Baltimore to Brooklyn to Worldwide: Yeasayer, live album at Alcienne Belgique in Belgium. I couldn't find any decent pure audio versions of this, so some less-than-sonically-pellucid videos will have to suffice. You can cop the album for a cost of your choice (free, .99, 2.99, 4.99 &c), thanks to the wonderful Yeasayer guys, of whom everyone should be familiar. If you haven't seen them live or have and want something a little more lively permanent for your collection, grab this now.
JJ released their Kills mixtape on Christmas Eve. Like a lot of their work, it's loaded with pop and hip hop samples far and wide, recondite and popular, surprising and expected, all breathily and hypnotically spirited over with Elin's amazing, vapor-thick, and constantly yearning vocals, the combinatory effect of which is just stunning and bracing, and even a little bit disorientingly transcendent in a weird way. Grab it here at Sincerely Yours gratis. In the span of about two years, the Swedish duo has an output already on par with some groups and artists who've been around for a decade, not one fraction of which isn't worth sitting down and sinking into. Elin's ethyrean voice finds that weakest spot in your cortical center, that weakest vertebrae, and soothes the living shit out of it. For me, despite or in spite of the autotune found occasionally here, her voice opens up to miraculous spaces on this mixtape, places to which she hasn't quite gotten before, and she sounds a little bit more confident than before, and the songs benefit from it.
"All of Ionesco's theatre contains two strands side by side--complete freedom in the exercise of his imagination and a strong element of the polemical. His very first play, The Bold Soprano, was an anti-play, and as such a criticism of the existing theatre as well as a type of dead society. The same, strongly pugnacious spirit manifests itself in Ionesco's entire oeuvre, and it is therefore quite wrong to regard him as a mere clown and prankster. Ionesco's plays are a complex mixture of poetry, fantasy, nightmare--and cultural and social criticism. In spit of the fact that Ionesco rejects and detests any openly didactic theatre ('I do not teach, I give testimony. I don't explain, I try to explain.' he is convinced that any genuinely new and experimental writing is bound to contain a polemical element. 'The man of the avant-garde is in opposition to an existing system...An artistic creation is by its very novelty aggressive, spontaneously aggressive; it is directed against the public, against the bulk of the public; it causes indignation by its unusualness, which is itself a form of indignation.'"Martin Esslin, The Theatre of the Absurd, "Eugene Ionesco: Theatre and Anti-Theatre"
The name Bradford Cox is really all that I need to mention. Holiday song:
"The rebellion hoarded up day by day against the fate which they had generously offered by means of a silly ejaculation was searching for its explanation at that time and its roots in the hated family tree. It was not possible, you said to yourself, that such a vivid and intense feeling, such a deep and bribe-free anomaly could rise up out of nothingness and thrive entirely in the air like an unrooted orchid. An anonymous member of your lineage had experimented before you perhaps, had transmitted them them intact to you at the cost of darks years of compromise and dissimilation. What was maturing in you and giving forth no fruit could feel it germinating inside of itself, terrified, like a cancer that grows and strengthens itself in the midst of the blindness and the ignorance of others. That impulse, obscure and luminous at the same time, had hidden in it something like a grace perhaps, perhaps like a shame, sacrificing, in any case, its true imperative to the stupid and inconsistent approval of the clan. You, his heir, had managed to cut the bonds in time without managing to free yourself completely because of it. Family, social class, community, land: your life could not be anything else (you subsequently found out) except a slow and difficult road of breaking and dispossession." Juan Goytisolo, Marks of Identity
Geotic, Los Angeles' Will Weisenfeld of Baths ambient side project, put out a free record a few days after the new year, Mend, which is purely magical. I think the first time I played it through I dematerialized or something for the duration of the record, some kind of psychic departure and intensive form of concentration. While you're at it, you should also check out his Baths project--a totally different and equally as engrossing experience. So glad to have a dude like this making so much music.
"The only thing that makes me write is the need, the overmastering need, at this moment more urgent ever it was in the past, to create a channel between my thoughts and my unsubstantial self, my shadow, that sinister shadow which at this moment is stretched across the wall in the light of the oil-lamp in the attitude of one studying attentively and devouring each word I write. This shadow surely understands better than I do. It is only to him that I can properly talk. Only he is capable of knowing me. He surely understands...It is my wish, when I have poured the juice--rather, the bitter wine--of my life down the parched throat of my shadow, to say to him, 'This is my life.'"Sadegh Hedayat, The Blind Owl
Oh, and lastly: I can't even remember when Eric put this out, whether it was before the holidays, during, or after, but Eric Berglund, one half the Tough Alliance, and the brains and voice behind CEO did a rather awesone interpretation of Beyonce's "Halo" complete with Spanish guitars, blasting and rolling synths, strings, and horns. This is over-the-top in the best way possible.
Now for a aggregation of sorts of my personal heart-swoons with regards to images taken in, of, or from space throughout 2010, which I'll try to ensure aren't any of the ones I've previously included.
A sunspot image taken of the sun, showing the great ball of light more or less staring right back at us in a very creepy and somewhat absorbing manner.
12th time I've seen this and it still blows my mind, its almost cartoonish fantasia-like accents. What it actually is: The Carina Nebula, a stellar nursey 75000 light years away, and what's going on in the image is a whole lot of chaotic activity at the top of a three-light-year-tall pillar of gas and dust being chomped and eaten away by the brilliant light of nearby stars.
Long exposure image of a magisterial face of a spiral galaxy deep within the Coma Cluster of galaxies 320 million light years thataway.
"In order to explain my life to my stooping shadow, I am obliged to tell a story. Ugh! How many stories about love, copulation, marriage, and death already exist, not one of which tells the truth! How sick I am of well-constructed plots and brilliant writing." Hedeyat, The Blind Owl.
Astronaut Nicholas toiling away on the International Space Station's seven-windowed observation deck, which apparently provides the most marvelous view of earth from this particular outpost.
Check out all 32 images here
Last but most certainly not even close to least, Baths, as mentioned above, will be touring the US this spring with Braids, and they'll be stopping at San Francisco's Rickshaw Stop in Hayes Valley on Friday, March 4th. Were I not already committed for something that day, I'd be there. Braids, who finally put out their LP--Native Speaker--is a spellbindingly and startlingly good band out of Canada too eclectically intricate and stylistically woven to even begin to describe with any precision. The only true reason I mention this show to which I won't even be able to go is so I can reccommend Braids. Highly textural, deeply hypnotic, long serpentine and fluid songs capable of going on forever with elusive percussion, surging rhythms, sudden movements form hushedness to exuberance, and the gorgeous and at times wild vocals pushing it all forward--they're remarkable, an alien and otherworldly kind of good, and just beginning.
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