September 12 2023
The “greatest ambient album of all time,” hitting bottom in LA with Elliott Smith, 9/11 at Elixir Juice, the five kinds of music I do not want you to send me, a Kompakt mix, and a little bit more
The 1986 release that Joshua Minsoo Kim called “the greatest ambient album of all time” is being reissued. That album is Hiroshi Yoshimura’s Surround, originally titled Soundscape 1: Surround. This is literally ambient music, commissioned by “Misawa Homes, intended to function as an ‘amenity’ designed to enhance the company’s newly built living spaces.” I am practicing abstinence around saying things like “the greatest of all time,” though I understand why JMK said it about Surround. The music is not entirely top-to-bottom smooshed electronics, though some of it is, and the overall mood falls in line with a lot of music we need never hear again. (See below.) Which is not Yoshimura’s fault! Surround came before all the lavender scroll beats. Yoshimura’s music doesn’t have flatlined screensaver dynamics; Surround is a series of active parts. (The synthetic marimba/empty tube sounds in “Time After Time” are not all that passive, for instance.) You can tell someone is in the house.
All of that might be less relaxing than these eleven minutes shot in 1986. Yoshimura runs around filling garbage bags with air and playing with kids. Apparently a performance? I can’t say.
For Luke O’Neil, I wrote about hitting my bottom in LA and listening to Elliott Smith. I love his newsletter, which I rank way above being an alcoholic, below Elliott Smith himself, and pretty much even steven with my very first AA meeting at Cafe Tropical on October 20th of 2015. Fun fact: I never heard Elliott in any of the bars I went to.
Joell Ortiz is living like the other suburbs dads, buying gazebos at Home Depot. More raps about aging!
Here are the kinds of music I do not want you to send me anymore. These are obviously styles of music I like. I have possibly even released records in these modes. We tend to care most about our own backyards.
People combining field recordings with lil shambly hospital sketches. I do not want to hear it unless you are Kate Carr, whose brand new 90-minute set is a mind-melter.
Whatever vapor wavy ‘80s cool-cat synth-pad mash you picked up off the movie blogs. Here is a new short guide to vaporwave, which always feels like a too-complex name for people just chopping up ‘80s samples and avoiding beats. Some Dimes Square grunt could write “Vaporwave is White Hip-Hop” and get canceled and then start a Substack and do a podcast about post-woke rave drugs.
Anything with a thick, midrangey white or pink noise bed and spooky black and white art. I am glad we both saw SUNN O))) with Attila. I am glad you got that Eurorack up and running. We love many of the same things. We do.
Half-assed improv. I am glad you met a jazz legend. I am.
Taping-down-the-keys drones, which can be great, like this RST album, Air. You just really have to listen to the entire album after you make it. At least once.
The indispensable Le Cinema Club is showing Seventeen which will be up until midnight on September 15 (free, as always). “A free-flowing portrait of midwestern America’s working-class teenagers,” released in 1983.
Today, Sam sent me this 9/11 footage of a woman ducking into the Elixir shop on West Broadway. That’s where Sam and I used to get blueberry smoothies. In September of 2001, he was four years old. I took him to preschool that Tuesday. He sat on my shoulders and watched the first plane hit. Until that moment, we were just watching some weird New York shit. We weren’t “evacuated,” as some people still say of Lower Manhattan residents. The pile smelled insane for months.
Sam is 26 and moved to London for grad school a few weeks ago. After he texted me this, I asked him what he remembers from that day. He said:
A lot
I remember seeing the first plane hit
Getting pulled out of school
Some mf bit their tongue in school
I honestly remember almost everything
And then I don’t remember much of the next year or two
And then my memories start
There is a new Tirzah album, produced by Mica Levi. I am just beginning to absorb its slack and slidy wonders. Will I love it any less in two months? Hasn’t happened yet with a Tirzah and Mica Levi album.
Michaelangelo Matos just posted this two-hour mix of Kompakt. It’s great. Speaking of Kompakt: When we held the first New Yorker dance party in 2006 at Club T, Michael Mayer was the DJ. Look—here are some photos on Flickr that confirm this fact. It was incredibly fun. Just dancing, nothing else. I cannot say the same of subsequent years.
