Been listening to the new album from Ital Tek a lot. It’s big, dark, and full of machines clacking around while massive bass swims underneath and pads echo overhead. “Kill Switch” is a relentless, stomping beast, the one I keep coming back to most.
The video below is a fascinating look into his studio and his process of making some of his unique, organic sounds using voice, odd instruments, and a few effects.
Read the (somehow) very first English translation of the first two Godzilla novels, GODZILLA and GODZILLA RAIDS AGAIN. Originally written in 1954 by Shigeru Kayama who was also one of the original films’ creators. The novelizations came immediately after the films we shown in an effort to further capitalize on their massive success.
As such they read a lot like one might describe the films as they play out on screen. There is very little in the way of additional character development or lore. It’s mostly: People in a boat are having a good time. Godzilla shows up. People freak out. Godzilla smashes some stuff. Bang! Zoom! Crunch! And goes away. People worry about him coming back and what they can do to stop him. Godzilla comes back and messes more stuff up. Whoosh! Zoom! Kablammo! Now the people really need to do something and say so over and over until a very unlikely solution suddenly appears and Godzilla is defeated, the end, we will not be taking any further questions.
Sure, there is a bit more depth than that, but if you’re going into these books in the hopes of really getting to know the “why” and “how” of Godzilla, you won’t find it much beyond “bombs did it.” Which is fair.
As far as I can tell the translation is great, and in fact translator Jeffery Angles’ afterword commentary was the highlight for me. He goes over a bit of Kayama’s early history, the making of the films, the writing of the books, and Kayama’s own feelings about Godzilla’s success overall. Considering that Kayama doesn’t have his own Wikipedia entry (in fact the entry for this book has far more info about him than you can easily find elsewhere) this might be the only place to find this information in English.
Side note: This was published by the University of Minnesota Press who also published the nearly award winning cookbook I had a part in bringing to life.
(Opening page. An example of understatement.)
Received the new issue of Electronic Sound magazine featuring Squarepusher which also (optionally) comes with an exclusive 7″ white vinyl record with two previously unreleased Squarepusher recordings.
First, the feature interview comes from The Quietus’ John Doran, a fact I was unaware of going in and delighted to find out since his work is always 1) enlightening and 2) often darkly hilarious. This plays out in the very first paragraphs as Doran recounts that one time he found himself jamming with SP (aka Tom Jenkinson.) Because of course he did.
While the feature is on the extended side I could have easily read much more as Doran provides an easy to follow through-line to much of Jenkinson’s deeply obsequious discography, adding insight into Jenkinson’s creative process and life in general, and specifically SP’s newest album Kammerkonzert.
Second, the record. After reading the decsription on the ES site I had a pretty good idea of what it would be, and was not disappointed. Two extremely minimal tracks featuring a few pure sound waves weaving in and out, droning with both a sense of dread and a searching inquisitiveness. Exactly the kind of thing you’d throw at a magazine looking to blag something special for the trainspotters (ahem.)
Of course this is just one feature in an almost 100 page magazine. And what a high quality production it is! This is my first encounter with the physical specimen and I can tell you it’s extremely high quality. Taking it out of the cardboard mailer felt more like revealing a book than a typical magazine (even ignoring the record stuffed inside.) “Thicc AF” comes to mind. Anyway, it’s filled with much more to discover (I was listening to the record while reading the story of Gentle Hum, a colab between Ah! Kosmos and friggin’ Hainbach!, and was happy to see a review of the new BoC), reminding me of the olde days of picking up a UK music mag at Barnes & Noble and reading it cover to cover over a swimming pool sized mocha at their coffee shop before putting it back on the shelf. In this case the lavish production lends weight (literally) to the words within and I will definitely be on the lookout for future issues.
(Cat for scale.)
Imagine me nodding more and more intensely while reading Cory Doctorow’s thoughts about Brian Eno’s and Bette Adriaanse’s thoughts about “what art is.” I especially resonate with his refinement that “Art is intended to make other people feel something” and that AI is incapable of intent and therefor cannot create art:
Until recently, we weren’t accustomed to encountering coherent strings of words or polished images that had no intender, so we imputed the existence of that intender to them, and we did what we always do when we encounter a work of art: we tried to mentally materialize a facsimile of the feeling the artist experienced while creating the work.
Because the intention of these works was so dilute, we ended up hallucinating an intent.
My art (some call it “music”) is most often “abstract.” I am the only intended audience, so one could argue that everyone else listening is equally bereft of my inner intent. I do sometimes try to nudge listeners with suggestive song or album titles (“Field Recordings from the Edge of Hell,” “More Fire in More Places,” “The Pier Mourns the Wreck,”) but many are also just me having fun with words (“Squid Crow Pro,” “Eraseface,” “Strange Rangebow.”
As I say in my Bandcamp bio, I’m “creating space through sound.” That space is entirely in the mind of the listener, and what inhabits that space is also entirely the in the mind of the listener. That’s my only explicit goal, to take the listener from where they are to somewhere else. To “make other people feel something.” What the listener experiences there is not my fault, I only facilitate it. Does it make you sad? Good. Bored? Good. Transcendent? Good. Want to write 100,000 words about what really lurks behind the veil of time? Good.
Essentially, all I am doing is asking one question: “How does this make you feel?” The only wrong answer is “nothing,” because I know, as one human to another, that’s not true.
(Slightly expanded from my original Bluesky thread here.)
It’s been out for less than a week but it already feels impossible to add anything about the new Boards of Canada album that hasn’t already been said. I can say that I love it and that I think it’s a masterwork. The artwork and packaging of the 2x LP is beautifully done, and the extra hexi-flexi disc with its mysterious provenance and forward/backward single track was a complete surprise.
INFERNO feels to me like a culmination of all of their past output, produced in a less cosy/nostalgic mode and more like a confident, focused work that’s not afraid to walk in the sunlight. But like the best of David Lynch’s work, sometimes the sunlight can make truly evil things all the more haunting.
I’ll leave it up to you as to whether or not you want to dig deeper. You certainly do not need to. But the meanings and connections are there for those who want to grab a map and a shovel and start digging.
OK, there was one imperfection that I just had to fix…the obviously terrible kerning…
Read the latest novella from Icelandic author Hildur Knútsdóttir, DEAD WEIGHT.
Her previous novel (and first to be translated into English) THE NIGHT GUEST was a tightly focused story of a woman who suspects that her body is living its own life while she sleeps (being as vague as possible here.) DEAD WEIGHT is again narrowly focused (complimentary) on how a woman gets drawn into something increasingly dark both against her will and also because of her own ambitions and obsessions. Both stories are efficiently written and accelerate at a steady pace that makes them hard to put down. I’m reminded of Stephen King’s Bachman Books where King finds a pressure point and just keeps on pressing it until something breaks in a spectacularly bloody fashion.
The translation by Mary Robinette Kowal is crystal clear and proves that Knútsdóttir can be just as funny as she is ruthless.
It is already set to be a feature film by Act4 and Skogland Films.
(Both Vigi and Fumi show their good taste. Follow Knútsdóttir on Bluesky to understand what this is all about.)
Read the 2012 Olena Bormashenko translation of the 1972 novel Roadside Picnic by the Russian brothers Arkady and Boris Strugatsky which was made into the 1979 film Stalker, directed by Andrei Tarkovsky, which I first saw, oh let’s say in the 2010-2017 range. A circuitous route to be sure. If you, like me, only knew the story via the film then you, like me, were largely ignorant of what the book contained until you, like me, finally got around to reading it. The film is mostly a faint echo of the events of the book which has me wanting to watch the (grim) film again because I couldn’t remember anything in the book happening in the film other than some very basic details. As far as I’m concerned, its greatest contribution is this image/vibe:
A simple distillation of the plot is: Aliens visit Earth and then leave. They leave behind both physical objects and less tangible “zones” that have strange effects on humanity and the environment. People go after these objects and die or get grievously injured (physically/mentally) in the process. Mostly they talk about it a lot. Highly recommended.
The song that was playing as I read the final scene and which was the perfect accompaniment was this one from Ian William Craig and Daniel Lentz titled “Stöltzle.” Also highly recommended.
About a year ago our cat Auguste (Twizby) was diagnosed with the first signs of kidney failure. This level was too high, the other too low. He had already been eating a prescription dry food for kidney health, but recently he stopped eating it almost entirely. We had him checked out again and switched him to the wet version of the same type of food and he was super into it. Soon we found out his too high/too low levels were even more so, and the vet prescribed him a few medications (Naruquin for phosphorus levels and Renacare for potassium levels).
Context: A few years ago our older cat Minty went though a similar situation, but his escalated very quickly, resulting in a check-in with the vet that he didn’t return from. So this was very much on our minds with Auguste.
Fortunately the medications worked/are working, and hopefully will continue to work. Auguste is still with us, still excited to eat his horrible smelling wad of prescription food gloop, is still keeping on eye on the neighborhood, and is still waking everyone up at 4am with his pacing and faux-mournful meowing. Fantastic.
Made Japanese Milk Bread from the Milk Street cookbook over the weekend. It’s my second time and both have turned out great. I’m the kind of sicko that sometimes thinks I could happily survive on nothing but buttered bread and water, so being able to make my own, even a couple simple varieties, is a nice skill to have. Milk bread (slightly crunch crust, very soft but stable interior) is a bit more complicated but none of the stages are themselves all that esoteric, though if you’re a slowpoke like me it will eat up an entire day. It makes enough to freeze for later and it comes back to life rather well, so bonus. Also, dog approved.
Planted nine raspberry canes over the weekend. Days later and I’m still a broken man.
Growing up, my grandmother had a swath of raspberry bushes that produced more berries than we could eat. That seems impossible now (I can eat a lot of them) but I think it’s true. Raspberries are my favorite food, hands down. Recently I had bought a pack of them at the grocery store to use in a dessert or something and ended up eating almost all of them while standing over the kitchen sink. In this economy? I figured it was time to make my own.
So, fingers crossed we should see some next year.
(Note: Latham is a University of Minnesota variety originally released in 1920 and “was the most widely planted raspberry in the United States during the 1930s and ’40s.“)
