Jan 2024
The advantage of using my own site is that I can set the day that the blog was posted and future readers will be none the wiser (unless I point it out in the beginning paragraph, whoops).
January Playlist #
In light of recent developments in music journalism, I'm going to exacerbate the problems further by writing about music for free. Sorry everyone! There's also still no embed functionality on the site yet (lazy), so please just click the links to the music.
Glass Beach - cul-de-sac #
How great is it that Glass Beach starts off 2024 with a 5-years-in-the-making-follow-up to 'the first glass beach album' which conjures up a whole new sonic world to get lost in! The progression of the musicianship, composition, vocal performances and "sound" since their debut is endlessly impressive over the course of the epic hour-plus play time. A sonic odyssey of a record, it feels like a complete whole rather than a playlist and is a joy to listen to from start-to-finish. As a result, it's hard to pick just one song. I've chosen 'strange animal' as it's a great distillation of what makes the entire album so enjoyable (and sounds like eternal favourites of mine, Change-era Dismemberment Plan and 12Rods).
Listen here to 'cul-de-sac' here
Number Girl - ZEGEN VS UNDERCOVER #
Sometimes I think "why did I pick the heaviest to transport, loudest, most expensive, hardest to record and most impractical in an urban environment instrument to play" and then I hear a Dave Fridmann produced track and feel completely validated in my instrument decision.
Listen to 'ZEGEN VS UNDERCOVER' here
Lubo Alexandrov - Gankino Horo #
My bandmate (no online alias) has said for a long time how much he enjoys Balkan folk music and for some reason I never asked him for recommendations until last month. This is the least traditional of the songs he sent but is perhaps the one I found to be the easiest gateway into a heretofore unexplored genre (especially for fans of "Hot Rats" and The Dillinger Escape Plan).
This subsequently sent me down a rabbit hole of trying to understand how to count the complex rhythms (5/4, 7/4, 11/4, 13/4, etc.) in Balkan folk music. I stumbled across a lecture by Borislav Petrov on Youtube and found it to be a fascinating overview of the history of the genre and an incredible lesson in how to feel odd time signatures. It's an hour long but I would really recommend watching it.
Watch Bulgarian Rhythms Presentation by Borislav Petrov here
Julia Holter - Spinning #
Julia never misses!
Home Front - Real Eyes #
I really like Twin Shadow's first record and yelling. This song is evocative of the former and contains a lot of the latter. Shouts out to "Roof Access" for putting me onto this one!
Gia Margaret - A Stretch #
Last year really was an incredible year for ambient and instrumental modern classical records. Perhaps it was just also an incredible year for every genre but 'Romantic Piano' would have definitely made my list of favourite albums had I had heard it in 2023. Thanks again to "Roof Access" for making me aware of this one!
Jlin - The Precision of Infinity #
Jlin never misses!
Listen to 'The Precision of Infinity' here
Denki Groove - かっこいいジャンパー #
Would highly recommend doing your warm-up walk of your regular 5k run to the first half of the song and then starting your run during the second half of it. To be honest, you can usually miss me with most 90s dance cross-over (specifically electronica, big-beat, chill-out) but this track is a full-on techno rager by the end. If you like anything Yasutaka Nakata has written or Tetsuya Mizuguchi has designed, you'll probably like quite a bit of 'A' by Denki Groove.
I found out about 'A' from Patrick (no relation) St. Michel's Make Believe Melodies newsletter, which I would recommend subscribing to if you are a big nerd about Japanese music from the past and the present (no offense Patrick).
Listen to 'かっこいいジャンパー' here (only on your preferred streaming service (or buy it?), sorry)
Patworld Changenotes (feel free to skip if you find web development uninteresting) #
The goal of this site was for it to cost as little money as possible.
Currently we're on the 'most free' hosting service there is, Github Pages. Most blogs like this have a mailing list and I wanted to explore a solution that did not require me to pay a monthly subscription. After some investigation of using Serverless actions (DigitalOcean, Google Cloud, AWS, Azure), I realised that a platform with a hard billing limit (not a billing warning) doesn't exist.
The conclusion I've come to is that I'm going to eventually move the site to the cheapest VPS service I can find, which is Hetzner. This will happen whenever I get round to it and then I'll also start using the domain name I purchased.
Maybe there will be a mailing list you can sign up for next month?
- Previous: 2023 lists
- Next: Feb 2024