollo, the feline guardian of people outside gender binaries, oscillates wildly. Elysia Crampton’s maximalist approach takes it beyond the strings and cackles of 2016’s Demon City, yet Golgotha remains always present. Standout track “Moscow (Mariposa Voladora)” was inspired by Ofelia, a Bolivian mariposa (“femme revolutionary”), and it judders roughly, darkly. Crampton’s Aymara and trans identity are her displaced subjects, particularly in light of the gestural movement between her origins in Bolivia and her current home in the US. But this is not any straightforward folk music revival — rather, it’s a deconstruction that reconstructs. The difficulties and contradictions of critical theory, in particular writers such as José Muñoz and his exploration of queer brown-ness, are braided into the work. The first written reference to queers as mariposillas (“little butterflies”) is from Pedro Cieza de León, in the 16th century, in which he compares “sodomites,” subject to punishment by burning at the stake, to moths drawn to the flame. The suffering of our ancestors can’t be recuperated, but through art, we may yet dance grotesquely but triumphantly on the pyre. –Rowan Savage

[pagebreak]

The Caretaker

Everywhere at the end of time – Stage 4

[History Always Favours The Winners]

[LISTEN · READ]

The late hauntologist Mark Fisher once cruelly noted that the OED lists one of the earliest meanings of the word “haunt” as “to provide with a home, house.” And now that we live in a world that has lost the very possibility of loss, we have also lost the one who can lose, cohabiting with oneself in the present’s presence. Ghosts no longer have a home to haunt in any case, and their yearning and lingering voices are consigned to a past that can never pass away. Although it is haunting and horrifying to behold Everywhere at the end of time’s fourth installment pass from memories to their source — what Kirby calls “the post-awareness stage” — perhaps we must be grateful that someone can forget (for (us)). For, the source of memory must remain, even after all memory has been stripped away from it, even though this source can never be aware of itself. Yet, this source is not, strictly speaking, an identity. What it may be I do not know, but The Caretaker allows you to hear, what, behind those eyes, devoid of any recognition of life; we hope, we plead to be someone who remembers us, yet the only bliss, as transient as it is empty, is the wry smile that, for an instant, says, “Do not save me.” –Evan Coral

Lucrecia Dalt

Anticlines

[RVNG Intl.]

[WATCH · READ]

OK, Hoag. You wake up in 1925, in a different place but with the same objects. Lucrecia Dalt’s Anticlines is playing on the victrola. She sings, “Skinless others/ Oils on waters,” and you realize you’re in the same room as the killer. The only other person in the room is dressed exactly like you, and that person’s talking up the other place — the one you believe you are still in — saying, “I think you’d like it there.” Where again? Both places go out of view. Now possibly dreaming, in a time and place before flight, Gein or radio, you wait at a blue-dipped railway platform as trains roll by on their way to Oclupaca and Ortseam. You’re hoping to catch a ride to somewhere similar but elsewhere, more elemental, past the unseen concupiscence between thermosphere and exosphere, out there where you don’t have to wonder, anymore, what the toys do while you’re away. –Rick Weaver

Tierra Whack

Whack World

[Self-Released]

[STREAM]

In the face of incomprehensible excess and stream-gaming nonsense, Tierra Whack — yes, that’s her real name — provides a grotesque yet charming response with the wonderfully weird “Whack World.” Rather than dragging the tempo or chopping the tracklist, the 22-year-old Philly rapper embraces something like a skip-button aesthetic of preview clips and non-member samples, unceremoniously cutting off her songs as soon as they hit the one-minute mark. With 15 songs in just 15 minutes — an absurdity further heightened by its surreal video — traditional payoffs are just beyond reach, forcing us to sit through a goofy, lighthearted romp of youthful innovation and bizarre genre play that includes everything from slow jams and trap bangers to country parodies and kids pop. It’s delightfully ridiculous and sometimes annoying af, but it arrives with undeniable energy and child-like wonder, bursting out confetti-like from a singular, captivating voice who’s on one of this year’s quickest and most unexpected come-ups. Blink and you’ll miss it. That’s the point. –ミスターおしっこ

GAS

Rausch

[Kompakt]

[WATCH · LISTEN · READ]

I consumed the hour-long experience of Rausch, blaring through my headphones, as golden hour became twilight and the mosquitoes started biting. Luckily, my timing was great; 2017’s Narkopop, with its penchant for forlorn ruminations, ultimately owed a lot to its namesake: pop music. Now, those hopeful moments of liquid sunlight are far away. Rausch finds GAS staying true to its typically ascetic atmosphere, but any strand of accessible melodicism is replaced by shattering layers of dissonant drone upon drone, Doppler effect-synths, and percussive textures that pierce through it all — shimmering cymbals, palpitating kick-snare rhythms. As each funeral march bleeds into the next, the delirious effects of Rausch take hold. My arms are covered in bites, and temperatures still haven’t dropped below 90. For the superimposed intensity of Rausch, a more fitting listening environment couldn’t be created. –Rounak Maiti

The Body

I Have Fought Against It, But I Can’t Any Longer

[Thrill Jockey]

[LISTEN · READ]

It’s so much to bear. We’re expected to carry more than our own weight. The pain and suffering of our past traumas, the present crises, the future uncertainties. More and more, any attempts to alleviate the pain, to share the burden, are undermined. All we ever wanted, all untenable. They demand purity (in lieu of that, submission by “privilege”), individuality, personalization, subscription. They won’t cry for us. Everything must be on you and you alone. Time will not notice you are nothing. You are already hatred as an abstract to someone else. The pull of the personal must end. The allure of ontology and self-indulgence must be shattered in the face of those who leer lewdly into its mirror and contort on the floor in false ecstasy. But it is a painful burden. “I lower my guilty-looking eyes. I’m afraid of looking people in the eye.” War is necessary and proper, to shatter illusions. But it’s all so much to bear. –Ze Pequeno

[pagebreak]

serpentwithfeet

soil

[Tri Angle/Secretly Canadian]

[WATCH · LISTEN · READ]

It’s crazy to think that soil is serpentwithfeet’s debut album. The queer, pagan singer, a former choir boy from Baltimore, emerged in 2016 with blisters, a set of mesmerizing slices of new age R&B delving into faith, superstition, and love. His voice and composition live up to the lofty themes; delicate and meandering, serpent recalled the acrobatic opulence of 90s R&B with brooding, industrial production from The Haxan Cloak. The most visionary artists are those who sound like nothing other than themselves and exhibit a gravitational aura that inspires imitation, lust, and disbelief. soil lurches and waltzes, while Josiah Wise, who prefers to go by “serpent,” remains fully exposed in the mix, employing innovative vocal stacks that whisper, conjure, and croon behind him like a choir of restless spirits. Despite the divine quality to serpent’s voice, which is at times shellacked with layers, often battling against static noise and its own quivering vibrato, the subject matter of soil is immediately relatable and quotidian: the navigation of a shifting dating landscape, the sublime essences of individuals, intimacy and grace in heartbreak, the projection of sorrow onto the world. serpent doesn’t want to be “small sad,” but “big, big sad,” to the point that he’s sure his friends are “tired of him talking.” The domesticity infects us all: How can we properly grieve? How can we redeem ourselves? The occult instrumentation falls away to reveal a queer individual who is merely describing their personal desires. –Ross Devlin

Sarah Davachi

Let Night Come On Bells End The Day

[Recital]

[LISTEN · READ]

I walked through the streets barefoot, clothed only in a robe. The bells were ringing, playing their ancient song, letting the world know that the night had begun. My feet were bleeding from the cobblestone streets, which is how they found me in the morning, just outside of town in the woods. I didn’t drink that night. The evening swept me up, and some tribal instinct forced me outside in virtually nothing. My neighbors looked and closed their curtain as I kept walking, holding the hand of the force that was dragging me. I remember parts like my head hurting and my eyes watering. I remember spinning in the center of town underneath a street lamp. I don’t remember why I left town and headed toward the woods. I don’t know why I left my house. I remember being woken up by the police and being embarrassed to face to my neighbors. They took me home and put me in bed, because the medic cleared me at the site. I’ve never spoken of it since, and I still clench up when the night comes on and the bells end the day. –Sam Tornow

Jenny Hval

The Long Sleep EP

[Sacred Bones]

[WATCH · LISTEN · READ]

Roping in some of her favorite jazz musicians to explore ideas, Jenny Hval has managed to escape the noose of her recent collaborative concepts and delve within to produce yet another stunning act of imagination. The pure reach and weight of The Long Sleep is extraordinary. Hval moves across emotional ground with certainty and delicacy, capturing the subtlest of feelings. Like a soundtrack to a brilliant short, Hval plays with recurring motifs first presented in the “conventional” “Spells,” but then swerves genre expectations along the way, through the piano-led clap frappe of “The Dreamer Is Everyone in Her Dream” to the blissful title track drone. On “I Want to Tell You Something,” her presence is so powerful, as she attempts to express trance closure through an oblique narrative before realizing simple words are all she needs. Fecund, savage, and irresistible, The Long Sleep demonstrates once again why Hval is so intriguing. –David Nadelle

Gemini Sisters

Gemini Sisters

[Psychic Trouble]

[LISTEN]

How does one describe something so beautiful and uplifting — a beacon of light in a shroud a darkness. I was wallowing deep in the muck and mire, desperate to claw out of it rather than sinking down into it. But that tar pit of sorrow and defeat is thick, and it cares not about your will. But I saw the light and followed it. It led me to two helpful, outstretched hands. Jon Kolodij and Matt Christensen met my palm with a hardy grasp and a hefty pull. And I felt the warmth of Gemini Sisters. The sprawling, uplifting sonic aura of the duo’s debut speaks to energy from whence Kolodij and Christensen are christened: the two having their daughters born on the same day of the same year (and those offspring being Geminis). It shows with the delicacy of their aural attack. It is spiritual, reaching toward the heavens to pluck the constellation and bringing its brightness to our darkest places. Right now, the flesh is weak and the mind wavers. But our essence remains pure and chaste. Thanks to Kolodij and Christensen, I have traded the hastened quicksand for a tether to the sprawling galaxy. –Jspicer

Christina Vantzou

No. 4

[Kranky]

[LISTEN · READ]

When you’re in a vehicle moving at a slow, constant speed, sometimes you can convince yourself that you aren’t moving at all. No. 4 moves me like that. I know how tired that metaphor is, and if you listen to gentle drones like “At Dawn” and “Remote Polyphony” and think I’m a hack for digging the spatial metaphor up once again to describe slow, deliberate music, I understand. But I feel that uneasy compromise between motion and rest deeply and at every strange, shimmering moment of the album. It’s in the bells of “Percussion in Nonspace,” ringing in a sort of dual presence and absence; in the little arpeggio that creeps up through “Doorway;” in the pitch-affected choral chant that closes out “Sound House.” Whether we interpret track titles as thematic hints or as mere word games, the names of the tracks on No. 4 suggest, along with the music, that Christina Vantzou wants to domesticate and eventually upend and denature space through sound. Usually a device for ordering abstraction, she turns that hackneyed spatial metaphor into one for abstracting order. This record moves at no speed, in no direction, and toward no goal, except maybe to suspend us temporarily in a kind of beauty without dimension, not far from terror. –Will Neibergall

Kanye West

ye

[G.O.O.D./Def Jam]

[LISTEN · READ]

Just because an album sparks cathartic conversations doesn’t mean it’s good, and not all good albums invite candid dinner table discussions concerning their mercurial merits. Kanye, however, has just as big of a reputation for arousing furor as he does for leaving listeners speechless. Meanwhile, critics scramble for thoughtful words that won’t get them blacklisted for being associated with that black magic that has been infiltrating every aspect of daily life since Cain murdered Abel, thus birthing division. Calling ye a divisive document at TMT would be an understatement, and attributing its inclusion here to justifying countless hours of collectively unpacking just over 23 minutes of noise would obscure what ye actually contains: disturbing spoken word admonitions about premeditated murder, breathless bars on prescription drug addiction, ironic fantasies about butts of sex scandals, gorgeous gospel keys and beautiful dark twisted harmonies, celebratory reflections on fame and success, spectral arena rock vibes, and staggering room for growth cleared out by fear and love and loyalty. Regardless of our own individual feelings, ye keeps reminding us that this music shit that gets us through each day often requires plunging into dark places and reemerging with our own beacons of light. Believe it or not, I still love it, and like watching a bright-eyed child grow up in a world this dark, I’m terrified and excited for what’s next. –Jazz Scott

The Shortlist: King Vision Ultra’s Pain of Mind, Shygirl’s Cruel Practice, Oneohtrix Point Never’s Age Of, Ashley Paul’s Lost In Shadows, James Ferraro’s Four Pieces For Mirai, Larry Wish’s How More Can You Need, Jon Hassell’s Listening To Pictures, Rainforest Spiritual Enslavement’s Red Ants Genesis, Parquet Courts’s Wide Awake!, The Carters’ EVERYTHING IS LOVE, Bernice’s Puff LP, Carla Bozulich’s Quieter, Pinkshinyultrablast’s Miserable Miracles, Duppy Gun Productions’s Miro Tape, DRINKS’s Hippo Lite, Valee’s GOOD Job, You Found Me, and Frog Eyes’ Violet Psalms.

Feature: 2018: Second Quarter Favorites published first on medium.com/@buydigitalpiano

Posted by HomerAltizer on 2018-07-04 01:14:14

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[nofomoartworld]

Art F City: Michael Jones McKean Makes Museums Existentially Terrifying

Michael Jones McKean: The Ground The Hutzler Brothers Palace Building 200 North Howard Street, Baltimore, MD Presented by The Contemporary Gallery hours: February 18 – May 19th (today!) 10 AM – 4 PM Also on view during Black Ladies Brunch Collective Book Launch Saturday, May 20th and by appointment until May 31st.

Of all the strange art I’ve seen in my life, Michael Jones McKean’s brilliant installation The Ground is the only exhibition that’s given me an honest-to-god nightmare.

That’s surprising, considering the show is essentially a musing on the function and culture of display—in an inoffensive neutral palette—which at moments seems crafted with dry wit. Commissioned by Baltimore’s forever-mission-honing nomadic museum The Contemporary, it could be seen as the latest step in the institution’s attempt to work through some of those issues. Namely: how and why art gets displayed in what kinds of contexts.

The installation comprises one rectilinear white architectural form that bisects a large empty storefront at a slight diagonal. It’s divided into chambers, each containing a seemingly unrelated vignette. A central “atrium”, for example, houses a single, nearly-bare tree and abstract sculpture, all painted cool white. Other displays contain drawing-like sculptures, odd assortments of objects, or curious dioramas. Notably, there’s no didactic text accompanying any of the extremely-didactic-looking displays. One especially sparse cut-out holds hand-sculpted models of various mammal brains. Since they’re unlabelled, the human mind is anonymously lumped in alongside those of whales, cats, wolves, and elephants.

But the series doesn’t quite convey “body horror” per se—if anything, there’s a sense of humor sans the grotesque to much of the work. What’s uncanny, however, is the clinical sterility of the display—a dystopian human zoo that’s, on some level, about the absence of occupants. The creepiness of The Ground is felt almost immediately. Placing it takes some time.

The Ground is installed in one storefront of the sprawling former Hutzler’s department store in downtown Baltimore. It’s a curious, brooding building, parts of which date to 1880. When it opened then, it was described as “a museum of merchandise”, according to the exhibition text. Today, it houses only a massive internet server farm, processing roughly a quarter of the world’s data flows. Unlike so much of Baltimore, the old structure isn’t quite dilapidated, which makes it even more odd. It’s been maintained—just not for human occupation. McKean’s hyper-stylized architectural dioramas (which, by happy coincidence, share the otherworldly shopping-meets-set qualities of The Met’s Rei Kawakubo: Art of the In-Between exhibition design) present a similar paradigm.

It’s a life-sized dollhouse, full of objects that unabashedly show traces of the artist’s hand. Yet the structure itself is immaculate, clearly not built to be inhabited. The absence of bodies is palpably disturbing. In many tableaus, we catch glimpses of hidden corridors and behind-the-scenes access areas—they suggest a physical link between all of these ideas, but of course can’t be explored. The inutility of the space—despite ergonomic signifiers of human presence—is largely what makes it somewhat terrifying on a level I can’t fully explain. Knowing that a structure can’t be known in its entirety is unnerving on a primal level, similar to the architecture of the data networks that pulse elsewhere in the building. Or perhaps the mild panic that sets in when I imagine collecting museums’ vast hidden storerooms and archives—the mysterious infrastructures that govern what we see and how.

Detail

McKean seems to probe that logic of what curators place on view (and into the canon). One of the spotless white cubes holds reproductions of busts throughout art history—from an Olmec-looking head beside Michaelangelo’s “David” to Siddhartha and what I’m assuming is a cubist representation of a face. All are reproduced at the same roughly life-sized scale in matte white.

Below the monochrome world history of representation, a grid of hand-sculpted, full-color human heads floats awkwardly in a void. The specimens span multiple races and genders, and many are demographically ambiguous, suggesting a community of choice. That’s an impression reinforced by their styling—all have different cult-like collars in off-white and face paint that’s somewhere between tribal markings and CV Dazzle. Are these the hunting trophies of an alien conqueror? Practice heads for a strange aesthetician school? An anthropology display from a dystopian future? An obscure nook of the not-so-distant past? Present? Is it worth noting that all but two of them have vaguely concerned expressions on their face?

These are but a handful of the questions raised by each component of McKean’s installation, which is deceptively sparse but jam-packed with content. Which of these details are important and what does it all mean? For an artwork that seems to be about the limits of sculpture, display, or “the collection” as a didactic or narrative tool, the answer to that question could be everything and nothing.

Although the site-specific installation certainly references the vocabulary of retail displays (wig heads, storefronts, IKEA model rooms) it’s impossible to consider McKean’s work independent of the context of the institution which commissioned it. Since The Contemporary (formerly the Contemporary Museum) rebooted itself as a nomadic presenting/granting organization under the leadership of Deana Haggag in 2013, much of their programming has felt like an investigation of what the utility of “a museum” is. The institution has redefined itself by diving unabashedly into its own identity crisis—through diverse artist-centric programing alongside exhibitions and publications that can read as critical institutional self-examination. Much like the Hutzler’s building, The Contemporary now largely serves as a platform for the exchange of information rather than the display of objects of desire. Haggag is about to step down as director, heading to lead granting organization United States Artists, and The Ground feels like the tentative capstone of this brief but transformative era in the museum’s history.

This is a lot of backstory but it’s necessary, perhaps, for understanding the curatorial logic behind an exhibition about curatorial logic—or lack thereof. The last major Contemporary commission was a sprawling installation from Abigail DeVille in the Peale Museum, the Western Hemisphere’s oldest purpose-built museum building, which had sat vacant for years. If that installation embraced chaos to investigate the storytelling potential of museums/objects, the McKean show could be read as a startlingly sterile bookend—turning a black mirror on polished institutional aesthetics. The rhetorical questions about museum-ness posed by these projects feel less like self-indulgent curatorial navel-gazing and more like a fruitful laboratory experiment between institution, artist, and public. (The Contemporary, in a past incarnation, also commissioned Fred Wilson’s seminal Mining the Museum at the Maryland Historical Society a few blocks away in 1993. It’s since become required reading in the world of curation and museum studies.)

Rounding a corner to the side of McKean’s installation, it’s almost easy to overlook one of the show’s most loaded (literally) prompts for thinking about the nature of a collection. A small barely-lit case is embedded in the wall. It recalls the kind of climate-controlled racks data servers are stored in, but on closer inspection is jam-packed with hundreds of small plastic discs containing mysterious specimens (I later picked up an inventory list of what they were: meteorite fragments, seeds, and myriad other objects of interest). If the museum’s origins lie in the Enlightenment-era wunderkammer, this might point to a modern cousin: archives of obsessive preservation. How many of these species will cease to exist outside of university labs or government seed banks within our lifetimes? The expanse of time implied by ancient space rocks and impending ecological disasters is overwhelming.   

The rear side of the display holds a fake-plant-filled grotto like one might see in a natural history museum’s anthropology diorama (arguably the most problematic and loaded genre of curatorial display, on account of its colonial and racist history). Here, though, no “primitive” humans inhabit the cave, only a single bouquet of flowers humorously/creepily placed in the darkest nook. A line of perspectivally-compressed representations of organic and man-made objects—from a horseshoe crab and avocado to roller luggage and an iMac—floats in a non-space above. Like the busts on the other side of the installation, they’re all white, as if they had been fabricated by the 3D printers of Westworld. They feel like props ready to be dropped in to some reenactment of life on a long-dead Earth.

The sci-fi horror of absent bodies is perhaps driven home most directly by the twin displays at the opposite end of the diorama, connected to the “prop” room by a futuristic catwalk. In one flesh-colored chamber, a lumpy frame holds samples of Band-aids in various skin tones—surrogate skin like Pantone swatches of humanity. The frame is mirrored in the chamber above (with the negative space inverted), a minimalist “human habitat” from the present day or not-so-distant future.

The immediacy of The Ground’s allusions and seemingly-unrelated sense of dread is complimented by the slow burn of trying to connect the two (and a subtle, dark sense of humor). In the face of mortality, humanity has always found some small comfort in the idea of legacy. It’s why the powerful of yesteryear commissioned grand buildings with storytelling mosaics or stained glass windows and why contemporary oligarchs bequeath their collections to museums. But knowing how much archeologists, historians, and curators have gotten wrong (or just guessed) when discussing artifacts from the past, how much faith can we place in these professions’ ability to represent us in the future? There is, of course, more to The Ground than that concern. But it’s an inescapable question the more likely societal collapse and extinction-level events seem to become with each passing day—all while we heap ever more useless objects, extraneous data, and tangled history on the archivist’s pile.

Michael Jones McKean | The Ground from theuniformbridgetheory on Vimeo.

One of the few works in the show without a trace of dystopic anxiety, however, is also a bit of an aesthetic outlier (the first detail shot in the video above). A clay bas-relief that seems to sample styles from Mayan, archaic Hindu, and Gothic religious architectural details brought a much-needed chuckle. It depicts a home water birth in a bathtub, with a Madonna figure surrounded by a supportive audience of characters who appear to be plucked from various mythologies (two hooded priest-like figures are blowing kisses). Also in attendance are a collection of trendy houseplants and a cat, who looks slightly confused/disturbed by the ritual it’s witnessing. The sculpture is endearingly human and goofy, very much of the Pinterest era but also timeless. It’s a shame the clay doesn’t appear to be fired, because this would be a perfectly acceptable last trace of humanity left for an alien archaeologist.  

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