20 favorite albums (2/2)

Second half of the list began in the previous entry, perhaps more interesting for what’s not here than what is. Finishing this feels like a total exercise in self-mythologizing narcissism, a blatant attempt to paint myself in the best possible light by picking out a bunch of awesome records and subtly trying to imbue myself with the same inspirations and sensibilities of all the smart and talented people who made them. Don’t fall for my tricks!

The Breeders – Last Splash (1993)
The first “cool” album I ever owned (and if I recall, purchased in the same transaction as this). I had no context for this, didn’t know anything about the band or anything about Kim Deal that wasn’t in the liner notes. It was just the songs, alternative radio classics — bullied out of the canon by Pixies revisionist history — that drew me in, and for once in the monument to irredeemable awkwardness that was my childhood, I somehow tapped into something beautiful that didn’t turn out to be preposterously dorky in hindsight. Hard to channel any specific insights into what made this great, especially without romanticizing the 1990s, but this really is my “life was good” album that takes me back to riding bikes with friends, shooting water balloons at neighbors’ houses and just living life like I should have been at the time. Last Splash is still a bridge back to those feelings and I have no regrets crossing it again and again.

My Bloody Valentine – Loveless (1991)
The Internet is full of people who could talk your ear off about Loveless, its importance, how it was made, how much it cost and all the things it will do to your brain when you finally hear it. Most of them won’t steer you wrong. In a weird way, I’ve grown to feel a little ambivalent about the recognition this album enjoys now. I got a little too cozy with the feeling that it was something that no one else really knew about, and for the longest time in my circle of friends or my school or my town, that might have been true. But the cat’s out of the bag and, you know what?  That definitely takes nothing away from this album and its ability to surprise and confound, pierce through the coating of embarrassing hyperbole surrounding it, and to sound impossibly bigger than whatever set of speakers it’s playing out of. Is this my favorite album? It might be.

DJ Sprinkles – Midtown 120 Blues (2008)
It would be easy to describe Midtown 120 Blues as “deep house” if that wasn’t a term that had been whitewashed and culturally redefined over the past few years by EDM DJs, pop artists, and Beatport users. Funny how the co-opting of niche sounds and movements just happens to be one of themes of this album, which I would immediately recommend to any fan of this kind of music if only it wasn’t, for all practical purposes, impossible to listen to and casually consume in the way we’ve all come to take for granted these days. Considering the defensive and often violent reaction of the typical Internet user when confronted with the well-meaning imperative to “check your privilege,” or in this case, to at least (re)consider one’s actual relationship to the roots of house music (and why it might actually not be a world that everyone can identify with), keeping this at arm’s length from a general audience might be for the best. My vague descriptions of this album are rather pointless given how Terre Thaemlitz lays the thesis statement out in very stark terms from the very beginning (in deliciously mordant and self-deprecating fashion), eviscerating the rosy, secondhand nostalgia for the early days of house music that we’ve bought into as cultural tourists, consuming the past in safe, neatly-packaged summaries. The dissonant, often dark edge of these tracks evokes a sense of loneliness, loss, solitude and alienation, subtly conveyed by lushly arranged layers of piano, flute and richly-satisfying bass that swirl together into truly hypnotic shapes. I’m definitely aware of the hypocrisy between implying that this is an album that I completely “get” while hinting at an inherent, un-spannable chasm that practically no one else in my sociological cohort should be capable of honestly crossing. Yeah, it’s a problem I’m still thinking about.

Boards of Canada – Music Has the Right to Children (1998)
While I’ve possibly spent more time obsessing over this album than any other, my urge to dig into it for deeper and deeper meanings is completely over, and I’m definitely done with the joyless exercise of explaining it to anyone who will listen. Describing the Music of Boards of Canada, especially on their breakthrough album for Warp that made them every bit the label figureheads that Aphex Twin or Autechre were, is to reduce their approach to music to a formula or a gimmick (nostalgia!). Perhaps no other musical artists besides Radiohead (or Death Grips, so it seems) has been so wholly absorbed into the Internet indie-bro hype culture and had all the magic and wonder drained out of what they do and rendered into memes like the brothers Sandison have. The disgust I’m expressing here has little to do with them as artists and everything to do with music fandom in the age of social media, and is taking the place of any actual discussion about this album mostly because I’ve already talked about it here and don’t have anything left to say.

Broadcast – The Noise Made by People (2000)
Broadcast was a favorite band of many Stereolab fans I used to chat with online, and in years surrounding the release of this album, they were shortsightedly pegged as Stereolab clones. Besides sounding nothing alike, it’s definitely possible (and probably widely agreed) that the songs on The Noise Made by People are simply better than any other collection of Stereolab’s, or any of the other retro future-obsessed groups of the late 90s/early 2000s (Mellow, Komeda, even Air). 1960s electronic music may have been the inspiration for their use of analog synthesizers, but in the years since the album was released, The Noise Made by People has only come to sound more and more contemporary, a vision of the future rather than an imitation of a plastic past. There’s a heart to this music that goes unrecognized, a sense of honesty and vulnerability that took a long time for me to notice and embrace. Or maybe spending a long time with this CD just sowed the seeds of a special relationship that makes me extra-willing to romanticize about? I love that my copy was released on Tommy Boy, home of Naughty by Nature, House of Pain, and Coolio.

The Orb – Orbus Terrarum (1995)
I’d had either of The Orb’s first two albums penciled in here at one point and couldn’t bring myself to pick one over the other. So choosing Orbus Terrarum, the first album from The Orb that I ever heard/owned, is definitely a compromise but also a valid pick in its own right. It’s a brighter, clearer-sounding album than both Adventures Beyond the Ultraworld and U.F.Orb, with a wider dynamic range that I’ve always preferred to those albums, brilliant as they are. Also, Orbus Terrarum was definitely my gateway album into electronic music, and considering how weird and twisted it still sounds after all the years, that was probably like learning to swim by being tossed straight into the deep end of the pool. The first half hour of the album (“Valley,” “Plateau,” “Oxbow Lakes”) is deceptively warm and inviting, setting up my expectations for what I thought ambient music should sound like: tracks that evoked a “spacey” feeling, slowly drifting past with whimsical samples bubbling in and out of the mix, the sense of slowly floating through a palpable space on top of a deep, dubby bassline. But as the wide open spaces alluded to by the geographically-themed track titles start to feel more claustrophobic, the psychedelic twists and turns will still shake you even when you know they’re coming. Thankfully, the whole album still retains The Orb’s sense of humor, which shines through even without the aid of psychedelics, good thing considering how I probably still had my D.A.R.E. t-shirt at the time and wasn’t wearing it ironically.

Gas – Pop (2000)
Pop can lull listeners into a trance like waves crashing on an ocean shore or a breeze rustling thousands of leaves in a dense forest. It’s undeniably relaxing, but sounds less like a human composition than a huge force of nature. It’s reassuringly repetitious, but unpredictably so, unfolding at its own pace, seemingly unbound from the latticework that holds together even the most creative and effective ambient music. It’s a sound that seems to wash over you, surround and suspend you in its own world, even before the beat gradually emerges into the mix and adds an urgent but reassuring pulse. Provided you’re listening on any halfway-decent stereo or pair of headphones, giving into the music can be an immersive experience. Wolfgang Voigt’s recordings as Gas go back a few albums before Pop, his final solo release under the name, and following the slow evolution of his sound from its low-fi, hazy beginnings to the crystal-clear conclusion of his vision is a fascinating and satisfying trip to take. But really, I’d recommend closing your Wikipedia and Discogs tabs and just soaking it up without too much thought.

Michael Jackson – Thriller (1982)
Nothing else even comes close to the nostalgia rush I get whenever I hear this album, but despite the comfort and familiarity I experience whenever I listen to it, Thriller still manages to amaze and surprise me, as it does in every chapter of my life. The comfort of this nostalgia is secondary to the awe inspired by actually running your hands over it, appreciating its craftsmanship, wondering how something could be appreciated in its own time for being so soulful, joyful, and electric and still continue to feel so vital and essential for so long. Plenty of music talks about bringing people together, but as the appeal of Thriller spans generations, race, borders, I wonder if any of the art in our lives has actually done that quite as much as the nine songs here. This is music that makes me happy to be alive and genuinely thankful for the genius that brought it into the world.

Tortoise – TNT (1998)
Another album that changed everything I thought about music, how it “should” work and what it could do. Tortoise’s use of familiar instruments (guitar, bass, drums) with lesser-used sounds (mallet instruments, synthesizers, sampling), on the surface, doesn’t look like a particularly daring proposition today, nor would their blending together of sounds associated with different genres (dub reggae, jazz, film soundtracks) seem very risky in a world where musicians and listeners routinely dabble in all different kinds of music. But compared to any of the tepid post-rock that dribbled out into the ether over the next decade, it overflows with vibrant and deep grooves, playing with sound on a lush, cinematic scale. The product of equal parts improvisation and studio trickery, the atmosphere on TNT — a title I always assumed was an ironic nod to AC/DC, quite possibly Tortoise’s polar opposite as a band — is some of my favorite on any record, digging out unexplored spaces that I never imagined existed and have found few parallels to since.

Primal Scream – XTRMNTR (2000)
The second half of this list was half-done when I published the first part more than three weeks ago. But sitting down to wrap it up was a challenge. I’ve been…busy, and distracted by concerns that maybe, just maybe, putting the time and energy that I do into things like this is a distraction from both personal responsibilities and more important things in this world that can’t be ignored. WordPress tells me that this blog turned seven years old back in December, so for the entire time that I’ve posting on here, I’ve enjoyed the privilege of living as a U.S. citizen with a leader who valued knowledge, pursued wisdom, believed in the worth of public service and implored us to do the same, encouraged us in the struggle to respect and understand one another and to come together for a greater good that would affect universal change for the better. That this man of integrity, dignity, and generous spirit would be succeeded by a petulant con artist who transparently appealed to the darkest forces in our hearts and manipulated society’s worst fears is the greatest humiliation any of our generations have endured. That modern life has grown abstract enough for millions to willingly pull the level for an insidious opportunist, an unapologetic adulterer, rapist, and pathological liar who peddles debunked myths and conspiracy theories as facts, is still too much to fully comprehend. The startling futility of questioning his qualifications, calling out his lies, trying to expose his rhetorical tactics or explain what’s really at stake to his supporters feels like trying to run through a brick wall. The experience has shown me how brittle my optimism and mental resourcefulness becomes in a moment of crisis, and how that moment of crisis can arrive in a form that no one in my life has any idea how to deal with. I guess this is the moment where I look in the mirror, realize I’m an adult, and accept the fact that there’s no more secret wisdom waiting to be passed down to me and no further cues to follow. Basically, I have reached the end of my life, insofar as nothing in this world will change me from this point forward besides my own choices. Those choices, including how I choose to cope with troubles big and small, will define who I am (a childish realization if there ever was one, but better late than never, I guess). For the past two and a half months, I’ve chosen to steep myself in frustration and pent-up disdain, which brings me to XTRMNTR.

I turn to music as a conduit for a lot of different emotions that I feel or want to vicariously experience. This surely includes a lot of “negative” emotions, but for better or worse, anger has never really been one of them. XTRMNTR is an obvious exception to this, which is probably why I’m compelled to play it at ridiculously loud volumes (these days, confining it almost solely to listening in the car). While its release predated the Iraq War by a couple of years, even coming out a whole year before George W. Bush even took office — not to stuff this quintessentially British band into a squarely American context — the restless, pissed-off fury of the album felt like a direct response to the right-wing hypocrisy, overt propaganda and rabid militarism that was thick in the air. Unfortunately, it feels just as relevant today as it did back then. It probably doesn’t speak well for my maturity or composure, but a song like “Pills” (usually regarded by fans as the low point on the album, which may be true but not for the reasons they’d believe) sums up the complete scope of my feelings towards Trump, his petty, stupid Tweeting, his petty vendettas against any institution or individual who calls him out on his perpetual bullshit, his extreme solutions to imaginary problems and the phony explanations he’s allowed to give for any of it. And whether it’s an indictment against actual neo-nazis, globalization and neoliberalism, or just bullshit punk rock, “Swastika Eyes” feels like the soundtrack to the laser-focused response that’s in order against the normalization of racism and bigotry in our country and all across the western world. “Accelerator” is probably the loudest rock song I’ve ever heard, and whether or not it’s healthy for me, it’s invigorating to turn it up and let myself just simmer in. Describing the entire album as a one-dimensional expression of rage would be a mistake. “MBV Arkestra (If They Move Kill ‘Em)” continued Kevin Shields’ run of scarce but beautiful masterpieces in between Loveless and My Bloody Valentine’s return in 2013, and is one of the biggest-sounding slabs of kaleidoscopic psychedelia I’ve ever heard. “Keep Your Dreams” is a beautiful piece of future blues that feels cleansing, even redemptive, on its own or as the melancholy centerpiece of the album. XTRMNTR is, like a lot of albums that I’ve already mentioned, a work where the supposed weak links never struck me as such. Being a political album (despite what Bobby Gillespie may say), there’s fair share of sloganeering and not a lot of nuance in the messaging. And I guess something about that has always connected with me, maybe because I’ve never had the conviction to say what I truly believe or because I struggle to reduce the world to simplified, black and white terms, so letting this album voice my frustration is a tremendous release. If I’ve written more about it than any other album on my list, that’s because it’s just resonating with me very hard at the moment, a moment that I’m still hoping will pass sooner than later, one we’ll eventually be able to look back on from from a wiser, kinder place than we are right now.

20 favorite albums (1/2)

I don’t write about music here very often anymore. I always meant to make that a focus here, and in the early years of this blog I often did. But I was never very satisfied with the results. It wasn’t enjoyable or fulfilling, felt like a chore, and while I tried to make it all very personal, it felt deeply informed by influences outside of myself. Since then, I haven’t stumbled upon any new ideas to shake this up, but just taking a break has helped me reset my mind and I hope it makes a difference. Maybe there will be more posts about music in the near future, maybe there won’t. Anything could happen and I don’t know what to expect from the new year at all.

It’s been years since I’ve first wanted to do an entry here about my favorite albums, which is as simple of an idea but probably the biggest potential undertaking of a single post (or split post, as I think I’ll do to keep this manageable) that I’ve ever had. As I suspect it probably is for most people, coming up with the list itself was easy, but trying to identify and actually verbalize the feelings I have for each of these is a huge challenge, one that I know I’m not fully up to the task for but still feel compelled to attempt regardless. My “relationship” with all of these albums is extremely personal but often built on nostalgic feelings that I can’t communicate without illuminating contradictions in my thought process and a real lack of experiences and encounters in the world that would make any of this feel urgent or real to anyone else. Sometimes it’s felt like my lack of musical ability (despite fits and starts of practice and dabbling on guitar and various DAWs, which are seemingly picked up, inherently understood and mastered by children on a daily basis) is rivaled only by my inability to speak the language of music, to describe the qualities of sounds and the sensations of experiencing them. These limitations will manifest themselves throughout this list, and for that, I apologize but encourage you to listen to each album anyway and form your own coherent opinion.

I own somewhere around 500 or 600 CDs and a tiny vinyl collection that’s gathering dust while I continue to shop around for a turntable that won’t destroy records or play them at inconsistent speeds. I have at least a thousand albums on my computer; it’s difficult to tell without hand-counting and sorting between albums, EPs, and singles. Anyway, I have a lot of music, but despite the fact that this has been one of my life’s biggest obsessions, it’s hard to look at what I’ve gathered and see it as anything other than a catalog of well-known releases, very little of it truly obscure or rare or not hotly-tipped by one source or another at some point over the last twenty years. It’s a predictable sampling of the indie zeitgeist with a random scattering of old classics. Collectively, it represents my point of view and is different from anyone else’s, but for all the deep digging I’ve felt that I’ve put in over the years, it’s weird to survey what I actually have to show for it, which is a very mainstream and safe collection that covers a lot of ground but not in any particularly interesting way.

Whether these are truly my 20 favorite albums, or just the 20 albums that I most wish to publicly associate myself with, I cannot say. There’s nothing from Underworld or Radiohead or Susumu Yokota here (or Dig Me Out, which I should include but would rather not write about, I guess) but it’s not like the 90s or 2000s need to be any more represented here than they already are. The vast majority of this list is made up of music released during my teens and twenties, and there’s nothing on here that’s older than I am. Why that is, should, or shouldn’t be an issue, I can’t say. I guess I’m just trying to beat hypothetical readers to the punch when it comes to calling me out on a bias for music from my doe-eyed adolescence and too-cool twenties.

So here are my 20 favorite albums of all time, in no order of preference (started from a list I scribbled in a notepad at work two years ago):

Bark Psychosis – ///Codename: Dustsucker (2004)
This album was not a hit when it came out and didn’t get the kind of recognition it definitely would get if it was released today, yet somehow it kind of fell into my lap right after it was released. Unfortunately, I was young and dumb and downloading more albums than I had time to listen to and it got lost in the habit of simply trying to hear as much music as I could on a daily basis. Years would pass before I’d give it the time and attention that it deserved, which really sucks because I now think it’s as good as Kid A or maybe even Loveless. Heck, I appreciate that it’s been able to reasonably duck the kind of reputation that those albums have, which has made it all the more easier for me to experience it a more personal way in the years since. Not that I’ve listened to it in a vacuum or that it’s even an obscure album, but it still hasn’t been tainted by the all-seeing eye of the Internet hype machine. Like Hex, it’s the perfect 2 AM album, the perfect companion for watching the night sky on your porch while cicadas chirp and leaves rustle in the breeze. That’s probably not essential for wrapping your hands around this thing, but some albums deserve a listening experience that breaks from the routine, and ///Codename:Dustsucker is surely one of them. Graham Sutton is always praised for his mastery of mood, but this is not a generic exercise in painting post-rock textures or whatever you want to call it. These tracks exist as bonafide, poetic songs and really weird sound sculptures, and to tune out everything else and give yourself over to them with no reservations feels like stepping into another world.

The Chemical Brothers – Dig Your Own Hole (1997)
This album is definitely of a certain time and place and mentioning it probably dates me in a way that I’d rather avoid, but unlike nearly everything else from the short-lived “electronica” movement, this album has persevered and still sounds fresh and urgent and vital to my ears. It’s far more diverse and interesting and deep than any other “big beat” music –which, don’t get me wrong, doesn’t have to be intelligent to be still be daring and unbelievably fun — and still evokes a sense of place when I hear it, not a geographical reality but a fantasy world inspired by classic rock and rave and my adolescent projections of what I imagined taking drugs would be like. That’s still a weird place I go to every time I hear this album, and whether that says more about DYOH or me, I don’t know. But I wouldn’t want any of that to change.

Sonic Youth – Dirty (1992)
I guess this is the album that got me into music and is kind of responsible for shaping me into the person I am now. I still remember the day I found it in the store (used!) and the whole experience of deciding to buy it, bringing it home and listening to it on repeat in my room while reading the liner notes and lying on the floor next to my bed and my fish tank and my crappy little 13″ TV where I still had my NES hooked up (our SNES was still in the basement, if we hadn’t bought an N64 by this point, I can’t remember, but yes, this is an important detail). I played it for friends with evangelistic enthusiasm, an occasion that blew up in my face and set the standard for how my interests would become completely isolating pursuits instead of the bonding experiences I’d always hoped they be. I was a few years late to this music but since it had never really “happened” in my little corner of the world in the first place (Sonic Youth appeared on The Simpsons, which was about as far as anyone I knew would have ever come across them), it always felt immediate and new and bursting with possibilities. Just walking down the hall at school with something like “Theresa’s Sound-World” or “Sugar Kane” playing in my head always made me feel like I was in on a big secret that I was torn between keeping to myself and wanting to tell everyone about.

Oval – Dok (1998)
Dok is never really mentioned in discussions of glitch/clicks ‘n cuts music of the mid to late 1990s. Even in talking about the music of Oval, it’s a mostly ignored album that doesn’t do much to draw attention to itself. It’s not groundbreaking in the way that Systemisch or 94 Diskont were, and it doesn’t feature Markus Popp pushing his sound to extremes like he did with Ovalcommers. It’s hard to comprehend exactly what it is and what it’s doing, outside of my own extremely subjective opinions and experiences. For years I used this album to cope with migraine headaches; the flickers of melody laid over Dok’s blend of skips, pops and deep rumbles of blown-out static (played at a quiet volume in a dark room) would set off curiously vivid hallucinations behind my eyelids and cue up ripples of mild brain sparks that seemed to carve voids in the pain amassed between my ears. Maybe it didn’t always work, but having music to turn to was a reassuring relief and may just have played a big role in helping me eventually grow out of what had been a weekly ordeal since I was in grade school. I wonder if Markus Popp understood just how perfect of a title “Polygon Medpack” was for this.

Stereolab – Dots and Loops (1997)
Dots and Loops found Stereolab making a hard departure from the guitar rock and droning synthesizers of previous albums toward a sound that dabbled in more sophisticated pop and nuanced production. I guess it’s both a perfect introduction to the band (since it straddles both ends of their career and catches them at the height of their creativity) and also a terrible representation of who they were (they’d never make another album like it). It was sophisticated and cool and really weird and still sounds like more than the sum of its parts. It was the first of any music that I’d ever heard from the band. Over time, I’d eventually collect most of their releases and go on to see them live three times (each time worse than the last, unfortunately). This is the Stereolab album I keep coming back to and never lets me down, unlike the last several they’d eventually release in the years that would follow, a terrible but completely understandable decline that’s a reminder of how irreplaceable people are, even when they’re part of a group playing seemingly interchangeable roles.

The Caretaker – An Empty Bliss Beyond This World (2011)
The newest album on this list sounds, by far, like it ought to be the oldest. It’s easy to assume (but hard to truly say) exactly what James Leyland Kirby is doing with the material he’s sampling for this, where he takes old records from the 1930s/1920s — which most listeners will have few associations with outside of the “haunted ballroom” music of The Shining, a point of reference the artist makes no strides to hide — and edits them with a deceptive hand. Much of the album sounds like untouched phonographs, crackling with age or perhaps playing in a cavernous, empty space. Other tracks find whisps of melodies cut into loops that trail off into silence before starting over, only to end in most abrupt ways and lead into the next track, always sounding like it’s in the middle of already playing when it’s introduced. Layers of static and reverb, feeling less like digital effects and more like a physical presence, have a subtle influence on some moments while completely overwhelming others. The overall feeling may parallel to drone music or the world of dark ambient, but the album is an ode to music that exists outside of the lineage of classical or rock music and is hard to relate to the well-established “rules” of any of those genres. There may be a temptation to write off the source material as romantic schmaltz, but revisiting the excess and optimism being channeled in these tracks feels uniquely bittersweet in hindsight (after all, this may be the first pop music that’s outlived its audience). An Empty Bliss Beyond This World is a dark, dark album that’s defined by playful moments and a sense of memory that’s nostalgic, wistful, reminiscent of a time and place that we can revisit any time we want but is just out of the reach of any first-hand memories we have left of it. It’s music that’s somehow tremendously festive and sad, relaxing but still unnerving in a way that’s rarely explored in music or art. It didn’t oblige me as a listener because it didn’t satisfy any preexisting cravings. It has, however, turned into an obsession that’s one of the last singular statements in music that I’ve ever heard.

Shuttle358 – Frame (2000)
I can’t say if Frame is clearly the best album from Shuttle358 or if it’s even my favorite of his. And after 10 or 12 years of somewhat frequent listening, all I can really say is that it’s the album that I’d point to as the definitive Shuttle358 recording, but even then I can’t really say why. This is music that I’ve listened to a lot, almost exclusively alone, so it holds a great deal of private meaning to me that I’ve never tried to articulate in verbal terms and is predictably defying me now that I’m finally attempting to. It’s obvious enough to say that there were quite a few people making minimal, glitch-inspired electronic music back in the late 1990s and early 2000s, and I still enjoy a lot of that stuff but none of it has really stuck with me quite like this artist or this album. I know very little about how this was made, what sounds were sampled and which were synthesized, but it retains a warm, reflective, peaceful, timeless quality that I just don’t get out of any other music, and certainly not in any other laptop-propelled ambient music from this time, even when they come close and live up to all the telltale descriptors. This is great and I love it.

Nas – Illmatic (1994)
In an age of curating playlists, Internet contrarianism and the long, slow dismantling of the classic rock-dominated Great Albums lists carved into stone by the baby boomers, it’s hard to find any album that everyone can agree to hold up as a truly undisputed classic.  Illmatic may come as close as any album to staking such a claim. And yet, in the context of listing it here, I know someone will stumble across this entry and roll their eyes at what’s obviously just another token rap album. And that sucks, but too bad, it can’t be helped.  Every single track on this is, well, pretty much perfect. Is it worth mentioning that “One Love” is my favorite track? That the third verse sends chills down my spine every time I hear it? But unlike most albums on this list, there isn’t a bad song here, no good-but-not-great weak links that shape the album into preferable sides. I may have fallen out of the loop with hip-hop in the past few years (not something to boast about, I know) but time and time again, Illmatic has been the anchor and compass that brings me back, which I’m sure it will again.

Coldcut – Journeys by DJ: 70 Minutes of Madness (1995)
The most adventurous DJ mixes are often described as “journeys” but none live up to that metaphor quite like Coldcut’s entry in the Journeys by DJ mix series. I’m not too interested in trying to describe what Matt Black and Jonathan More (and others, maybe) are doing here — it’s better experienced firsthand than being reduced to a blurb that will describe it in the same terms as every other DJ mix ever made — but even over 20 years later, it’s still a masterclass in everyday concepts that we take for now granted and regularly draw upon with comparatively lazy inspiration: the use of sampling and digital editing with fundamentally solid, simple mixing and the blending together of different genres and styles. I’ve enjoyed plenty of mixes that are defined by their tracklisting and traditional transitions, and praise of the extensive detail that went into the design of this mix does not double as criticism of simple methods used by most other DJs. 70 Minutes of Madness, however, is inventive beyond compare and exposes the complacency and dilettante-level eclecticism that we’ve come to accept from most DJs today. Blending downtempo cuts, techno, jungle, electro, funk with film dialogue and other leftfield samples, the mix draws from a variety of genres but never sounds random or too scattered. Everything here makes sense, just not in the usual ways you’d expect.

Burger/Ink – Las Vegas (1996)
If this album had come out in 1998 like I’d always assumed, it would still be ahead of its time by a longshot. Even today, it resists easy categorization, despite being one of the earliest cornerstones of German techno in the new century. Like another Wolfgang Voigt album on this list, there are no tracks on this that I’d even think about skipping, and the entire album feels of a whole piece that I can only ever think about listening to from beginning to end. To point out highlights in this piece might imply that there are moments on it that don’t deliver the goods, and nothing could be further from the truth. There are a couple tracks nestled around the middle, though, that bend time and logic in ways that you’ll never quite get used to and give the album the sensation of movement that its cover hints at and palpable heights that aren’t just a suggestive title.

the Boards of Canada post

When I wrote about Daft Punk, I envisioned that entry as the first of a series of similar posts about all my favorite bands and musical artists. I was hoping to write other pieces like it about other artists I’ve been into for some time. Hopefully, my experiences with them would give me some things to write about and my enthusiasm would make it interesting. If I was going to do this, I knew that I’d be writing about Boards of Canada, and probably sooner than later. I’ve tried writing this post a few times over the past few weeks but it’s been very difficult for me to organize my ideas. Starting at the beginning has been frustrating so I’ll go backwards instead.

Tomorrow’s Harvest, the latest release from Boards of Canada, is a boring album. That’s a contentious statement if there ever was one, but it’s the simplest description of my feelings that I can come up with and a point that I wanted to make very clearly and get out of the way. The first three tracks are very good. The rest of it sounds very nice but feels meaningless. Boards of Canada’s fans have recorded several compliations of BoC-inspired music over the years as a tribute to their favorite “Gods” of electronic music. Tomorrow’s Harvest fits in nicely with those collections, feeling very inspired by Boards of Canada and all the sounds and effects and moods that their music has come to characterize over the years. It does not, however, break new ground or provide any kind of experience remotely akin to listening to their music made in the late 90s or in the early 00s. Many moments feel like imitations of earlier tracks. Had this album been made by another artist or group, it would either have been criticized as insultingly derivative or praised as a clever parody of the “Boards of Canada sound.” I realize that this is a very subjective take on the album, nothing but my opinion, which is all coming straight from the gut and which I still don’t completely understand. But I also believe that the time that I’ve spend with their music and the way that I’ve listened to it has given me a license to make such statements and that they’re worth more of your time than any of the seemingly-universal acclaim that this album has received from the press or from the duo’s most devoted fans.

And, recognizing how deeply so many people tend to feel about this music, I also recognize that I’m hardly the only listener out there who has what they know to be an “expert” opinion about it. Spend a few minutes on Twoism, We Are the Music Makers, or even the devoted Boards of Canada Subreddit, and you’ll encounter a level of emotional investment that’s almost unheard of in music outside of the realms of teen-pop. Surely there are always metal or prog-rock bands out there, making albums full of references to history and mythology and art and poetry, arranging it all together into puzzles for fans to unpack and discover and have deep conversations over. And there’s Radiohead, who wield a staggering amount of control over their fans’ listening habits and musical priorities. They selectively exposed their fans to one divergent realm of music after another, gently guiding at least hundred thousand listeners or so through the entire history of modern music, slowly culturing their fans into a new kind of listener more suitable for the post-Internet band they so deeply wanted to become.

Boards of Canada, on the other hand, have inspired nothing short of a cult following, one bursting at the seams these days, with very little direct communication or activity whatsoever. Having established a very recognizable sound that’s all their own, particularly on two “classic” albums and EPs, bros Sandison accidentally spawned a virtual world that was no longer limited to the confines of the music itself. “Boards of Canada” became synonymous not just with a very particular feeling of melancholy, but with he idea of “nostalgia” (childhood nostalgia, in particular), which electronic music had rarely concerned itself with before. Listeners who discovered them before the mid 00s encountered a very strange music. Reactions were mixed but always truly personal. But over time, discussion of “nostalgia” slowly spread like a meme, and is now held up as the “truth” behind their music. It now overwhelms the experience of listening to Boards of Canada, defines it, confines it, and reduces the very creative duo to a brand: blurry Polaroids, animated production logos from early 80s television, warbled-sounds pulled from aged tape… first the audience bought into this simplified idea of what Boards of Canada meant. Did the duo themselves begin to see themselves in the same way? Considering how Tomorrow’s Harvest feels like a shorthand transcript of their previous works, I have to wonder.

This is not to say that the new album doesn’t have a character of its own. It does feel creepy. And grim. And as desolate as the ghost town imagery that informs our expectations about the whole shebang. Much like a certain spector of death now hangs over the music of Coil, this is one of those albums that invites you to stare into the void and take stock of your mortality. This won’t stop people from adding it to their “chill out” playlists alongside Thievery Corporation and Zero 7. There are interesting themes here, but it plays out as if created by committee. The trademark syth pads, samples of voices counting, station ID jingles… the album feels like a Tumblr site devoted to collecting snatches of media that resemble the Boards of Canada™ aesthetic. What would have been short interludes on previous albums now constitute lengthy tracks, with no coherent structure holding them together. It’s a joyless album that makes me physically sick and is a chore to sit through. I hate it and I can’t help but shake the feeling that it’s a product something in the artist-listener relationship here that somehow got warped and twisted ass-backwards.

I don’t like the new album. “Reach for the Dead” is the best moment on it and the only truly affecting piece of music on it, much like “Dayvan Cowboy” was the saving grace of The Campfire Headphase in 2005. These aren’t simply two good-enough tracks that fans like because they were released as singles, but two of the most affecting pieces that Boards of Canada have ever recorded. I feel this is significant because it proves that the inspiration that made their earlier records so vital never left them, but rather, was buried by some other concern that else that rendered both The Campfire Headphase and Tomorrow’s Harvest as significantly weaker albums than their predecessors. These most recent efforts, in particular, were received by a sizable fanbase and critiqued by an Internet press industry that simply weren’t there to bother them during their time on Skam and their early releases on Warp. Am I trying to blame the fact that their music isn’t as enjoyable as it used to be squarely on the Internet? I don’t know. And what good would that do even if I was?

Geogaddi came out in February of 2002. I remember this very clearly, where I was living and what I was doing and how obsessed I was with their music at the time, actually looking up information about them online to see if they were releasing any new music any time soon, and then seeing that their new album had come out only days before. That sort of thing almost never happens anymore, so try to appreciate it if you ever get the chance. I remember going with my friend to the store to buy it. Unfortunately, that store was probably Best Buy but at least I can say that it was there for me when I needed it at least once. I don’t remember my first impressions of it or anything like that. I just remember it being with me for the rest of that spring and summer, gradually becoming a part of my life at the time along with the rest of everything else I’d collected from Boards of Canada up to that point. The album definitely felt more insistent than the rest of their music, or at least more assertive in delivering its musical and thematic motifs.

One review of Geogaddi, in a rather sheepish/apologetic recommendation of the album, made an interesting point about the reputation that was surrounding the duo and the nature of their work. “This is BoC in hi-fi, and not just in sound-quality either. All of their traditional cliches have been turned up to 10. It’s as if the earlier records were petri dishes to divine the most effective ways to cause mass-swooning among the faithful.” It’s never “expensive” sounding but is certainly the work of musicians with a desire to make a better-sounding long-player experience, and with more attention and probably resources this time around to make it happen. This doesn’t compromise or distract their vision, if anything it brings certainly elements of their sound to the forefront of the listener’s attention, perhaps stripping the music of some of its ambiguity but creating a clearer picture of their vision than ever before. They had already built of a musical language that was very much all their own, but the way it was all brought into crisp focus here, coupled with great track sequencing and the feeling of connected-ness between the tracks (which was missing from later albums) makes Geogaddi a very interesting listening experience.

I heard the In a Beautiful Place in the Country EP during the summer of 2001. I bought it and had the CD in my car during most of that summer, so my memories of it are usually associated with driving in my car on the way to my summer job (in the dead of night, stocking shelves at a big-box retail store starting at 4:00 am) or sitting in the car after work in the afternoon. My air conditioner was broken and I had black leather seats. I’d open the driver’s side door and take a breath before getting inside. It felt like an oven, and in less than a minute I’d always begin sweating profusely. I’d put this CD on and to this day, every time I hear the beginning of
“Kid For Today,” the skin on my arms and legs begins to tingle, as if all the pores are slowly opening up in the beginning stages of whatever signal cascade begins the perspiration cycle. And I feel very alone. And tired. But also very comfortable. The songs here are very comforting (quite the opposite feeling of Geogaddi, as a whole), which probably has a lot to do with the lasting appeal of this EP, which seem to be some of Boards of Canada’s most-recognized songs, if Internet message boards are anything to go by. I imagine that this release, which actually came out in late 2000, is their most immediately-accessible work, and probably came out at a time when more people than ever were getting into their music. This was also the height of Napster’s popularity. I don’t remember what lead me to download their music in the first place, but I first heard Boards of Canada after downloading some mp3s, more or less at random, off of the network. I don’t see how anyone at the time could have been interested in this kind of music, downloaded this EP, and not fallen in love. That’s the sort of bullshit generalization that I usually hate to read but it’s one that I believe enough to go ahead and make myself.

Sometime in late 2000, I downloaded some tracks off Napster from Music Has the Right to Children, and a few mp3s taken from the earlier EPs. Those EPs are all great. I could talk about them a lot, although I feel like I should spend most of the rest of this most talking about the album, instead. My memories of Hi Scores and Twoism, which I often confused with each other until I was able to get them on CD, whenever it was that they were each re-issued. “Hi Scores,” “Nlogax,” “Seeya Later,” “Everything You Do is a Balloon,” “Sixtyniner,” “Oirectine“… well, now I’ve just linked to most of the music on them, but listening to all of those (and quite often, on a loop for a few hours, late at night), I remember feeling aware of myself in a way that I’d never quite experienced before. I honestly do feel like I never quite grew into my self in the way that you’re supposed to during puberty or early adolescence. I do feel like the autopilot setting that everyone’s on during childhood was never switched off for me until I was out of high school, and that I was never truly living in the moment with a real understanding of who I was, what I wanted in life, or the understanding that I was truly responsible for making my own decisions, until some time during that year. I don’t know how to talk about this without sounding like I’m trying to get sympathy, make excuses for the person I was at that time or before then, or looking at my life as if it were a story I’m writing, and trying to assign interesting psychological qualities to the main character. Anyway, I’m not saying that these tracks made me experience a kind of awakening. But they were there when it was happening to me, so I’ve always had very special feelings about them. And that personal attachment is probably why I get so irritated by the legions of Boards of Canada fanboys that slowly came into existence over time, whose public displays of affection for the group often sound like Evangelical testimonials, at least in terms of the “personal relationship” that they seem to have with the music. I liked the idea that this music was “mine,” which is laughable to admit in any case today, but my point is that I felt this attachment in a personal way, and the emergence of a large community of people dudes excited about it in ways that looked very silly from the outside, made me wonder if I was nothing but just another dork gushing — privately, publicly, what’s the difference? — about how much it all meant to me.

Along with those tracks, I’d downloaded “Roygbiv,” “Turquoise Hexagon Sun” and “Happy Cycling” (maybe my favorite Boards of Canada track, and one that closes the album so perfectly that it’s hard to believe it was included on the Matador release as a US-only bonus track) from Music Has the Right to Children. I bought that album in late 2000, about 2 weeks before Christmas, and listened to it every day for the rest of that Christmas break. I remember driving to a Christmas party in another state — I shouldn’t have RSVP’ed but then again, they shouldn’t have invited me to go in the first place — and playing through the album twice. I don’t know if I’d ever played music in my car as loud as I was blasting “Sixtyten” that night. More than anything, I remember listening to this album on headphones while laying in bed, usually while thinking about a lot of things that were bothering me at the time. Maybe that should make me feel sad today, every time I listen to it, but it doesn’t. It didn’t inspire me or make me feel like I could “escape to another world” while listening to it or anything quite so precious as that. But it did make me feel like I was entering a new phase in my life, one that would hopefully give me some space to relax (not in a strict physical sense) and some opportunities to have some fun and rewarding experiences. There’s no way to talk about any of that stuff without going off on some boring tangents. I’ll just say that the album sounded like the perfect synthesis of so much of the music that I was enjoying at the time, but also something new and completely different. I didn’t come into it with great expectations or having experienced any of the myth or hype around it that would slowly grow over time, so I got to know it very slowly and by the time it was famous, getting reissued, getting a perfect score from Pitchfork, etc., I already felt like it was mine in a way that no other music had ever been before. That’s a feeling that’s worth savoring for a short time, but like I’d slowly learn over time, don’t attach any feelings of identity or accomplishment to stuff that you like, because its “importance” or “meaning” is beyond your control. I still love Music Has the Right to Children, even as it’s become a go-to “classic” electronic album that people recommend to curious listeners, even as its reputation has dwindled over time thanks to chin-stoking Internet geek hyperbole, even as I’ve even seen a backlash against it from people who are just tired of it. I don’t know what I’ll think of it a year from now or ten years from now, but I like to imagine myself listening to it for a long time and seeing what kind of new associations I can make with it.

I picked up a used copy of Music Has the Right to Children at a store in 1999. I’d seen an advertisement for it in a magazine and the art was really interesting, plus it was on Matador, so I thought I should try it out. I started to take it to the counter but put it back in the racks and bought LP5 by Autechre instead. I often wonder how my feelings about this music would have changed if I’d started listening to it back then.

Maybe that’s all I have to say about Boards of Canada. I could say more, but it’s a dilemma between wanting to talk about one of my favorite groups, and understanding that the attachment I have towards this music is based on feelings that I’d probably be better off not trying to articulate. There’s a lot of conflicting feelings in this music, and it’s interesting to talk about, but the experience of just getting lost in it is so much more rewarding and worth preserving. This is music that deserves a cold listen, free from promises about exactly what it’s going to deliver. Maybe that’s true of most music? Once you’re fed the press release, it can be hard to have an honest response that’s not tainted by other people’s ideas. Maybe that’s why I’ll be perfectly happy if no one ever reads this. I wanted to get this all out, maybe so I could stop thinking about doing it in one shape or form in the future, but I don’t want anyone to go into this music with expectations or come away from it with anything other than an interpretation that’s come straight out of their own imagination and nowhere else.