Are these the only posts I write anymore? Talk about a legend right here, Burt Bacharach shuffled off at 94. I have to say that's a good run.
The man, along with Hal David turned complex, jazz-derived chords and combinations into sublime, accessible pop. He collaborated with Elvis Costello and of course Dionne Warwick, among others, and inspired not just easy-listening mellow cats, but a huge range of artists that included Arthur Lee and his proto-punk band Love.
A true titan of music. Rest well and thanks for the music.
This one is a little late. But here's a guy who was the vocalist and drummer of the legendary Yellow Magic Orchestra, and then — like his other two bandmates — went on to an almost equally-legendary solo discography. Like Bowie, Peter Gabriel, and Robert Fripp, Takahashi is a big inspiration on everything I do that involves "songs" or "musicality." He never strayed away from pop or accessibility, but always kept it a little left-of-center.
Here's an insanely 80s video for the title track of my favorite of his, Murdered By The Music.
Lately I've been doing more fighting with Plex (slogan: "Pay $5 a month to use your own server") and my Raspberry Pi-based media server than actually watching or listening anything, so I tried a few new things.
I repurposed a desktop that I hadn't been using since getting a 2015 Macbook that was just a place to randomly try new distros and desktop environments for no reason.
I put Openmediavault (the OS) on it, and slapped a Dockerized Jellyfin in there.
I added Tailscale to the equation so I could get there from the other end of the house (don't ask, our house is bad at internet) or from outside the house.
Unfortunately, Tailscale doesn't let Roku type devices get on my tunnel, so maybe I'll use the old Pi for some kind of perma-VPN or reverse proxy or some shit I clearly do not understand.
But I've found Jellyfin to be more bare-bones yet also much more performant, more likely to direct stream than attempt to transcode, and really a breeze to work with. If you've ever wondered about switching from Plex, it might be for you. If you are wondering about Emby, don't — Jellyfin is an open-sourced fork that is more up to date.
I always do this, but honestly it was not a huge year for me in terms of listening to new music. I'm still jamming Necrot's Mortal (2020) on the regular and couldn't tell you much about what new death metal is out there. And two of my favorite bands were cut down by tragedy: Low due to Mimi Parker's untimely death from cancer, and Neurosis from the revelation that Scott Kelly was an abusive sociopath.
Sky Pig - It Thrives In Darkness
Petbrick - Liminal
Blut Aus Nord - Disharmonium - Undreamable Abysses
Lykotonon - Promethean Pathology
Hissing - Hypervirulence Architecture
ADULT. - Becoming Undone
Nik Colk Void - Bucked up Space
Wet Leg - Wet Leg (I'm still hip!)
Jóhann Jóhannsson - Drone Mass (this is mostly here because it exists. It's a gift to have more Jóhann after his death)
Locrian - New Catastrophism
Vermin Womb - Retaliation
Primitive Man - Insurmountable
Undeath - It's Time... To Rise From The Grave
Hällas - Isle of WIsdom
KEN Mode - NULL
Conjurer - Pathos
Crowbar - Zero and Below (It's Crowbar... come on)
Orthodox - Proceed
Vanum - Legend
That was in no particular order, but I think the top spot is occupied by Haunted Horses' The Worst Has Finally Happened. Monstrous and unique. It does the things I like. Check it out.
If the memes and jokes are to be believed, 2022 wasn't any more of a picnic than any year since the pandemic started. Or since 2015 maybe. Or the century. Or eternity maybe. But truly, we did lose some real ones in the music world.
If you haven't heard of any of these folks, I suggest you check them out. There's a lot of great art here.
Terry Hall. The last one of the year to go that I noticed, the Specials singer was a big loss to my musical history.
Keith Levine. I was a little late to PiL, but so many of the guitarists I admire, like Daniel Ash, owe a ton to him. His work on Metal Box still blows me away.
D.H. Peligro. An incredible drummer for one of the greats in hardcore, and one of the few and the proud who proved that punk wasn't just white guys and Bad Brains.
Jerry Lee Lewis. What can you say about the Killer that hasn't been said? Not the original wild man of rock and roll, but an early trash fire who paved the way for many more. Still energizing to listen to.
Pharaoh Sanders. One of the few jazz guys I really get into. Truly expanding stuff.
Andy Fletcher. Depeche Mode was an early expansion into electronic music for me, and probably half the known universe too.
Mark Lanegan. One of those guys who seemed to court death for a long time before they finally hooked up. A great lyricist and so unsung in the world of Seattle music.
Rachel Nagy. I think I only saw the Detroit Cobras once when I lived there, but they were legendary. Too young, and I still haven't heard what happened.
Vangelis. I was never a huge fan, but it's safe to say in hindsight he's one of the people who introduced me to electronic music. Maybe Jarre had more influence on me, but only because he came later — and because Vangelis's "Chariots of Fire" was so omnipresent.
Lamont Dozier, Dennis Waterman, Ken Williams. You might not know these names. Look them up. That's a lot of firepower lost. These are guys with both art and craft, guys whose results are very difficult to argue with.
Klaus Schulze. Up until relatively recently, I knew him mostly from the first Tangerine Dream album and Ash Ra Tempel, but even that'd be enough to cement him in my mind as one of the greats. But then there's Timewind,Angst, and a billion other releases. A master.
The big hoedown in the sky. Country was hit hard in '22. C.W. McCall might've been a one-hit wonder ("Convoy") but it was a monster and it always makes me think of my uncle who knew every word and maybe still does. Then Mickey Gilly, Naomi Judd, and Loretta Lynn? All pioneers and legends.
Classic rock radio. Dan McCafferty of Nazareth, Wilko Johnson of Dr. Feelgood, Christine McVee, Meat Loaf. Can't say I'm necessarily a fan of any of them, but their stature was undeniable. And of course, there's Meat's masterful performance in Fight Club.
Coolio. It's fucking Coolio. How is Coolio gone?
Taylor Hawkins. The Foos are not one of my favorites either, but it sure seems to me that he was loved by pretty much everyone who came across him.
The lords of the synth. This year we lost both John Appleton, the inventor of the Synclavier, and Dave Smith, the man behind Sequential Circuits and one half of the pair responsible for MIDI.
Ronnie Spector. Between her and Lamont Dozier both leaving the building, a massive chunk of Motown is gone. No disrespect to Diana Ross but Ronnie was always my favorite.
Angelo Badalamenti and Julee Cruise. This is some serious garmonbozia. Angelo had a good run at least, but I was hoping to hear more from him.
Mimi Parker. Saved the hardest for last. I truly don't know what to say about this one. So here's a video.
I feel like I've been posting a lot of these RIP things lately. The Specials were, in hindsight a big deal for me. Ska was a sound that was punk-approved. And other than hip-hop, it was the first music I got into on my own that wasn't "loud guitar music." That certainly opened up the way for so many of the things I love, from James Brown to Autechre. Arguably the only band more important for my branching-out was Joy Division.
And I can't get enough of watching them play in their heyday. They looked impossibly cool, a wild mass of energy and high pants cuffs. And there was Terry Hall at the center, totally serious and almost menacing while chaos erupted.
The guy had a terrible life story with great pain in his childhood, but he translated that into a great thoughtfulness and empathy for the less fortunate in the Thatcher era. It was through him that the great contrast of the Specials — fun Jamaican-inspired music with black-humor or straight-up dark punk lyrics — manifested, and without him they've been only half of their glory.
Instead of a classic Special song, here's the video for "Our Lips Are Sealed," which Hall cowrote, and in which he looks like Robert Smith.
Yes, Lite XL happened this year and it's been great on Linux but is a little janky on Mac. So I've stuck with what I know, which is the electron-based Atom by Github. Imagine my surprise when I went to make a couple CSS tweaks to this site today and found that Atom will be sunset... tomorrow.
So here I am with VSCodium, the MS-telemetry-free version of their VS Code. I'd like to take the opportunity to try something that isn't electron (even though a text editor for web projects might be the most logical use of the technology), but I need to get some requisite Python tools to make CudaText work and the list is actually pretty short these days. Seems that if you have the money for Sublime you're using it, and if you don't you're on VS Code. Oh well.
First Julee Cruise, now Angelo Badalamenti. One was estranged, one was presumably still a close friend. But either way, the David Lynch musical universe is a silent place now.
Here's the maestro talking about building perhaps his most iconic piece, Laura Palmer's Theme.
Pretty regularly on the Novation Circuit subreddit, a question like this or a comment expressing the same general idea appears. I'm not familiar with any other music gear subs where the users are so often actively trying to get away from their chosen devices.
The Circuit OG/Tracks/Rhythm are very interesting devices. Novation took the success of the Launchpad, an Ableton clip launch controller, and expanded it into a standalone device that really isn't like anything else. There's no screen. The pad grid serves as the user feedback for every function: step sequencing, keyboard, pattern launching, mixing, even the tempo display. That makes it a device that sometimes needs a great deal of memorizing (or RTFM, initially). But it also makes it a device that absolutely nails what it means to be immediate and tactile — attributes that screen-poisoned musicians supposedly crave these days when they step away from the DAW. There's no clicking, no menu diving, no using a scroll wheel to name a pattern. There's you, there's the buttons and knobs, and there's the music. And trust me, it's extremely quick to get to the "music" step. Features of both current-gen Circuits include one-button "scene" launching, sequencer probability and random mutation, pattern chaining for very long variations, and really usable reverb and delay.
So why does everyone think they need to "upgrade" to an Elektron machine, an MPC, or god forbid a Roland MC-707?
Cheap...
Firstly, these things are not expensive. About $350 gets you a new one, and for better or worse this "gotta upgrade" attitude leaves Reverb stocked with them for much less. I think there's an attitude with all kinds of musicians that the more you spend, the better your stuff is. Surprise! That's bullshit. It's not that I'm that old blues lawyer guitarist insisting that "tone is in the fingers" — after all, these same people are connecting 1958 Les Pauls to Dumble amps via Monster cables.
What I mean is electronic musical instruments are very rarely apples-to-apples comparisons. They all have their strengths and their frustrations. And good stuff has never been cheaper than it is right now.
And unspecialized...
The second thing is that, possibly because of said price, no pros have decided that these things have a certain space. If you want to make hard techno or dancey industrial, people like NIN and Richard Devine have sold you on Elektron machines and their hyped, exciter-pumped sounds. If you make lo-fi or boom bap, you want an SP-404 because Madlib, J Dilla, Flying Lotus, and who knows who else used one to make their iconic material. Even doofy gear gets this treatment at times, like the really uninspiring Microkorg being anointed the "synth for an indie rock band that has a synth."
What is the Circuit's space? It doesn't have one. I wouldn't say it's a "master of none" because it's quite good at plenty of things, but looking at it you don't say "ah yes, this thing is for X."
What I can say about the Circuits, especially the Circuit Tracks, is that they are now my centerpiece for both performing and composing, and in 20+ years of making live electronic music I have not owned another machine that enabled my way of working so thoroughly.
Would I like more precise sample cutting onboard? Yeah probably. What about separate outputs? Always want those. But "missing" features like these imply that the very purposeful design of these devices somehow includes more mistakes than it actually does. And the sum of the features versus tradeoffs is unlike anything else out there for both utility and (gasp) fun. So I'm not sure that an upgrade would actually be one at all.
Partially because there have been vast swathes of my life that went un-gamed, and partially because I have only kept a nintendo console around for quite a few years now, I tend to get into games late. My latest to finally add to the pile was The Witcher III: Wild Hunt, the main storyline of which I finished today, probably prematurely due to a week of being sick.
Openness
Holy shit it's a lot of game. And unlike Skyrim, you can go just about anywhere. Nobody climbs like Link, but Geralt does a good job of getting around territory. At least until he dies of falling from any height greater than 6 feet.
Combat
Like most 3d action RPGs, you can either parry or dodge-and-roll your way through combat. And as with all the rest, I take the latter path (arguably blocking is better since a perfect parry almost always gets you a nice opening — probably just one of the many reasons I'm shit at Souls). But either way the combat is a lot of fun. Much like Link's runes or a weapon/destruction hybrid build in Skyrim, the weapon and magic combo is really satisfying and gives combat a lot of variety. Geralt is a little slower to act than say, Link, but you get his timing down and you feel unstoppable.
Using mechanics to tell the story
I really think one the bar to hit here is Nier: Automata, but W3 does a great job sporadically. Playing as Ciri in flashback (or her supremely overpowered moment near the end, one-hitting wild hunt warriors) is a fun mix-up that lets you "live" the story a bit more. With a few exceptions, I have very little idea what the dialog options did to my playthrough and that's kinda cool. I guess it's a choice-mechanic equivalent of the open world.
Bummers
Like I said, something about the linear story that's very cleverly woven into an open-world game left me feeling "done" when it resolved. And I know there's a lot more there I haven't done.
Load times are really unfortunate, at least on the Switch. In story-heavy sections, there's a lot of it. Fast travel feels not all that fast when you can sometimes ride your horse there faster.
Frame rate is not great. Automata is a newer game that feels really intensive, but it rarely got herky-jerky. When it rains in a busy place like Novigrad (which is often), Geralt starts doing the robot. Weirder and more distracting is the crappy framerate in some cut scenes. In a game with so many of them, it's unfortunate.
None of this impeding me enjoying the shit out of it. Even the fall damage thing, because I laughed my ass off every time Geralt died by tripping over a rock.
