June 27 2023
Remember to order Earlier and let your web browser (not a submersible) take you into the deep sea. I almost drowned at the beach when I was a teen and that was enough to scare me straight. Lose once to the sea and it’s hard to hang on to the hubris. Compress all the billionaires, now, and remember that the record labels love nothing more than selling you music that they (and possibly you) already own. When people say “catalog,” don’t think about how old it is, because that’s not how labels think. What appeals about older titles is they don’t require any outlay—they’ve been paid for, so any income they generate is pure profit, minus the small upkeep fees of, say, engineers fluffing up the master with Atmos.
The new Aphex Twin reminds me that few people can make machines sound both alive and tentative. Go to the 41 minute mark in this Art21 episode to see Tauba Auerbach talk about marbling paper and the power of patterns. I didn’t intend that alliteration but I will accept it as a mirror of an imperfect repetition.
After Ahmad Jamal’s death, I started going through his catalog. No wonder Miles Davis told his band to pay attention to Jamal. Steppin Out With A Dream (1976) is elegant and wild (like the plaid suit he wears on the cover) and One (1978) has one of the best Billy Joel covers I’ve heard in a minute.
Some readers are confused, so here’s an explanation of the Nakba from The Nation (it’s a four-minute video) and a good rundown of the Naksa from Yumna Patel.
Steve Albini is doing a residency on NTS, and there are four episodes up. No idea if he’s done something like this before. I don’t like all the music he plays (or even that much of it) but I love the idea of someone playing the music that formed them—or sustains them—and talking to the musicians involved.
This explanation of what “Livvy rizzing up Baby Gronk” means is an accurate representation of what it feels like to chase slang as an adult. Why do I know something about lacrosse players now? That’s on me. Will I use any of what I learned in daily life? Only right now, when I share this madness between us.
Robert Ashley’s magnificent seven-part “television opera” from 1983, Perfect Lives, has been remastered for 1080p and the new files are here on Dean Winkler’s Vimeo page, for free. I prefer it on headphones, because of how Ashley’s voice sits in the mix, and it was made for a small screen. Your laptop is not a step down! Also going to repost a thing I did a few years ago called The Fork. It is wildly derivative of Robert Ashley’s work, in the most loving way.
The new album from Nora Stanley and Benny Bock, which is called Distance of the Moon, is a recent favorite. Slow, low, and benign in its freakiness: saxophone, piano, and a team that knows when to lay out.
I wrote a piece about Henry Threadgill’s wonderful memoir and something long for The New York Review of Architecture about Nan Goldin, All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, and some fucked up stuff that happened to me. It’s not really about architecture, though buildings play a role.
