continues to be awesome. internet tv at it's best. this last episode was my fav in a while, almost as good as episode two. if you haven't seen any yet, this might even be a good one to start off with. not that it would take that long to watch all seven chronologically, they're only five minutes a piece.

i'll get around to finalizing the 2005 disc and finishing off the relisten of the 2004 one, i promise. but on to 2006: early favs are, surprisingly, more album oriented than track. both achso and the new booka shade (movements) are really great album-style listens, but i've yet to hear a brutally awesome single yet. the year is young though...

recently i've been dropping obscene wads of cash on records (with the caveat that "obscene wads of cash" is relative to a grad student's salary. still...), but mostly they've piled up because i've been kind of busy. when i have been home, the pile stays piled up because i keep replaying quadrant's dub [basic channel 06]. like really good dub/minimal/ambient is wont to do, this track completely annihilates my sense of time, and i can listen to it for hours. so good. here's the a side.

just picked up the tropicália comp on soul jazz. after reading mike powell's review of it, and listening to optimo's awesome tropicália mix, i am really excited to crack it open.

a couple weeks ago i was poring over songs i missed out on last year and came across tomas andersson's washing up ep. holy shit. it was like finding one of those "diamond in the rough" tracks (there is oh-so-much electrohouse and not a whole lot of time, unfortunately), except where the diamond jumps up and bites you in the face and fucking cracks your skull open.

just as brutal (and with added tiga-sleaze!), i like the remix just a little bit more than the original. the filtered cowbell didn't hurt either.

favorite track: lindstrøm - another day (todd terje remix). (thank you once again TAPEblog). i will be totally shocked if i hear anything better than this made in 2006. despite rmd's misguided claims to the contrary, this is the best thing i've heard from either lindstrøm or todd terje. although i've never heard the non remixed version, everything fits perfectly here - the mellow spacey synths (and "oooh" sounds) and the mid-tempo keyboard samples are perfect complements to the theme, which seems like it's trying to get somewhere fast without breaking a sweat.

every week i perform electrophysiological experiments on photoreceptors in nearly pitch-black rooms, occasionally using a dim red flashlight to find things in the dark, locate keys on the keyboard, or make notes in my labbook. the first time i blasted this song, in the middle of an experiment, i was compelled to make a disco-light out of my flashlight and dance around in the dark. i had a newfound appreciation for my research conditions.

favorite album: belle and sebastian - the life pursuit.

favorite word: "quail-tard" - as uttered by one of the daily show correspondents when describing the type of flightless, caged(?) bird that dick cheney was trying to kill when he shot some other republican in the face.

i think that one explaination for my cartoonish overconsumption of music is that i've spent a large part of my adult life trying to compensate for my parents' (percieved, at least) bad/non-taste in most things artsy-aesthetic. one of the handful (literally) of musicaians i remember my dad enjoying when i was younger was andreas vollenweider, proprieter extradoinaire of cheesy new age harping and transparent orientalism. the last time i'd even thought about the dude was when i made a mix cd for my brother and threw on this track, mostly as an in-joke but also because i'm pretty fond of the first half of it. (i am trying to convince myself that i'm not embarrased by that fact (remember, there are no such things as a guilty peasures... maybe). i like house and disco, cheese doesn't bother me. so i don't know why i find dude's music so... uncomfortably corny most of the time.)

whatever. anyway, i was pretty confident that no one my age would ever seriously like that music. wrong, wrong, wrong. a one mr. terje olsen (aka todd terje), who seems to be able to appropriate damn near any kind of popular music with his edits & "re-kutts", apparently does, and he almost made me snort coffee all over my keyboard when i heard his edit of vollenweider's "belladona" pop up in a pile of downloaded music i was listening to. seriously, this blew me away: hipster vollenwieder. and it sounds... really nice.

so yeah, that got me all excited and i tracked down a buttload of terje's music, most of which i liked. the standout track by far though was eurodans, a track i'm sure og will love. more bounce that most of the "cosmic" stuff i've heard, it blows his lindstrøm remix out of the water.

adendum: fun fact – terje is a physics person! nerdcore, you know the score...

for some reason i never got into luciano's original productions the way i did with his buddy villalobos's, but i really like his remix work. inspired by hearing a killer new one in a recent tape post, i set out soulseeking yesterday afternoon to complete my collection of luciano remixes.

prior to saturday i had only heard maybe half a dozen of them, out of which i absolutely loved one (the teen angst remix), felt fairly indifferent to a couple, and rather liked his bordering-on-novelty remixes of the amelie theme and a mj song (he's bad, w/ villalobos). yesterday's search was fruitful though, and i found at least a couple of mixes that are near "teen angst"-level awesomeness. as promised at tape, luciano's remix of salif keita's yamoré is a classic, and i'm also into his short (for him) and sweet remix of argy's love dose. there are more great remixes obv, but these are the two that jumped out at me on the first pass through. will post more later maybe.

i've been anticipating the new belle and sebastian album more than anything they've released since i had my heart broken by fold your hands, child... and storytelling. now i'm starting to regard those records as the chrysalis phase, from which b&s have emerged with an altogether new form - one that almost fits them better than the sinister/tigermilk form... well, perhaps that's a bit of a stretch, but the life pursuit one-ups even the great popness of dear catastrophe waitress, an album which appears to be sadly underrated by rmd (cuckoo is only one of many great tracks).

anyway, i've been listening to this album a lot since i ordered it a few days ago, and my current favorite song is the opener, act of the apostle. heavy smiths influence, but also some elements of early/mid-90s dream popness like the cocteau twins.

i also like the second track, another sunny day, which is more of a traditional b&s song, but with a little more bounce.

so maybe sasha frere-jones, who is probably my favorite music critic, doesn't find it becoming when someone can summarily dismiss popular country music, and i get the impression that a lot of people feel the same way. maybe what he (they) really don't like is the rejection of an entire (sub-)genre of music, especially one with apparent cultural import like country. i don't find genre-hating any much than artist hating, and i can honestly say that i feel the same way about contemporary pop radio-friendly country (henceforth, "country") that i do about nazi march music (from which it is not far removed, thematically)... that is, i find it "largely unlistenable"...

i'll also admit that i'm rather smug in my dismissal of country, since i've had more than my fair share of exposal over the years. at a very young age, i was occasionally babysat by country music star tracy byrd. also, i remember a few occasions when clay walker sang at the church that i was coerced into attending by my mom. at no point during the 18 years that i lived in texas did i find any compelling reason to listen to more country music than that which was forced upon me in public places and at social events.

what am i missing?

get thee over to soul sides and download didn't i right god damn now. it is one one of the most beautiful things i've ever heard.

i was just playing the what else is there ep that finally came in the mail (three amazing remixes, which is totally wreaking havok with the silly self imposed rules i made for my year-end cdr). listening to the vitaic remix (for my money the third best, which is saying a whole hell of a lot about the quality of this ep) i was reminded of a song i loved a couple of years ago and have since almost forgotten about: do you like that, by john spring (which was included on eucalyptus, one of sami koivikko's awesome free mixtapes [edit: it looks like he took down the one i was thinking of. i bet the new ones are good though.]).

when they get going (~3 mins in for spring, 2 mins for vitalic), the two songs share a similar super-insistant mind-controlling robo-funk groove that i absolutely love (on a tangential and unnecessarily bitchy note, i wish music for robots would post more music that actually sounds like it's for robots). other than making my body want to move in ways my brain can't really fathom (how do non-cyborgs dance to this? really, i want to see it done), they aren't that similar i guess... the john spring track is more, um, sproingy, and the vitalic track is, while less drenched in testosterone than most of his tracks, still so much more male than almost anything else out there that it's messing with my notions of robot non-sexuality. still, they share a special spot in my mind: the music i like to think that industial/assembly-line robots dance to at night after all the humans leave the factory. which is, as you may have surmised, some of my favorite music ever.

came out a couple of days ago. as usual i found the individual ballots to be way more interesting than the super-predictable consensus (though i was surprised at how close arular came to kanye on the album poll).

i was kind of bummed to see how little respect most of the music i was into this year got. this, for instance, made me sad. this almost made me cry.

also, were people just really lazy this year with the comments, or have they always been half made up of copied and pasted blog posts?

not that i'm complaining, i love reading this shit. i have like thirty ballots to pore over this weekend and cherry pick for stuff i missed during the year (which, yes, is my idea of an awesome weekend). besides, how could anyone be down on pazz & jop in a year when this this exists?

since it's somewhat impractical to put up the justus album, some love for the tragically under-repped (thank you mr. sherburne, for at least putting it on the board) m83 – teen angst (luciano remix) will have to do.