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#he did the soundtrack for Kentucky route zero
hypertextdog · 28 days
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whats ur fav video game(s)?
OOOOOH THATS A GOOD QUESTION ummm lets see. im kind of ass at a lot of games that require a lot of speed and precision so it's mostly story-based and puzzle games. ok im bad at favs but here's some good ones and brief sales pitches in no particular order ...
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STORIES UNTOLD is a ~puzzle game that unfolds in four parts with mechanics varying from those of the text-based adventure to full walkaround horror shit. over the course of play you gradually get a sense of what's really going on and how all of the parts are connected. it's extremely extremely cool and feels like a weird dream sequence it's great
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HYPNOSPACE OUTLAW is some kind of exploration game that takes place on a fictional second internet circa 1999. play feels not dissimilar to surfing wikipedia. it's incredibly elaborate and vast and was crafted with a lot of love for the cultural phenomena of the internet both then and now. its soundtrack is also like 6 hours and incredible
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THIMBLEWEED PARK was my first ever point-and-click adventure game and it's so cool. it's a very funny game and has a lot of fun puzzles ... it's shorter but it's also got one of the best soundtracks on this list check this out
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KENTUCKY ROUTE ZERO is probably the most beautiful game i've ever played. i completed it earlier this year. it's so beautifully written and there's not a character in it who isn't in competition for most compelling motherfucker there. its visuals are also just so perfect dude. i really like itttt
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DISCO ELYSIUM i nearly forgot to include because i was like nah everyone in the world already knows how amazing and immersive and vast and well-done de is. it is probably the best game on this list. it takes place in the most fleshed-out fictional world i've ever interacted with and every second of it screams "this is The work of someone's life." there's also a fantastic novel "sacred and terrible air" which takes place in the same world, which i also suggest ...
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PATRICK'S PARABOX is one of those really mind-fucking puzzle games like baba is you if you're familiar (which would probably also be on this list if i got further in it than i did.) it's one of those games with an extremely simple premise that contorts into one of the most complicated things you've ever tried to wrap your brain around. recursion is so fucked up dude
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THE PROCESS OF ELIMINATION is a pretty good free web game that irs umm i hear its author is a pretty cool guyy and uhhh i ummmm. it's pretty good ...... it's a hypertext-based adventure about a piece of spyware which an architect uses to monitor local crime and which his son uses to stalk this redditor he's crushing on. ibwill make another one eventually
HOPE YOU ENJOYED MY GAMESLIST ... 👍
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gwynndolin · 3 years
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i would literally commission ben babbitt to cover more hymnals
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vroenis · 3 years
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2020 Music In Review
When this was a draft, it opened with a bit about me not writing, but then I started playing board games again and wrote two bits on board games. In the trashfire that 2020 was (add “trashfire” to dictionary, no I did not mean “trash fire”), and 2021 continues to be, somehow I ended up getting back into board games. Actually there are good and logical reasons I returned to them and if you’re interested in that, I go into some of it in those journals, but more interesting is just playing the games so you should totally HMU if you’re local, sorry I don’t do virtual/digital, I like handling physical pieces and sharing food.
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The most natural way for me to wrap a year for me is in music and since Melbourne locked down in March, I spent a lot of time working from home and listening on my own gear which I can’t express enough the joy at being able to do - firstly at having good reference transducers and secondly not having to listen to trash radio.
Writing about art is always a bit weird but it’s good fun so we do it anyway so let’s write some words about art. There are three main ways I engage with music in no particular order - more or less however I happen to notice them;
Music and musicianship - tonal and rhythmic composition
Technical production - recording, editing/manipulionation, processing/production, mixing and balance, and mastering
Song-writing/lyrics - should there be any - excludes vocal performance as this is covered under the first one.
To get weirder about it, I tend to have both emotional and also pragmatic responses to those three things separately so that means there’s a wackadoo matrix of 6 criteria I seem to be assessing every piece of music I encounter against and yep, that’s a thing I do, all the time, every time. The better a piece of music is, tho, the more the line between the emotional and pragmatic blurs as the overall quality of the work is established. I might begin with an initial pragmatic appreciation of an excellent mix and balance, and technical execution of a recording and production, then come to get a feel for how emotional a work is - and vice-versa. Sometimes on rare occasions, it all happens at the same time - an album is just a smashing work of excellence in every way and I just love every aspect of it more over time.
It’s worth mentioning I don’t really have any great axe to grind with pop music - there has always been and continues to be great pop, and good pop isn’t by any means easy music to create. For me at least, and likely many people, what destroys pop as a listening experience is repetition which usually isn’t under the listener’s control, but an unfortunate side-effect of the underlying culture that sustains pop as an industry. I still appreciate and admire so much about pop-music and always keep a little in my collection from each decade. No matter what, always remind yourself that the kids are OK and that there’s always great pop-music around - stay in touch with it. Some of it is truly awesome, and I use the superlative with sincerity.
Albums Of The Year
A few things happened on the way to me actually getting to write this journal, including some surgery (I’m fine), but also I ended up nominating no less than 4 Albums Of The Year. I think they deserve their own lengthier write-ups, in a weirdly me thing to do, I feel like I want to talk less about them and you should just go and listen to them but they have been getting a lot of air-time on my channels - in any case, here’s a lazylink to the instagram post I did for them. They’re all great and they feature in the lists coming in this entry so give them a listen, they’re outstanding.
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Personal Charts
When I set out to write a musical summary of the year, I went to my last.fm page to see what I’d listened to by number of plays polled. As mentioned, given the Covid lockdown and working from home so much, I’ve actually gotten to register a lot more of my listening on the site whereas in general so much of my listening happens offline, so to speak, be it in the car or on my mp3 player. This year has also seen a serious shift in my buying habits shift entirely to Bandcamp for a few reasons; Google shut down their Play store in favour of streaming because naturally it favours them and not artists - it also just makes sense for them from infrastructure and administrative perspectives, but also I just did more and more research and naturally found more and more artists and Bandcamp just made sense. I want to write a digest as to why you should do the same but I feel like people need to find their own way there or approach me directly so the motivation comes from them. Streaming is bad for artists and while I and indeed artists don’t want you to close your premium accounts just yet because closing any revenue streams to artists in any way is bad, I encourage you to do some research into just how much revenue there is in streaming, and what your expectations are for how you think the artists you love so much are supposed to make a living. I guess if your engagement level is fairly low, or the culture you’re into is pop-music, then this is the end of the discussion and that’s OK, we don’t need to take it any further. If you’re in any way curious about what this issue is, this video by Benn Jordan is a great place to start.
There are two charts I’d like to share - one is my top 10 albums I’ve chosen, the other is the same albums by number of plays as per my last.fm polling. These aren’t the top 10 albums I polled, mind-you. Sometimes I listen to an album a whole bunch just because I’m into it or because it slaps, but it isn’t one I’d nominate as an album that encapsulates the year.
You’ll immediately notice not every album was released in 2020, however my conditions are that they either had to have been released close enough to 2020 that I’d have done heavy listening in the year, or I had to have purchased them in 2020 so they were new to me in the year.
Here are the 10 albums I chose;
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And here they are by number of plays polled in 2020 - bear in mind I probably played one or two favourite tracks a few times more, so they don’t neatly divide by number of tracks listed on the album;
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A few immediate things to note;
- Dreams Are Not Enough is significantly underrepresented because I don’t listen to it at my PC while I work. In general, I definitely listen to this far more in environments offline, but also it’s not exactly an all occasions album given its tone and atmosphere, if you know what I mean, and if you don’t - give it a listen and find out.
- La Favière on the other hand is more or less a bit of a party so I play it a lot… yet when it comes to my personal rankings, it’s not that I like it less per se, it’s just that I love the other albums more - tons of respect to Iversen. It still made 10th on a list of hundreds of albums and netted 161 plays out of thousands of files I have.
- Had I done this kind of list in 2019 and known about Reid Willis, I suspect The Longing Device would have been an Album Of The Year then. It was a dead ringer for an Album Of The Year for me this year except then he released Mother Of and that is an absolute killer, so he outdid himself and I selected that instead. Reid Willis is a genius.
- There’s a long story as to why I only bought Hanan Townshend’s soundtrack for To The Wonder in 2020 but at least I was delayed long enough to not produce any more plastic, given my original intention once upon a time was to get it on CD. In any case, I had to buy it on iTunes and was bedstricken from illness for days after. iTunes is cursed.
Telefon Tel Aviv - Dreams Are Not Enough (October 2019)
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In 2009, Telefon Tel Aviv released their album Immolate Yourself and then Charles Cooper died. I didn’t actually find out about his death until after I’d heard the album a few times over, but the album stayed with me for the 10 years to the new album as a landmark like no other. In part for the mourning of Charles, but simultaneously and separately as something that stood apart as some sound for my life that no other music could touch. Maybe The Haxan Cloak’s Excavation, maybe Darkside’s Psychic, but each of those in different ways.
10 years later and Joshua Eustis continues his long journey and releases Dreams Are Not Enough in the Telefon Tel Aviv name. After my first listen, I tweeted to him that I felt like deleting the rest of my music collection which we had a laugh about (he’s a very sociable person, by the way, if you’re not an asshole - he’s also someone you can learn a lot about the industry from). The thing is - I want to have these kinds of exaggerated reactions to the art I engage with - I want them to be world-destroying. Sure, not every piece of art has to be immense and euphoric and devastating, but it can’t all be run-of-the-mill either.
It’s difficult for me to describe Dreams Are Not Enough in practical terms, it is still a Telefon album, it is also Telefon without Charles, it’s also mourning him, is it moving on in his absence? It is definitely its own art for you to engage with as a unique work, to you the individual. It’s uniquely Telefon Tel Aviv in a way that no other electronic artist does the same way - it feels a specific way and there are times when no other music will do. One of my running jokes is that Porpentine’s Howling Dogs and Cardboard Computer’s Kentucky Route Zero will be my Game(s) Of The Year every year forever and Dreams Are Not Enough now with Immolate Yourself are going to last 10, 20 years - longer - as Albums Of The Year forever too because there’s just never anything else like them.
Reid Willis - The Longing Device (January 2019)
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The good thing about having made my choices earlier in 2020 is that Reid WIllis’ Mother Of wasn’t out when I wrote-up the list, so I get to talk about The Longing Device.
Reid Willis was an absolutely random find on Bandcamp. Occasionally I like to dive into subgenres and just go hunting. You can imagine that 9 times out of 10 this is a fruitless endeavour and might think this is frustrating but I really enjoy doing it as an exercise in critical listening. By whatever turn of divine Bandcamp listing, I came across the first chronological album he has up, Crude Healing (2016) and from memory listened to four tracks before instant-buying his entire discography available. I did go hunting on the Google Play store before it was shuttered and buy the most recent album from 2013, The Sunken Half listed from his older works before he jumped over to Bandcamp for all his newer albums and it’s definitely a transitional work to what he does now and well worth having. While Crude Healing initially blew me away, The Longing Device is a more mature album that has been more carefully shaped, skills having been honed and focussed into a less raw and yet more powerful sound. Very rarely am I ever an “I liked your old stuff better than your new stuff” kind of person, in general I tend to go with an artist when they evolve and grow unless on occasion they go in a completely different direction in which case hey - I respect it but sometimes it’s just not something I feel.
Here Willis’ orchestrations are careful, beautiful and languished in the right moments - cut with beats and edits, and the beats and edits likewise deftly cut with orchestrations. This is such a stunning exhibition of creativity, it’s one of the more esoteric examples of my music collection and also in some ways perhaps one of the more approachable works. Then in November Willis released Mother Of where he just takes everything to the next level.
Mat Zo - Illusion Of Depth (October 2020)
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In July of 2020, Above & Beyond released their ongoing regular compilation Anjunabeats volume 15 and finished the first disc with a bangin’ Mat Zo track called Problems, an instant favourite of mine as soon as I heard it. It’s a tough year for DJs and musos all round not being able to tour, Josh Eustice and many others have been doing year-round commentary about irresponsible alleged “underground” gigs have nothing to do with the old-school spirit of underground at all and have turned into superspreader events, and how publishers and labels haven’t supported artists through Covid. Leading up to October, Anjuna and Mat Zo promote his forthcoming album and I have to admit, I’m pretty hyped and then it drops.
Holy shit.
In a year of such terrible events, this felt like such a timely dose of positivity that arrived at just the right time. I wrote a whole damn entry for this on instragram, and it’s one of my Albums Of The Year, but far out the digest of this album. On one hand, it’s a hugely technically accomplished work - it’s a diverse exhibition of styles, musicianship, stellar production, and absolutely pristine mix and balance - on the other hand, it’s just an absolute fucken banger-riot-party of an album. The album stands up to a clinical listening on reference transducers, it’s such a delight to audition and examine in every way, but you can set all of that aside and just enjoy the experience, front to back through the tracks in order and as an album, that’s becoming quite rare. There are levels of production discipline on display in this album, especially for electronic music in difficult mixing environments with potentially cluttered frequency ranges that a lot of artists need to learn from, yet Maz Zo executes with ease. This has a lot to give no matter who you are, whether you want to sit down and listen, dance all night or go for a drive - a word of warning, it might make you want to drive fast!
It’s also worth noting that Mat toured this album virtually in Minecraft in order to be Covid-safe and that is absolutely freaken amazing.
Hanan Townshend - To The Wonder (April 2013)
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Not the best choice of cover-art, but to be fair, no-one likes Terrence Malick films so it doesn’t really matter. Like most things, getting into music tends to be multifaceted. To The Wonder is my favourite Malick film and yes, I love many of them (you can check the Film Notes page), probably because it’s the most intimate and grounded of his narratives. I still like the more grand and abstract stories he tells, they’re very much my bag, too, but To The Wonder really is a simple story about people told from a closeness that is for some perhaps uncomfortable, but I love that closeness. There’s a dream-like quality to Malick’s filmmaking and indeed cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki’s photography that is both surreal and organic that makes the film feel very real and then like recollection once it’s done. Hanan Townshend’s music perfectly matches it, and then like all good soundtracks transcends the purpose for which it was written and can be applied to life outside of its matching media. There is a certain framing I have in my mind and at times, with the way I quite literally see, that makes me cue this soundtrack. Very few other soundtracks have this kind of power - Kenji Kawaii’s work for Ghost In The Shell (inclusive of Innocence), Hajime Mizogughi’s Jin-Roh and Cliff Martinez’ Solaris would be some of the others.
Daniel McCagh - Altered States (April 2020)
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Another semi-random Bandcamp find, I was chuffed to learn that Daniel McCagh is from Albury, NSW, Australia. It’s always amazing to find local artists who are this astonishingly talented. I tend to associate Australian musicians at the not-quite-there-yet level of art and still do. That’s not a criticism of the artists themselves, it’s a criticism of our government and their backwards attitude towards arts funding and economics in this country. We are a developed country in the age of the internet where information and culture is shared instantly but we deny our people opportunities in so many ways - in education, facilities, commerce and economic infrastructure - the state of internet services in this country for a start is appalling and has been behind global standards forever. It will take us so much time, funds, resources and coordination to catch-up and of-course the longer we wait, the greater the cost and each successive government makes their excuses as to why we can never quite afford to do things right.
Props to individuals who can make it stick, tho, and Daniel McCagh is one of them. It’s probably shockingly unfair to hold someone up on a pedestal every time they do well but I can’t help it - Altered States is on par with Reid Willis’ and other dark ambient/electronic works or whatever genre you want to put them into. On Bandcamp these darker synth and drone-centric artists are a dime a dozen and to be fair, a lot of them are quite good but finding works that truly stand out in excellence can be difficult. The low play-count is due to having only found and bought the album quite late, but it goes into rotation fairly often and it’s a growing genre in my collection.
The 1975 - Notes On A Conditional Form (May 2020)
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The closest thing to pop music to hit this list, NOACF was going to appear at some point - just getting pipped at the finish-line by Reid Willis, all told. I listened to this in the car quite a bit when I was still in rotation in the office before full lockdown.
Writing about The 1975 will be a Thing - either you’ll know something about them or nothing at all. For me, I guess I engage with them entirely differently from superfans - I’m in my late 30s so it won’t surprise you that I don’t have a TikTok account nor do I op a Spotify account and I’m not active at all on Facebook altho neither are gen Z. That said, I’m not entirely sure who their core fanbase will be - they don’t strike me as chart-topping, TikTok everpresent pop-culture icons. Their lead singer certainly has the awareness of pop-culture to communicate with their fan-base to keep up, but they don’t seem to engage at the same level of the lists you see on say, Todd in the Shadows - but I’ve not watched enough of him to know if he’s ever mentioned them.
Anyway I’m enough of a musician (read: snob) to dig their lofty musical stuff - it’s the perfect follow-up and follow-on from ABIIOR and I Like It When You Sleep... before that. Their sound stays uniquely theirs while slowly evolving with contemporary sounds, all the while the production stays top-notch and I’m always pleased with what I hear from a mixing and balance perspective. It also sort of launched with one of the most exciting singles I’ve heard in a while If You’re Too Shy (Let Me Know) which has to be one of the absolute best recreations of the quintessential 90’s sound yet with contemporary production discipline I’ve ever heard. Many have tried yet most have failed. I always have so much respect when an artist can nail this kind of thing because it’s immensely difficult to do and I’m so proud of The 1975 for pulling this off. All of their genre homages and tilts on this album - actually on all of their albums since I Like It When You Sleep… have been stellar and I continue to be impressed.
I’m also completely onboard with their performative behaviour - they remind me of the angsty political U2 et al of old, but with the necessary contemporary tilt we need. Matty as a front-person is grounded, sensible, vulnerable, flawed - been thru some shit and talks openly about it. I don’t care how much of it is genuine, it reads and plays genuinely. I’m not a superfan so I don’t have posters of him on my wall nor hang on every word he says, but if I was 16 or 23 and did, I think he’s saying the right things. Setting that aside because it doesn’t matter, as a late 30’s adult, this album is fucking great and the band is aging, whether the fanbase likes it or not. There is so much creativity in it and I feel like while they play like they don’t care whether anyone comes along with them or not, they actually really sincerely hope we all do - and I also hope we all really do come along with them because I am coming along with them. None of this “play Antichrist” bullshit - leave the past in the past. Play Nothing Revealed / Everything Denied. They just cancelled their 2021 tour plans due to Covid which was a really good move, and confirmed a new album in the works, and I can’t wait to hear what they have coming.
The Midnight - Monsters (July 2020)
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One of the most exciting releases last year, I was amped for the drop and was anticipating another solid, top-notch contemporary synthwave album from who I regard to be one of the very best in the genre. They’d released America Online some months prior which I really loved but it didn’t really indicate what the album was going to be like. Monsters ended up being waaaaay better than I expected - and I expected it to be really great. I don’t know whether it was a conscious decision by the band that perhaps the synthwave space was perhaps wearing out the 80’s a little bit - even pop-music was starting to take nibbles at the genre albeit pretty poorly by comparison, not that radio-punters would know it. With the new album tho, we’re taken into this wonderful in-between of not fully 90’s but not wholly 80’s either and even some contemporary r’n’b thrown in there but always stellar production and it’s just a massive album. It’s like a film you watch that ends up being an instant favourite you wish you could watch again for the first time because that first experience was so great. EVERYTHING lands perfectly in this album… with perhaps the exception of the lyric 
“friends become lovers under covers” 
in the song Prom Night because celebrating teens being sexually active is probably not something I cherish too much but hey, whaddayagonnado some things are just facts LET’S TURN THIS INTO A TEACHING OPPORTUNITY ABOUT CONSENT let’s not at least not right now.
Jeremy Blake - Object Permanence (December 2019)
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Jeremy Blake is also known as Red Means Recording and he is a Synthlord. He has a YouTube channel and I am a superfan of his, so much so that I wrote a feature about him right here in this journal. I have a lot of his albums and Object Permanence is one of my favourites.
Jeremy is the definition of good faith. Everything he does is done with the intention of creating goodness in this world, in whatever way it can, somehow. Whether it’s just by listening to something that you might find pleasing, or whether it’s watching a video intended to help you create music on a piece of hardware or learn about software or licensing or platforms, distribution or business in some way. I happen to really dig the kinds of music styles he’s into as we seem to have had similar roots when it comes to some of the rock and electronic music we grew up on and have been into in our music lives, so the music he makes now really gels well with me. It was super difficult to choose between the album he released before this called Soft Music To Do Nothing To and Object Permanence but ultimately I think this is the right choice as far as an exhibition of his talent goes. Soft Music is still great, it’s more of a long jam he performed with only three pieces of gear which is pretty amazing and I listen to it all the time, but Object Permanence has some distinct tracks in varying styles I really get into.
I highly recommend Jeremy’s YouTube channel as an entry-point into his style, but if you’re a synth-head and like beats, breaks and groovy bleeps and bloops, you definitely won’t go astray by dropping into any one of his albums on Bandcamp.
The Paper Kites - On The Corner Where You Live (September 2018)
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File The Paper Kites under “holy shit another Australian artist that isn’t rubbish” and from Melbourne, my hometown at that. In 2018, they split their new tracks effectively into two albums which works really well. The first is called On The Train Ride Home which is wholly downtempo and almost entirely acoustic with no drums, the second is this album and is a more energetic. I don’t actually prefer one over the other and have just made myself a playlist with contributions from other artists that only includes songs from On The Train Ride Home, but for this list I chose the second album for its exhibition of the band’s overall breadth of song-writing, performance and production. I guess I associate this sound with bands like Rogue Valley and other north and Pacific Northwest bands in the US but to be fair, I don’t really go hunting for this kind of sound - Nashville?? I don’t associate this very cooled-down acoustic-electric sound with Nashville, it’s not very Country (I have some Country in my collection which probably doesn’t surprise you), it’s almost like ultra-chilled mid-90’s ballad in a sense. Someone will have to tell me what it really is and where to find more but only of this calibre because I’m picky about quality. Google says they’re “folk music, folk rock, indie rock, alternative/indie” and that’s useless so throw that in the bin where it belongs.
This sound is definitely a mood. I hunted thru my entire collection including the aforementioned Rogue Valley and started a first playlist of just this kind of thing. I have the acoustic list done and will do an electric counterpart that will include more material from this album, as well as the one song I bought from Night Traveler called Don’t Forget Me as long as it’s not too energetic, it all depends on what makes it to the final list. This music speaks of drives thru rural landscapes, late nights in the city, time alone or with just one other person, closeness, loneliness, introspection, of long journeys and separation.
Iversen - La Favière (August 2018)
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The story of how I got this album is hilarious - one of my gaming friends who buys stuff on Humble Bundle and itch.io and god knows what else tweets me this link and says “hey there’s this synthwave bundle for like $2 you should get it it’s $2 it has all this music in” and as someone who won’t buy bad music for even $2, I go investigating and you can listen to some samples and lo-and-behold, most of it is pretty great. I paid a lot more than $2 as that only got you 4 albums and for another $5 or something, you got another 4 albums plus I always pay more because I want more revenue to go to the contributing artists. I ended up not liking about half of the music on offer but in the bundle I discovered Lost Outrider, Morgan Willis and Iversen, all of which I’ve gone on to buy more music from on Bandcamp. As for La Favière, I bought it again on Bandcamp because I love the album so much and wanted to support the artist - it’s really excellent. Oddly tho, two of the best tracks from it were bonuses that only came with the bundle version and not the Bandcamp version, called Sunset Rider and Visions of Blue, so if you want those, I’m not entirely sure how you can get a hold of them - I’m sure if you contact Josh Iverson and tell him you want to pay for them, he’ll try to sort you out unless there are labels involved in which case, not his fault. Regardless, you still get one of the best chilled synth tracks of all time In Dreams which is worth the price of admission all on its own, it is absolutely epic and you should give it a listen.
Goodbye 2020
Time of writing is Sunday 16th January and what a ride it’s been already, hey. I might still write up my actual Albums Of The Year given two of them didn’t get mentioned - Reid Willis -  Mother Of and Gidge - New Light, so I cheated a bit, but they’re my nominations, awards and lists so I can do whatever I like. I’m always excited about music, both listening with a critical ear and also emotionally engaging with it. There’s never a shortage of good new music or discovering material I hadn’t from years past. Sometimes it feels like wading thru endless fields of dross to find the gold but it’s always there and getting to it is a true delight.
There were honourable mentions and I couldn’t quite get the list to 10 - there are 8. I might write them up but for the moment, here they are in vague order of vagueness. Importance? Order of purchase? I got into Lapalux and Enter Shikari very late in the year. Apparat’s - LP5 is a very special album to me, almost Dreams Are Not Enough special. I do want to talk about how Jacob Collier’s album is both very very good and also not good enough. 
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The majority of the music listed here can be purchased on Bandcamp. There are links to most of it on my Bandcamp profile if you want to go hunting - I might add lazylinks later-on if I get the time.
Here is my last.fm full listing for 2020 if you’re curious about that kind of thing. Stats are great.
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vroenis · 4 years
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Circa 2009 - 2019
Lede with a picture, righto...
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In true style, that’s going to deter the lot, but gotta stay on brand.
To have this discussion, we’re going to need a list. A musical timeline of sorts with the exception of four key events;
2002 Balance 003 (compiled and mixed by Bill Hamel) 2008 Jóhann Jóhannsson, Fordlandia 2009 Telefon Tel Aviv,  Immolate Yourself 22nd January - Charles Cooper dies Tosca, No Hassle Hildur Guðnadóttir, Without Sinking
2010 Jóhann Jóhannsson,  And In The Endless Pause There Came The Sound Of Bees 2011 Bon Iver, self titled 2012 Bat For Lashes, The Haunted Man 2013 13th January - Kentucky Route Zero Act I is first released Andrew Bayer, If It Were You, We'd Never Leave Darkside, Psychic The Haxan Cloak, Excavation 2014 Siavash Amini, Til Human Voices Wake Us 2015 Björk, Vulnicura Siavash Amini, Subsiding Jóhann Jóhannsson, Sicario (original soundtrack)
2016 The 1975, I Like It When You Sleep, For You Are So Beautiful Yet So Unaware Of It 2017 Björk, Utopia Siavash Amini, TAR 2018 9th February - Jóhann Jóhannsson dies 29th June - Bill Hamel dies Andrew Bayer, In My Last Life The 1975, A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships Siavash Amini, FORAS Skee Mask, Compro 2019 Siavash Amini, SERUS Apparat, LP5 Telefon Tel Aviv, Dreams Are Not Enough
While I’ve added a precursor of two albums to give context to two of the events that happen in the timeline, it is effectively book-ended by the two most recent albums from Telefon Tel Aviv. These albums form a frame in which so many things have happened - in my life, and seemingly in the lives of others. Some clearly in the events so evident and unavoidable, painfully so and still lingering in the minds and emotions of those they directly affect and us in the periphery who only have the most faintest of contact yet still seem to perceive ourselves significantly touched. By this I mean the death of Charles Cooper - if I feel devastated, having only ever been had an impression of his character via the channel of his art, there isn’t a universe in which I can possibly imagine what Joshua Eustis’ daily experience is, so I can’t and won’t speak to it.
And I guess that’s where the story begins.
In 2009 my best friend who remains so to this day plays me Immolate Yourself for the first time - bearing in mind they and I are slightly different people, probably me more-so than they. Our tastes in music have always been fairly broad. We’ve never been haters of pop-music at all, they’ve always embraced pop more than I but I’ve always appreciated pop. In by brief stint industry-side when I was professionally working, I did form an appreciation for the labour, but in general I still maintain a high appreciation for the craft. In any industry there will always be a valuable critique of culture and bad culture exists everywhere. We must always work to protect the vulnerable at all times, no excuses, and erode imbalances of power.
Back to 2009. The album blows us both away and I’m fairly confident in speaking for us both, changes us forever. We both have immense music libraries having purchased music constantly from young ages, but no matter what we cycle through or have in rotation, Immolate Yourself has always been evergreen. Not to say it’s in daily rotation constantly - it’s not exactly that kind of album. It’s highly emotionally charged and a demanding listen, and sometimes I am listening to it once a day for a given period, but it certainly is highly mood-dependent - more-so than some of the other music in my collection which is completely fine in that not all art has to be hitting at that level.
I remember our conversations about Charles, how shattered we were, our conversations about suicide, mental health - please be aware that at the time, it was rumoured Charles Cooper’s death was due to suicide but later several reports ruled that it wasn’t. That’s that. The purpose of bringing it up is to give context to R and my discussions. Some years prior I had my own mental health diagnosis clarified and had seen some improvements on and off with my personal management, but the rigours of life still presented challenges significant enough to cause extreme frustration, anger and anxiety. I’d say these days, in the year of our Synth Lordz 2020, I’m doing much better and on better medication management and that would still be true.
I don’t go looking for articles or interviews with Joshua Eustis about what his life has been life at all or how things are for him now. I do follow him on twitter and we’ve had a few great, unrelated exchanges. When I bought and had my first listen-through of Dreams Are Not Enough last year, I told him I wanted to delete the rest of my music collection which of-course is hyperbole and he knows that, but as I’ve mentioned elsewhere (this almost always means Instagram), I always want to have these extreme responses to art. It doesn’t have to be all the time, but it has to be at regular intervals, even if they’re separated by long periods of time. Art is so important to me. Sometimes I joke - love you don’t have to work to receive,  but art takes labour. Maybe I’m not joking (typical artist wank :P )
Apparat (Sascha Ring) was one of those artists I never bought back in 2009 but he was always in the playlists, always at the festivals. Maybe he did remixes? Or his music was being remixed. I dug his stuff, it was pretty cool, but back then he was probably in the periphery for me. He, like many for me, faded into the background. Because I follow Joshua/Telefon on Twitter, I randomly see a retweet or an exchange between him and Apparat, probably about software or plugins etc., and think far-out, Apparat’s still around... and he released an album in March (2019). I’m going to go have a bit of a listen and if it’s good HOLY SHIT...
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To help me characterise what I hear when I listen to LP5, I’ve included a very important album from Tosca, interestingly released at the beginning of our bookend; No Hassle. I don’t really know what the zeitgeist is on this album, but my completely uninformed instinct is to say it’s not popular. For me, tho, No Hassle is absolutely divine. It’s an astonishing listen because it’s in some ways *unexciting* - it’s a severely sober listen. There’s next to no energy in it at all, even when Richard and Rupert dare to tilt into a major key, they’re still listlessly meandering along as if they got up too late or are still sitting in an old sofa or are just happy enough to be strolling and the conversation is good enough at a moderate level before we head back down as the sun sets and the night swallows everything up. It’s an album I listen to almost exclusively in the car during night drives, or in either my house or in hotels, airports, any other environment but always when it’s dark. Cheesily I call these works “Midnight Albums”, and I tend to characterise them as serious listening, when I’m feeling meditative, pensive, neutral, dead-sticking, however you may wish to describe the sensation.
LP5 is along very similar veins for me and it strikes me as extremely interesting. Sascha didn’t exactly disappear for 10 years, his wiki page lists two other albums in 2011 and 2013 respectively as well as other collaborations and work, but to me, just the sound of this album strikes me as particularly unique to being distinct from the years gone by. That sounds like a redundant statement - that might be true of everything altho with art I often don’t think that’s the case at all, but when I first heard LP5, I thought Sascha - shit’s happened to you. I don’t know what it is, but then I figure...
Shit’s happened to us all.
Anyone well inducted into the Anjunabeats cult (lol it’s a joke, you can laugh - I’m a fellow cultist) of trance will be familiar with Andrew Bayer. A good thing the Anjuna label seems to be doing and more of of late, is funnelling some of their phat stacks of cash to their talent so they can actually record full albums if they wish, a venture which I’m sure isn’t profitable for them in any way unless they go on tour, contingent of-course on the material being shoppable. I’m sure that makes Spencer Brown a darling - not having a go at him, I love both his albums to death, they’re amazing, but I genuinely don’t think there’s any pressure on the artist to produce tourable music. I feel Andrew has the latitude to do whatever he wants, and he works at the shoppable remixes because it’s fun for him and they have a wonderful community of talent in constant contact with one another so the opportunities are there.
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In 2013, Andrew Bayer releases his album which upon hearing I instantly buy. It’s a pretty neat departure from all things trance - it’s beaty, synthy, broken samples and pushing at ambient at times. Then I get to the amazing last track titled “Closing Act”. This is 100% without question inspired by and styled after the music of Jóhann Jóhannsson.
On the 9th of February, 2018, Jóhann Jóhannsson dies.
I’ve just come back from stepping away from this writing for about two hours. I appreciate people interact with art, artists, performers and people of varying level of exposure (read: celebrities) in different ways so let’s just bypass any discussion of how other people behave. It’s fine. As for me, I try to maintain what I believe to be a healthy sense of distance from people of cultural note. They’re still people; human beings, and I don’t know them. Actors and musicians had died before, artists I’d “grown up with”, admired etc., but Jóhann‘s death struck me with force. It still haunts me.
Why?
I don’t know him. I never knew him. For all I know, he may have been an arsehole to everyone around him. I had to and still interrogate my emotional response and I very much do it with the greatest of intent. Is it stupendously capitalist? Am I so entrenched in my lust for his music? His product? That is literally all I can say I know of him; what he produced - what he gave, what he offered. Is it because I want more? No - not really. There are artists still alive who have chosen not to offer more and I have no problem accepting this. There are artists who have more to offer and aren’t able to due to the economics of power and the power of economics and I’m certainly angry about that while they’re alive. I grieved for Jóhann. I was so upset. I shut myself in my studio and cried.
In some way, regardless of not knowing anything at all about the circumstances of his death, I felt that we had all failed.
Knowing even in the smallest element that mental health was a contributing factor to his life and death leads me to make assumptions about the kind of world he may have existed in, what his experience may have been. Regardless of whatever differences there might be between his experiences, now finite, and my own, I still believe there is justification to draw parallels. Not because he’s semi-famous, but because we are both humans, and that it is known he struggled with mental health. It is as much about known, documented and shared stories of services, medications and social experiences as it is about everything that is unspoken that all people with mental health concerns know. We may not know to what degree we might have commonalities, but the one thing we may have in common is that there are so many things we cannot share - speak, or expose, and there are things at times we feel we must not expose in order to survive. It is at this point I must emphasise that health professionals will always dispense such advise as “You’re never alone/you never have to carry burdens alone” etcetera etcetera and I value the intention in such actions. I’m here to appreciate the goodwill behind such advice, but purely by nature of existence, we are each of us alone - this is not an emotional fact, this is simply reality. You cannot inhabit our bodies and minds and live our lives for us - nor can you overcome our physiological concerns internally on our behalf. You can offer us medications but it is still we who have to bear the process of evaluating whether we can endure the experience of synthesising them. 
Professionals need to always respect that fact and never forget it.
This is key when I interrogate my emotional response and reaction to Jóhann Jóhannsson‘s death. I don’t know what treatments he may have been receiving but I also don’t know what his life experience was, because treatment in and of itself is less than one half of the equation, perhaps not even a third. The total texture of a human’s experience is woven from so many fibres; and one of them is the cultural response of the people surrounding them, from the immediate individuals to generalised language in use within earshot to advertising unwillingly overheard to adopted via accepted use over time to idioms adopted when people have literally no idea what words mean and what they can mean and how they can directly affect others.
Am I blaming this nebulous spectre of Society? Of-course not. Am I wanting to focus a microscope on the microcosm of communities within this idea of Society or induce guilt on individuals? Also no. But there is still a sensation of endemic guilt and carelessness that we do not make better attempts, perhaps not even to approach a comprehensive understanding of mental health, but at least to triage some of the casual damage we do by being completely careless with it with poor cultural practice. It’s such a difficult thing to speak to because the terms are at one moment so specific and yet the next so generalised. What are we to do? How can we improve when it’s no-one’s fault and yet everyone’s fault? How can we be effective if we want to discard useless, terrible and outdated ideas like blame and backwards accountability and yet we haven’t even begun to understand how the shape of our behaviour is having such devastating effects?
The cost is literally human life.
The interrogation goes further. Why only Jóhann? Why don’t I mourn every death? At the risk of diverting to whataboutism, it’s still worth asking, because it’s clear I valued his life because of his art, and it can’t be avoided that I list Bill Hamel for the same reason. Balance 003 is for me the best collection of minimal trance in history and there has never been another since, the genre has evolved and as yet has not been revisited. Bill himself joined with some friends to work on some more upbeat and detailed music but then himself died in June of 2018, but I wasn’t to find out for months and again, was shattered. I didn’t know Bill either but there were more anecdotal accounts of his personality available online, and they certainly were glowing and positive, and that’s how I think of him - fondly, regardless of not knowing him.
Later in 2018 Andrew Bayer released his next album. It’s a collection of vocal pieces, and the final song is titled End Of All Things. Eerily but welcomed, many of its musical stylings begin to resemble Jóhann Jóhannsson‘s, and Alison May lends her voice to lyrics that include the following;
Roll down the aisle You were bold to go first With a fist to the earth
I don’t like to quote a lot of lyrics, and you can look the rest of them up if you want, but if you do, like me, you might interpret the song to be about death. I don’t know if Andrew Bayer wrote this for Jóhann Jóhannsson, or only for him or at all. He probably wrote it for someone else entirely, probably someone he actually personally knew. Maybe he just wrote it about death in general. It doesn’t matter because for me it was the first catalyst in musical form for processing Jóhann Jóhannsson‘s death in some dimension. It wouldn’t be until much later, when Justin/Telefon Tel Aviv retweeted Siavash Amini that I’d find art as powerful as  Jóhann's and Andrew’s and of-course Justin’s own, but each artist is their own texture and I listen to them all in different ways when in different moods.
2019 - Dreams Are Not Enough
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There is so much more writing I can do with this short list of albums. I’m at 2800+ words and I’ve barely scratched the surface. That first, dull image at the top of the piece is the directory structure of my music collection, replicated on the hard-drive that goes into my car and on my personal music player - I don’t use my phone for music. While I do listen to music from every directory over time, of late I’m gravitating more and more to two main folders; Ultimate and Survival, and almost all of the music from the list in this piece comes from those two directories with only one or two exceptions.
I’m a bit miffed I didn’t get to write about The 1975, there’s some great stuff to be said about their work and I’ve written about them before, but I have so much more to say, especially culminating with Love It If We Made It as a generational, cultural proclamation. We’re on the verge of the new album tho (time of writing is 29th February 2020) so who knows, maybe I’ll get the opportunity to be topical with that but knowing me, I’ll still bury it behind a wall of text but that will be for the better, I’m sure.
I need to close on Dreams Are Not Enough, tho, and also Kentucky Route Zero. I think I’ve mentioned it before - completing Kentucky Route Zero was the catalyst for me to start writing again, and it’s there in the timeline that the first act released in January of 2013. Last tumblr entry, I briefly touched on being in a holding pattern until KRZ was completed by its developer, Cardboard Computer, and since completing it, I’ve gone off socials which means I’ve greatly diminished my activity on social media and returned to long-format writing. This entry and the last on tumblr are very much evidence of that. Way back in 2013 when I first completed that first act, Kentucky Route Zero was one of those seminal experiences I felt was made just for me. After years of playing all sorts of traditional video games, I’d grown tired of their play dynamics in many senses. I still liked traditional games, and in some ways still do now, but I will always hunger for boundaries to be pushed, for greater things to be said, for things to be said and done in conjunction and in parallel; in layers and simultaneously; artfully, with complexity and subtlety, or with simplicity but with great humanity and maturity. I remember watching Serial Experiments: Lain, the first episode and feeling like it was made just for me, and then that feeling being amplified a million times over with Haibane Renmei and Texhnolyze. There are reasons these works are so rare and so unpopular. Again - I’ll reaffirm I still love a lot of pop and there’s nothing wrong with generalised and widely celebrated art at all, a lot of it’s cool. But when you find something so unique that speaks so much to your experience in a way that’s powerful to the point of dialect...
That is what Kentucky Route Zero and Porpentine’s Howling Dogs are to me.
That’s what these albums are to me, and Telefon Tel Aviv’s albums somehow have book-ended this period in my life. Each album captures a facet of turbulence, of emotion, probably a little bit of joy, or chaos and a healthy dose of hedonism too, but I have other music for that and I tend not to talk about it much. I’m sure joy and euphoria can be complicated for others and that’s cool, but it’s not something I feel drawn to discuss.
All of this art, this Art Worth Dying For, seems to be the only thing I can engage with at the moment, in the wake of completing Kentucky Route Zero. I have shooty shooty games sitting on the Playstation that I once did really enjoy and probably will again, I don’t know. But right now I can’t bear the thought of booting them up. I think about some of the films I was keen to see some months ago and right now they look like noise, indistinct, boring to the point of textureless, falvourless null-space. I don’t mean to insult these works in any way at all, I’m not trying to diminish their value by saying by comparison to KRZ, they’re bad. Not at all. I don’t seem to be able to process them. The closest thing I can describe is the kind of mood disorders, dysthymia being one of them, doctors used to try and diagnose me with before they knew I was bipolar; a literal chemical barrier that’s preventing me from comprehending and interpreting the data I’m being presented with. I’ve lost hold of the cultural frame I’m supposed to have to understand how to place these objects in reference to my sense of entertainment and engagement.
So instead I come here and talk to myself with barely an objective in mind, other than to perhaps share my thoughts with you. And some music that I’m hoping you’ll buy. I know I’m a pain in the arse for that, and I know buying music is an immensely privileged thing to be able to do - I get it. You don’t have to buy everything right away, but if you want me to make a case for it, let me know and I will, I’ll even make a case for small steps i.e., even when you can’t afford much and how to spend a really tiny amount. Otherwise proceed as normal and click onto the next visual diary, nothing to see here.
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