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mayland69-blog · 6 years ago

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The Steel Maidens

Who are They:

The Steel Maidens are elite, religious, female warriors who serve under the influence of the Mother Goddess and the church. They serve as both police and an elite military force in the territories that they occupy. Vowing to protect and serve the people in that territory.

They can be identified by the heavy full-body steel armor that they wear. The steel itself is near indestructible by conventional means. Each steel maiden has armor unique only to them in design. The same for the custom made masks that they wear to protect the entirety of the face. Both of which are designed to fit the steel maiden’s personality and accomplishments. Armor that shows that each of them has a story to tell if you’re willing to listen.

Each steel maiden is also granted certain abilities that make their job easier. All steel maidens share these traits and it keeps them as a more unified and organized force.

This Includes:

-Telepathy

-Mind reading

-Immortality

Any militant force has some sort of enemy to fight. This the steel maidens has plenty of. Though they usually just fight tyranny and natural evil wherever it may lie, they do have a greater enemy to face. The Bronze Angels. Warriors that serve the Mother Goddess’s rebellious son, Nebri. For as long as the two could remember, they have clashed their weapons in many skirmishes and battles throughout the multiverse in an everlasting war known as The Eternal Conflict. To this day they still continue to fight on. Almost any soil you can find has most likely tasted the blood of bronze angels and/or steel maidens at some point in history.

The Creation of a Steel Maiden:

Steel maidens are a form of a religious monk under the church of the Mother Goddess. That said, most steel maidens first start out as priestesses, nuns, or some other role within the religion. Though any woman (under the requirements) could ascend to become a steel maiden so long as they pledge loyalty to the Mother Goddess and the church.

To become a steel maiden, you must get in contact with a higher priest/priestess that will send your name to be enlisted to a recruiter. After your name has been brought to their attention, they will look at your information to see what you’ve done and see if you can qualify to become a steel maiden.

Requirements (the first obviously being female):

No younger than 18 (in human years).

No older than 42 (also in human years).

Physically healthy with no crippling diseases or conditions that could make fighting extremely difficult.

Mentally stable (they’ll look at your medical history).

No or light criminal history.

Loyal to the church.

Decently attractive.

If all requirements have been met, the one who has enlisted will be sent with many other recruits to the Monastery of Alkane for training. There they will be put under the care and supervision of the monks that live there.

For an entire year, the recruits will be put under intensive training that will push them to their extreme limits. Both physically and mentally.

For physical training, they will do drills and exercises three hours a day to improve their athletic capabilities and get them to work more as a unit than individually. Teamwork and bonding play a large role in this training, putting the recruits into squads of ten which they will stick with through their entire training. On their downtime, they will be expected to bond with each other through conversation and activities of their choosing. Any recruit showing anti-social behavior will have it known to the squad leader at once and expected to end the behavior or have that recruit sent home. Any recruit showing to have been lagging behind her peers will be told to catch up or be sent home. The whole part from the physical training was not to only improve their athletics but to also weed out the weak from the strong. Anywho get sent home can look forward to trying again next year if they so wish.

Next comes mental training. For a steel maiden is designed to remain calm even in the direst of situations or the most horrific of scenes. They'll be subjected to disturbingly realistic simulations of warzones, natural disasters, and any other scenario from which steel maidens will be sent in to help out with. Dead children, badly injured and terrified civilians, and horrific beasts are only the tip of the iceberg of many things they will see in these simulations. All through this, the recruits will be trained to remain completely calm and not let their emotions cloud their thinking or actions.

Any recruit that continuously fails to handle these simulations will be sent home. Like in the physical training, they will have a chance to try again next year.

Next comes combat training. If the physical training wasn’t already brutal, sparring will only be worse. For the instructing monks will not interfere with sparring matches unless they are on the verge of death. That said, recruits will be given the choice of independent study with a weapon of choice, using that weapon to participate in sparring matches for which they will have every other day for four hours straight. In these sparring matches, they are to fight as though they actually intend to kill each other, holding nothing back. Being sent for emergency healthcare tended to be very common. And after all have gotten decently good, they will then move to skirmishes and full scale battle simulations. This is where the recruits will then learn to work with their designated squads. First it will start out with skirmishes, fights between squads to get them used to working together. From there the battles will become large and more complex, requiring a more organized strategy and tactics to win. This would be done with grouping the squads together between two teams. When confident in that, they will face realistic simulation of bronze angels and other enemies they might against. This is where the simulation truly gets difficult.Yet if the recruits work as one and manage to win several battles against the computerize enemies, they will officially graduate from the combat part of the training.

The final step to training is duty training. Here they will head to the books and learn of basic enforcement, steel maiden principals, religious studies, and how to interact with civilians. Doing a few tests and practicing simulations, they will learn everything that is related to their job. Though obviously not intense, this final part of the training can be tedious and hard to master for many of the recruits. If they fail more than two tests, they’ll be sent home.

With all stages of training complete, the recruits will at long last be deemed true steel maidens. A night of celebration will be held for them with feast and praise to the Mother Goddess for giving them strength to succeed. The next day the ceremony will be held for all of the recruits at once (usual graduation number being around 10,000 each year). The one hosting the ceremony being none other than the Mother Goddess herself. As for those who attend the ceremony, this will be the every recruit’s friends, family, and priest/priestess of the church they came from.

The Mother Goddess will first start with a speech, one that’s always different each year. Then she will congratulate the new steel maidens for their hard work and success. She will ask them to face the crowd as the priest/priestess of the churches they come from grant the steel maidens their newly made mask, armor, and weapon. All this planned ahead of time when the steel maidens were finishing up duty training, taking their measurements and preferences secretly. The priest/priestess of each church will also be allowed to chose the design of the armor and mask for the steel maiden(s) associated with their church to match the steel maiden's personality.

Quickly, the armor would be assembled to the new steel maidens for all to see. The Mother Goddess then will order them to face her and bow, commanding them to repeat the vow that they were expected to rehearse a day before the ceremony.

The Vow:

With faith and honor

With selflessness and bravery

With kindness and compassion

These are the things for which I must be

For now with the love of the Mother

I become a Steel Maiden

Warrior of the faith

Defender of the church

Shield of the people

And servant of the Mother Goddess

From now and through eternity

I shall be the Mother’s blade

To smite tyranny wherever it may linger

Her voice

To spread her holy word

And her kind hands

So that I may serve and protect the people

If I ever fail in my duty

May I be put to the sword

Judged by the court in life

Then by Saphine in death

For the Mother

The church

And the people need me

May I be reminded of that

Until I die on the battlefield

Or be taken by the Mother Goddess

For whenever my time comes

Telling them to rise, the Mother goddess will finish the ceremony with placing a kiss on every one of their cheeks. This kiss will bless them with the abilities that all steel maidens possess after graduating.

From here the new steel maidens will all be assigned to a covenant from which to serve under. These covenants work as divisions for the order, all of which are stationed in specific regions. The covenants do not choose the steel maidens, nor do they choose their covenant. It will be entirely up to monks as to where each steel maiden should be assigned. And after getting assigned to a covenant, they will begin their regular duties that they’ve trained for. Rarely does a steel maiden change her covenant or leave her post. When with a covenant, they stick with that one for pretty much their entire career unless ordered otherwise.

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newidaho · 6 years ago

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13. Christmas in Hell, pt. 1

Don’t have the time/patience/desire to read with your eyes? Don’t have eyes? Well, have your friend read you this: You can check out the audiobook for free on Apple, Google, Stitcher, or Spotify. Subscribe for new episodes every Wednesday!

25 December 2054 /// 0550h

For 54 years I have been present on the annual celebration of the birth of Our First Lord and Savior. For near on 20 years I have been in charge of illuminating Virtual Life with the Word. Every 25th of December has left me feeling full of Christ’s love.

Until Now.

This dream. And, upon waking, the memory of my daughters’ transgressions. Oh, Lord, it weighs heavy on my soul. And I feel that to lift this weight, I must retread in the steps of Abraham as he raised the knife to Isaac. If this be not so, Lord, please send your form of angel as you did on that fateful day at the beginning of our human journey. And praise be to you now and until the 0800h service.

Papa Fred Garland put down his pen. He had tried to go over his sermon after writing down his dream, but the events of the previous day kept him from focusing. He felt there was more to write. And he felt there was more to do.

Papa G had not talked to Gamma after the Christmas Eve service. His wife had told him that Gamma had simply said she was leaving and removed her mask. Papa G did not hold it against this wife for not pursuing his daughter. She was focused on the word of God—and that was something that Frederick could never begrudge.

Garland told himself the decision not to speak with his daughter was because he didn’t have the words. When he was honest with himself, he understood that this also carried the additional benefit of adding pressure to the situation. Gamma knew that consequences were coming—the longer they were put off, the more anxious she would become from the anticipation.

What Garland had failed to realize at the time was that this anticipation was a blade that cut both ways. He knew he had to provide consequences. Up until now, however, he did not know what these consequences would be. After his time of prayer, he finally did.

Garland walked out of his office and down the hall to Gamma’s bedroom. She would be receiving a 0600h wake-up call. Garland rapped on the door with authority and waited for her answer. The door creaked open almost immediately.

‘Good morning, father. Merry Christmas.’ The anticipation was obvious. Gamma’s voice was meek and directed at her feet.

‘Good morning, Gamma. Were you already awake?’

‘I always wake up early on Christmas, father.’

‘Good. Well, before we begin our Christmas traditions, I would like you to accompany me to the Prayer Room.’

‘Yes, father. Should I change?’

‘Your pajamas are fine. Come. We only have so much time before the eight o’clock service.’

Gamma followed her father down the stairs and across the lounging quarters to the tall, circular prayer room. Upon entering, she noticed her father had been carrying one Lucid Mask. He handed this out to her.

Gamma took the mask from her father’s hands. It was apparent that her father did not intend to wear a mask himself. He did, however, have on AR Lenses—unusual for him at this time of morning. She guessed it must be part of her punishment.

‘Before you put this mask on,’ her father said, ‘let me preface what is about to happen. I feel the best way to preface this includes a dialogue. I noticed you left the Christmas Eve service early. Is this correct?’

‘Yes, father.’

‘Why?’

‘I don’t know if I’m right, yet, so don’t be too mad at me. But you were being so mean last night, I thought that, if God does exist, maybe you aren’t really speaking for God. So I didn’t want to listen to you speak for Him.’ She had spent all night thinking about how she would respond to the conflict she had inspired—it was evident in the dry delivery of her words.

Papa Garland resisted the urge to touch his daughter. Had he said something of this sort to his parents, he would most certainly have been slapped. Instead he moved on from the dialogue portion of the preface, and into his more happily anticipated monologue:

‘Well, Gamma, the realities of God are unfortunately not for you to decide. If we allowed everyone on Earth to decide the rules of their own God, we would slip deeper into the chaos that has been spreading like a virus since the beginning of this millennium.’

‘But father, isn’t Bible debate encouraged at FuTech?’

‘I was not finished talking, Gamma.

‘You are correct. Discussion of the Bible is encouraged. But no one doubts the word of the church’s authorities in such a way that even approaches the disrespect you have shown for me. It is not in my place to judge those who walk out of our church as you have done, but my heart cries for the judgement that will be placed on them when their final day comes.

‘But you, my daughter, are not simply a member of the congregation, free to come and go as you please. No, Gamma, God has entrusted me to raise you in the church, and to make sure that you understand all the lessons the Bible can teach you. He has blessed you with the opportunity to be present for each of the Virtual Services held in the most popular Virtual Church in the nation. And to learn and ask questions directly to his faithful disciple who runs the service. And when you voluntarily leave his service, as you did last night, this transgression speaks volumes greater than those of whom are lost without the beacon you have been born among.

‘Those who so readily give up the influence of God in this way are destined for a long journey into a dark space. It is out of love for you that I tell you this, for I would never wish upon anyone the journey you have shown interest in taking. Now, as my daughter, it is with both sadness and duty that I must show you the road that your actions are leading you down.

‘Please put on your mask.’ There was a moment of hesitation, but as strong-willed as she was for her age, Gamma was only 13. She knew she had to follow her father’s orders. She put her mask on.

‘Now,’ her father said. ‘Relax for a moment.’ Papa Garland tapped twice on the side of his Lenses to pull up his home menu. After navigating through the FuTech menu, typing in passwords at checkpoints along the way, swiping past confidential documents and information, he finally made his way to a menu with a dark red box. He waved his hand over the box and it opened to reveal one application in the shape of a 16-bit ball of fire—the type you might see in an old Super Mario game around 70 years ago.

From Garland’s point of view, the interface for the application was rather sparse. The fireball expanded, and inside was one menu option—“Connect”.

Before selecting this option, Papa Garland spoke once more to his daughter. ‘Gamma, what you are about to experience is a simulation. It is to be used rarely, if at all, by FuTech reverends. Very few know if its existence, and after this experience, I ask that you tell no one, lest the secret get out.

‘What you are about to experience is a collaborative effort between the priests and engineers of FuTech. It is the nearest simulation that we could come up with, through our divinity and study, of Hell. This, Gamma, is what you can look forward to should you continue to walk down the road you are on. It pains me to use this punishment on you, but I ask that you remember this is for your own good. I ask that when you come out the other side, you attempt to be grateful.’

With this, Papa Garland placed his hand over the “Connect” option on the application. After searching for nearby connections, a ball with Gamma’s image on it appeared floating in the air—her mask had been noted for possible connection. Papa Garland placed his hand over the sphere, inserted the requested password, and placed his hands firmly on either side of Gamma’s mask.

It wasn’t long before Gamma started to move about, attempting to free herself of the simulation. It was to be expected—a natural human reaction to the Hell that had been designed by FuTech engineers with the help of Divine Inspiration.

When her father connected her to the simulation, Gamma’s home menu had faded to black. After a couple seconds, the landscape around her faded in. She stood on a plain made of dark red metal. The sun was the only natural body in sight. All around her were pieces of machinery, ranging from simple to complex, from torturous to productive. The sun beat down on the metal below her bare feet. Though she couldn’t literally feel it, she still experienced anxiety that her feet would burn if she stood on the ground much longer.

Of course, Gamma found she couldn’t move. Her father was holding her to the spot. Even if he wasn’t, she knew the simulation would not be one to let her explore. After she got her bearings, Gamma heard a terrifying screeching noise and the machinery began to start up.

It would have been impossible to see everything going on. It was an environment of overstimulating horror. Certain machines resembled meat grinders, with human shapes passing between the gears as they ground down the flesh and bone. Other machines simply scraped metal upon metal in between their gruesome deeds, contributing to the head-splitting symphony.

Gamma’s first reaction was to turn her head away, but she immediately remembered that her father’s hands held her head in place. Even had she been able to turn, she understood she wouldn’t be able to see anything but what was going on around her. Instead, she tried closing her eyes. After one second, bright and painful flashes of light spazzed in front of her closed eyelids and the cacophony grew louder. Unable to put up with this alternative, Gamma was forced keep her eyes open.

After five minutes that felt like an hour of watching the machines execute their gruesome tasks, a line of adolescent boys and girls walked in front of Gamma’s field of vision. She was about 20 feet from them. The line stretched out to either side of her periphery, containing about 30 humans in all.

Gamma felt her head turned slightly to the right. Approaching this side of the line was a large, hunched, grayish-black humanoid creature about twice the size of the humans in the line. It wore no clothes, though his body had no features of male or female genitalia. It was also completely hairless, and its facial features were unreadable under the shadow cast by its brow. He retrieved what looked like a large serrated knife from somewhere behind him. He fluidly moved the saw so that its teeth met the front of the first victim’s head. In two harsh motions, the creature pressed and dragged his knife across the boy’s head back and forth, completely removing the top of his skull.

The sound of the saw cutting into flesh and the subsequent guttural screams from the boy were too much for Gamma. She closed her eyes again and the sounds became ever more aggressive and unwieldy. As she opened her eyes, she could see that the creature in front of her had not moved on—in fact, he appeared to have been staring at her with unfeeling eyes the whole time.

Upon seeing her eyes open, the creature kneaded his fingers around the sides of the rim of the hole it had cut in the boys skull as though the edge of the top of his head was a pie crust. The creature worked its way around the top of the boy’s head until the skin and bone resembled a funnel being fed into the top of his head.

Gamma watched the creature go about a similar process for each adolescent in line. It didn’t use the same instrument every time. Sometimes it used an ice pick to make a hole and cracked the skull apart with its hands; sometimes it bludgeoned the top of the head with a metal hammer; only once did to use its mouth to bite the top of the head off of one of its victims.

When each human in line had been properly disfigured, with a funnel of skin and bone being fed into his or her head, a gang of half-sized demons the same make as their master dragged a piece of heavy machinery behind the line of humans, the contraption making a nearly unbearable scraping sound as it was dragged across the red metal ground.

The machine stood about as tall as the original demon, with three downward-facing nozzles protruding from its front. As the machine was dragged behind the first three humans, Gamma could see that the nozzles were spaced perfectly apart so as to hover directly above the heads of the victims.

The original demon walked up to the machine and emphatically turned a wheel on the back of it. A mixture of what looked like concrete was then dispensed into each victim’s open head as their screams increased and their faces morphed from a horror that Gamma couldn’t possibly understand. As soon as the first of them keeled over from the heaviness of the concrete, the original demon grabbed him by the legs and effortlessly swung him into the air and smashed his head on the ground into a shattered, bloody mess.

The beast followed the same process for each human being. By the time the rest of the line realized what was going on, some naively attempted to preserve their life by standing, but none could withstand the concrete. One slightly stronger boy managed to remain upright until lines of wet concrete began dripping down the front of his face, his legs quivering under him. Eventually, he buckled and met the same fate as his peers.

After finishing with the line of humans, the creature predictably approached Gamma herself. As he approached her, the screen went blank, the noise stopped, and she once again felt free to move her head around.

‘You can remove your mask,’ her father said behind her.

She removed the mask and looked around her. For some reason, the room felt different than when she had entered.

‘What time is it?’ Gamma asked her father.

‘Thirty past the hour of six,’ her father replied.

Gamma nodded. She wasn’t surprised it had only been thirty minutes, though it felt to her like the sun could have risen and set on Christmas day by the time she had opened her eyes.

‘I am preaching in an hour and a half. Do you plan to stay the service?’

Gamma nodded.

‘I expect to see you there.’

‘…’

‘I don’t feel happy for having had to put you through this. I prayed, requesting God send me a sign that you didn’t need this treatment. It would appear that it was his will that you go through this experience. I know you have a strong soul, Gamma. You will get past these feelings of horror in time. But you will never forget. You will never forget where you may end up should you slip up.’

‘…’

‘Do you understand? Do you understand that I love you enough to put you through this? It is because I don’t want you to go through the real thing, Gamma. Many parents do not love their children this much.’

‘Yes, Papa.’

Papa Garland took a long breath and nodded. ‘I must prepare for the eight o’clock service, Gamma. I hope to see you there. I hope you learn something.’

‘Yes.’

‘And Gamma?’

‘…’

‘You will not be sitting next to this boy, will you?’

‘No, Papa.’

When the time came for the virtual service, Gamma found herself almost sickened by the thought of putting the mask on again. But she didn’t sit with Charlie. In fact, she didn’t even see him in the first service. The same was true for the 1000h service and the 1200h service. She made sure to take a comprehensive look around her, disguising her curiosity as as a sneeze or a stretch. But she was sure she hadn’t seen him at all. As far as Gamma could tell, Charlie Johnson hadn’t been to any of the Christmas services.

#New Idaho #Ben Vizy #New Novel #Writing #Writing Community #Novelist #Novel Writing #2054 #Augmented Reality #Futurism #Hell #Visions of Hell #Bad Girl #Punishment

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accelerator-sama · 3 years ago

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СИМУЛЯТОР ОЧЕНЬ НЕПРАВИЛЬНОГО СВЯЩЕННИКА 😳 Priest Simulator Heavy Duty

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tinymixtapes · 7 years ago

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Feature: 2017: Favorite 50 Music Releases

Do we still move in 2017? In a year when our AI systems were becoming citizens and shut down for inventing new languages, when our social media interactions were weaponized with unprecedented precision by political campaigns, when our very DNA could be encoded with malicious software, what does movement even look like in such an information-rich world? A string of data waiting to be computed? If an average of 68 Facebook “likes” is all it takes to predict skin color with 95% accuracy, then it’s not hard to imagine a future when our movements find their significance not in expressing our desires, but in being algorithmically expressed. But how much data do we create when we cry? What does data look like when we are fake laughing? The musical movements of 2017 offered both a glimpse into our mental health and possible ways to reconcile our technopolitical anxieties with our overbearing, untenable individualism. Our favorites this year didn’t offer solutions to our waking nightmares — why should they? — but they helped remind us that, while life is fragile (Ryuichi Sakamoto) and death is real (Mount Eerie), recovery is still possible (Björk). Amidst our fantasiis (MHYSA), dreams (Twin Peaks), and distorted reflections (Bell Witch), even our electronic music felt like ethereal gestures toward renewal, whether it was through reflexive neo-songs (Klein), a dance in the smoke (Actress), or an effervescent faith (Yves Tumor). And our movements were many. For every articulation of bodily devotion (Perfume Genius), ruthless loyalty (Kendrick Lamar), and tender obsession (Lorde), there was a subversion of spacetime (Toiret Status), revelatory Euclidean algorithms (Konrad Sprenger), and circuitous experimentalism (Playboi Carti). For every instance of emotional nourishment (Charli XCX) and critique of power structures (Richard Dawson), there was a desire to build community “in the face of absolute fragmentation” (Club Chai Vol. 1) and to try “new forms of living in a deteriorating world” (Lawrence English). We left 2016 already bruised and exhausted, and while 2017’s shitshow can’t be completely undone, we are not beyond repair. It’s easy to question our obsession with music, especially when our audio-editing tools find parallels in a gene-editing tool like CRISPR, when the noise of our time could be silenced in a flash by Minecraft scammers, when our hybrid musics coincide with hybrid wars and whatever the fuck these are. But this year’s sounds continued to expose and counter our artifices and mythologies in compelling ways, and we should count ourselves lucky that there was even a semblance of healing in both the ambience and the losses of 2017. Our movements, especially in this small corner of the internet, remain vital — necessary, even. What will our movements look like in 2018? Hopefully something a little better than this. –Mr P --- 50 Perfume Genius No Shape [Matador] [WATCH · READ] In the music video for “Slip Away,” our introduction to the fourth Perfume Genius album, Mike Hadreas ran through a slideshow of soft-focus fantasies, away from a cast of hapless villains and toward an implied happy ending. Like a dream, the detail seemed both blurred and crudely exaggerated; the antagonists’ faces painted in caricature, overcome by Hadreas dashing through the exploding set with his fairytale bride. Most of all, for an artist who dealt nothing but shade on 2014’s comeback “Queen” — all vicious contours and slicked-back hair, lips frozen in a permanent sneer at American heteronormativity — “Slip Away” presented a palette that was warm, dynamic, and deliriously playful. From start to finish, the intersections of love and death that played out across the record (see: auto-erotic asphyxiation tribute “Die 4 You”) never felt cheapened by the gauzy nightdress they came swaddled in, but elevated by its vaudeville sexuality. Even the posthumanist tropes that swirled through the album were rendered with joy; at the death, No Shape swooned at the spirit’s liberation as readily as it lamented the body’s failure. –Matthew Neale --- 49 Sun Araw THE SADDLE OF THE INCREATE [Sun Ark/Drag City] [WATCH · LISTEN · READ] Strike the stage. Think of the desert as a set, an empty set, one in waiting. Potential, not unrest. Perhaps an inclination. Look around, it’s barren and stable, tough to soil. (A grain of sand ain’t nothin’). Here it is: total poiesis (There’s a snake’s scale on that bird’s tail); the verbal rendering of all forms present by no trick greater than insistence (Ain’t that a sight). The presentation of a gift: a hidden giver, a lost recipient (…ain’t nothin’). Nowhere to go, cannot go beyond all that is present unless presented (There is a chute). It’s a classic place, an old joke, plain enough. A cowboy story, “as futuristic as possible.” Dehydration, waiting for a sign. It’s a trip, an experience, a losing time. “IT’S MORNING. HARNESS IN. STRAP UP. RIDE ON OUT BRAVE INTO TODAY.” My tongue is a chair, and I like that. –Ben Levinson --- 48 Tara Jane O’Neil Tara Jane O’Neil [Gnomonsong] [LISTEN] In the summer, the light warms and deepens everything natural. Summer sunlight makes shimmering greens seem deeper until the end of August, but come December, even at high noon, the empty branches look washed out; the air looks washed out. In 11 gentle songs, on a self-titled album, Tara Jane O’Neil tucked that deep, warm summer light into her pocket. In fits and starts on tracks like “Flutter,” “Kelley,” and “Blow,” she raised it slowly over the horizon. “The path forward is well lit,” she sang on “Metta,” and even on the harshest winter days, it is, thanks to her druidic calm. The path unfolds like a clean line traced by the afternoon across a bedroom floor. Follow it to keep inside its warmth. Look up sometimes, but never too directly or for too long without those heavy-duty and professionally inspected eclipse glasses. This album was inviting and elusive. It pulled us in close but never let us forget how fragile our little human retinas are. And then it dipped out of sight. –Taylor Peters --- 47 Nmesh Pharma [Orange Milk] [WATCH · LISTEN · READ] Nmesh’s plunderphonic monolith Pharma was many things: a chemical cocktail for a future nightlife, a hallucinogenic trip through the dark fractures of 2017 and its nostalgic histories, a waking nightmare catalyzed by vaporized pop cultural memories. Pharma went beyond simulation, toward the tangible archaeological rescue of base cultural artifacts, offering a digital rendering of the remnants of human primitivity that felt especially appropriate in this historical moment. The melodic duality of “White Lodge Simulation,” the psychedelic brutality of “Mall Full of Drugs,” and the grotesque fantasy of “Acid Baby” were all the stuff of cosmic horror, but channeled through aggressive grooves and hooks that can only charm and intoxicate. Through Pharma’s many tributaries, Nmesh took on a whole society’s obsession with the artificial and gleefully liberated us. –Colin Fitzgerald --- 46 Colleen A flame my love, a frequency [Thrill Jockey] [LISTEN · READ] The events surrounding the creation of Colleen’s seventh studio album, A flame my love, a frequency, were as heavy as it gets. Colleen’s real name is Cécile Schott, and she is from France. She happened to be in Paris, getting a viola bow repaired the night of the 2015 terrorist attacks. For weeks after, as the songs started coming, the looming specter of death wouldn’t leave her mind. Yet, for how overwhelmed she felt, the album she created was full of light and hope. The viola de gamba that created the backbone of her 2015 comeback album Captain of None was replaced here by a focus on the Critter and Guitari Pocket Piano and Septavox synthesizer, as processed by a Moog delay pedal. The minimal compositions were recorded live, without vocal overdubs, fostering a sense of personal immediacy amid the waves of synthetic sound. A flame my love, a frequency remains an album of essential contrasts. –Alan Ranta --- 45 Bell Witch Mirror Reaper [Profound Lore] [LISTEN · READ] “Mirrors are the doors through which Death comes and goes. Look at yourself in a mirror all your life and you’ll see Death at work like bees in a hive of glass.” Jean Cocteau’s 1950 cinematic adaptation of the Orpheus myth has its hero journey through mirrors to the underworld in a vain attempt to save his beloved Eurydice. Mirror Reaper, Bell Witch’s somnambulant third album, echoed that film’s themes of dreamlike movement, distorted reflections, and an obsession with death. After former drummer Adrian Guerra died during the writing and production of Mirror Reaper, current members Dylan Desmond and Jesse Shreibman created an album that alternated between an elegiac dirge and its angrier mirror image, a mournful march showcasing that death is but an inverted reflection of life. The power of Mirror Reaper lay in its world-building; consisting of a single 83-minute track, the album forced the listener to meet it on its own terms. Through repetition and a loud/quiet dynamic, Bell Witch lulled us into a slumber in which the voices of the dead spoke to us again and then violently shook us awake to remind us of our own fetid mortality. –Jeff Miller --- 44 Toiret Status Nyoi Plunger [Noumenal Loom] [LISTEN · READ] Ingestion and invisibility, undo our reverse cornucopia; plunge and unplug, let loose the profusion. Microscopies swell to burst in bubbleshine, but don’t forget to meet the man, the man himself, who cans all that laughter. We’ve got lyrical machines, all pistons firing and tiring, building all those silly swirls of collapse and sweettoothing their hardware hollow. The arc of the priest’s staff leaves a sparkling trail of emoji — snap, swing, zing, plonk. Things move fast and then they move faster and then they don’t. Thank you, thank you, grazie. The trunk sort of explodes, splitting loose and scattering the grid, leaving queues all out of sort, and cutting the stone with recrudescence. While you can help it, never stop iterating += 1. TFW when the POP ROCKSTM pass the blood-brain barrier I caught the cows tangoing on the roof, clapping and clacking their hooves hailstone-style on the corrugate. A toast to every comet that explodes overhead! Drum rolls please, but we shouldn’t cater to bourgeois enjoyment. Quiet, the show is set to start… Elsa coughs a light cough and foghorns: Dedesnn nn rrrrr, Ii Ee, mpiff tillff toooo, Dedesnn nn rrrrr, Ii Ee, mpiff tillff toooo, tillll Dedesnn nn rrrrr, Ii Ee, mpiff tillff toooo, tillll,Jüü-Kaa?llll,Jüü-Kaa? Roshi, scepter at his side spilling smileys, nods. The crowd detonates. And what would you call that act? –Cynocephalus --- 43 Julie Byrne Not Even Happiness [Ba Da Bing!] [LISTEN] Not Even Happiness is Julie Byrne’s truth, honesty, desire, and memory laid bare. It’s a woman accepting the universe, chaos, and herself through a calm that’s almost hard to take in. It’s airy. It’s layered. It’s self-love in motion. It’s an attempt to discern a place in the cosmos. It’s Grouper out of the mist, Angel Olsen on Xanax. It’s pure consonance. It’s about moments both meaningful and mundane — a cup of coffee in the morning while looking out the window — but they’re actually all important if you care about how you live. My friend who barely talks to me anymore sent me the record in April; I played it on repeat for five hours that day, and I’ve kept listening to it ever since. –Adam Rothbarth --- 42 Pharmakon Contact [Sacred Bones] [LISTEN · READ] I spend more time than I’d like in meetings centered on teaching middle school students empathy. It’s something I care deeply about, but these meetings often make me doubt that adults (especially those in positions of interacting with children) are actually competent models of reaching out and making positive contact. These meetings feel a lot like how most people would describe Pharmakon’s music: chaotic, headache-inducing, dissonant. I don’t think it’s an accident that what “kids these days” are bumping always seems, by adult standards, alienating. “At least it makes them feel something,” right? Truth is, kids are really good at “feeling things”; adults have just had more practice turning feelings into ulcers. Margaret Chardiet hasn’t forgotten how noise can make us feel things. Contact was what empathy (feeling what other people feel) really sounded like: generative, alleviating, and cathartic, qualities that may be better taught through unadulterated sound than through rudimentary recalibration. So next staff meeting, I’m playing “Nakedness of Need,” hoping that it will expand our discussion on how we can build better connections between us. If it doesn’t work right away, at least it will have made us feel, and that’s something. –Jazz Scott --- 41 Amnesia Scanner AS TRUTH (MIXTAPE) [Self-Released] [LISTEN · READ] AS TRUTH (MIXTAPE) was as engrossing as it was adverse. With migrating noise and tones hammered out along pulsing rhythms, the mix was the out-loud dialogue of the desires and fears of machines laid flat. Of IP addresses beating like thumping veins. Of processors moaning and crying toward nothing. It was like the open wounds of aux cords oozing their creamy innards, reliving their nightmares on repeat, doled out into dulled infinity. This year has been tough, but out of strife and constant defeat comes a readmitted commitment to past truths. Processing grief and anguish is necessary for growth. Let’s just hope the machines have a better world in the works than what we have created for ourselves. Amnesia Scanner was here to help the wires deliver sensitive content with distance and grace, along with a mirror to gaze at our own created horror. –Bort [pagebreak] 40 Kara-Lis Coverdale Grafts [Boomkat] [LISTEN · READ] Montreal resident Kara-Lis Coverdale returned in 2017 with her most fascinating and poignant work to date: her first solo vinyl release titled Grafts. Over the course of its 22 minutes of playtime, Coverdale expertly layered various textural and melodic ideas, molding them into a whole that inspired reverence and wonderment in the listener. The piece drew inspiration from contemporary electronic music, seminal minimalist compositions, and church music, as overlapping muted piano flourishes, dense organs, gentle drones, and fluttering synths blossomed into fascinating meditations on texture and melody. As the third — and most peaceful — movement (“Moments In Love”) slowly drifted to its conclusion, there was tangible sacredness in the air. Grafts was spiritual, intimate, contemplative, and completely alive. And in 2017, it was a stark reminder that beauty exists, even amidst the ever-present chaos and confusion. –A B D --- 39 Actress AZD [Ninja Tune] [WATCH · LISTEN · READ] To enter such a realm, of life between being and nonbeing, of sound surging with numinous intensity and laboriously weaving itself into some vague, half-formed nightmare… The horror of reality, the limitations inside of genres like “dance” and “club” and outside: icy white silk of pouring rain and a backdrop of bleak office buildings. A ghost in the making, a figment, a cash register, a pistol, a zombie. People say that I am in a city, but I suspect I am amongst thousands of mountains. Expressive force over representational legibility, with the snowcaps amongst us. Slabs of marble dragged onto raw drips; flings of dust conjuring a far-away vision of the Dragon Gate, and in its fairy tale therein occurs a dance battle, or maybe a rap battle, or actually a 4/4 beat created from synths of yore, heavy with retrofuturism and insinuating something, something deep. So we go out, to the warehouses, to the studios, to the grottos, to the basements, with a question to ask: Do you remember real life? –Hydroyoga --- 38 Upgrayedd Smurphy HYPNOSYS [R-CH-V] [LISTEN] HYPNOSYS’s Giger-inspired cover art depicted Upgrayedd Smurphy morphing into something like an apex predator, xenomorph style. Smurphy’s beats were tighter and more austere on this album, driving the melodies while integrating classic post-punk texture into modern beat work. This approach effectively aligned her music with recent works by Andy Stott and Zomb while still sounding nothing like them. It was music for driving at night through morose, dilapidated cities. Dim-lit neon bulbs flickering out, exits collapsing in the rearview. The malaise of modern living, all connected yet lost (hypnotized, even) in reconciling that this was all actually meaningless. The whole thing felt appropriately bleak, the product of how awful our world has become. If we have to go on, let’s become something else. It’s already happening all around us. Upgrading to extraterrestrial. –Joe Davenport --- 37 Pan Daijing Lack 惊蛰 [PAN] [LISTEN · READ] Pan Daijing herself described Lack 惊蛰 as an “opera,” suggesting listeners were to consume the work as performance rather than music proper. Immediacy and vulnerability, then, were core tenets of the work: Lack 惊蛰 was an intimate process to be witnessed, not only by the listener, but by Daijing herself: “I saw myself being this absurd, mad person ‘acting’ out the sounds.” Taking listeners through various modes of sound affect, Daijing’s arsenal included experiments with verbal intonation/inflection, disquieting moans, aggressive synth loops, and arrhythmic percussion. Still, the album was less about sonic extremes and more an exploration of what noise — and perhaps the avant-garde at large — can achieve by forcing us into spaces that make both listener and performer more visible, allowing us to express and embody sincerity in an era rife with irony, superficiality, and untruths. Fundamentally, Lack 惊蛰 instilled awareness: the simple suggestion that we are here, we are feeling, we are real. In the years to come, art and performance in a similar vein will become paramount in creating spaces where we are free to feel vulnerable and consider our emotions and experiences as they relate to the human condition. –Alex Brown --- 36 Richard Dawson Peasant [Weird World] [WATCH · READ] Peasant detailed the lives of the 6th- and 7th-century peasantry during the violent unification of the Kingdom of Northumbria in present-day Northeastern England. Daunting stuff for the historically disinclined. But as TMT writer Sam Goldner pointed out, this obscure theme counter-intuitively allowed Richard Dawson to address very current, and very pressing, political concerns. By giving voice to otherwise mute historical figures — soldiers, prostitutes, beggars — Dawson implicitly critiqued the power structures that allow these characters’ oppression to persist today. Wary of drawing any explicit connections between his music and recent politics, Dawson nevertheless remarked that “some of the things that are described in the songs are not too different from some of the things that occur today in a supposedly civilized society.” And what is described in the songs was bleak: the world of Peasant was violent, superstitious, corrupt, and all too recognizable. Dawson’s powerful Geordie bark and discordant acoustic guitar brought this world arrestingly to life. The intensive historical research and dissonant experimentalism of Dawson’s earlier albums now seem like necessary steps toward creating Peasant’s sprawling narrative, one of those rare documents that perfectly encapsulates an artist’s approach. In retrospect, it’s obvious Dawson had to make this album, and that he had to make it in 2017. –Matthew Blackwell --- 35 woopheadclrms Meeting Room + Rare Plants [Ukiuki Atamata] [LISTEN · READ] It took a few listens to pinpoint what made woopheadclrms’s Meeting Room + Rare Plants so compelling. Putting aside the overwhelming amount of samples and otherworldly qualities hidden in the pitched-shifted mutant vocals, there was an underlying presence. It was almost like a secret, whispered between the barrage of sound. The smooth transitions between sounds, the gentle jokes, the memes, the chirping of birds, the conversations between friends, the jungle-like atmosphere: it all made for an experience akin to those overly romanticized depictions of death we see on television, where the character’s life flashes before their eyes, millions of moments rushing back toward a light that had shined for decades, maybe even a century, separating the unknown pre-birth world and the halcyon ocean that lay ahead. All the detailed subject matter blurred and the memories seemed randomly chosen, but when pieced together, they formed not a grandiose message, but feelings of warmth, solace, maybe even alleviation. –Sam Tornow --- 34 Giant Claw Soft Channel [Orange Milk] [WATCH · LISTEN · READ] There are few rockist tropes as worn-out as the breakup album. Many of rock & roll’s big names have one among their canonical works (Blood on The Tracks, Here My Dear, Rumours, The Boatman’s Call, Sea Change, Vulnicura, etc.). Is Soft Channel “a breakup album for the internet age”? Cutesy rhetorical clutches aside, the album indeed found Keith Rankin exploring the fragments that circle one’s head in the aftermath of a sentimental crisis, the mix of frustration, disappointment, relief, loneliness, regret, and everything else that threatens to overwhelm you in such episodes. And if Rankin’s post-digital approach to plunderphonics, his brutalization of modern pop and appropriation of the remains, suits the anxiety buildup that comes with a breakup, Soft Channel wasn’t just a trip through despair. The later part of the album pushed for a sense of closure, with melodies becoming recognizably tame and R&B vocals acquiring luminescent shapes. Striving for serenity might be naïve, but a measure of peace existed in letting memories and whispers dilute in the past. After all, we will all find a home in there eventually. Even awful exes and sanctified breakup albums. –jrodriguez6 --- 33 Konrad Sprenger Stack Music [PAN] [LISTEN · READ] Stack: With Stack Music, Konrad Sprenger put the authorship of music in flux. The music was authored by a system: user, interface, instrument. The user directed the interface to make choices for patterns of sound. Despite a complete oversaturation of questions regarding artificial intelligence in electronic music, Sprenger’s process stood monolithic in its reversal of “man vs. machine” rhetoric. Here, the system’s authors shared an economy of sound. String: Every sound came directly from a computation of resistance; the string resists its labor. The physicality/artificiality of the string was totally elusive, creating an audible treachery of sound. The string sounded like a train. Stanza: 7:01 / 18:56 / 18:07 / 6:28 Space: The Euclidean algorithm, here applied to rhythm, creates an interplay of space. The computer-author finds space and generates sound to fill it. Sprenger’s longtime influence and New York minimalism counterpart is Ellen Fullman, but where Fullman’s string instrument creates space, Sprenger’s devours it. When there is no space left, Stack Music sounds the most beautiful. Syncopation: “I can make syncopation sound like death.” –John Fahey. –E. Fosl --- 32 Khaki Blazer Didn’t Have to Cut [Hausu Mountain] [LISTEN · READ] Even Khaki Blazer felt it this year. Taking a respite from the whiplash frenzy and wormhole plunderings of his sample-heavy, hyperaccelerated pinball methodology, Pat Modugno launched an uncharacteristically patient, low-key textural investigation on Didn’t Have To Cut. Through lateral pathways into parentheticals and ellipses plunged into the hearts of his samples and discovered something like a universal glitch, stuttering alongside elastic harmonies and oblique slippages, plopped onto the cement like putty and smeared into the shape of a rainbow. Our bodies twitched, our eyes glazed over. Time was a bar of soap. Space was up for debate. “My battery’s almost dead. Do you have a charger?” We looked down, and Khaki Blazer was trapped in the grid, crying. He had flowers in his hand. The flowers were melting. It was a cartoon! –Mr P --- 31 Young Thug Beautiful Thugger Girls [Atlantic] [WATCH · READ] Wending his way gently into the crevices of a rich and sensuous realm of pop, Young Thug used Beautiful Thugger Girls as a faultless freeze frame that captured his increasing rise to stardom and the social misdemeanors that come with it. His observations were as astute and as resounding as ever, rapping about everything from his difficulties at school to family loyalty to individuality. Each cut carved fresh insight into the complicated world of a rising artist as he continued to veer away from the mainstream while flirting unabashedly with it. Although it might not have been as crass as Barter 6 or as uncompromising as JEFFERY, Thug made sure that his summertime mixtape proved to be one of his most captivating releases to date, and for that we were truly grateful. –Birkut [pagebreak] 30 Lawrence English Cruel Optimism [Room40] [LISTEN · READ] You don’t hear the sounds so much as you feel them, like a distant mudslide slowly moving your way, when everything stalls and a moment seems to last forever. Sharing its title with Lauren Berlant’s 2011 monograph, Cruel Optimism addressed the same affect theory concern of an individual’s optimistic attachment in an increasingly compromised society. Across Cruel Optimism, English was able to push his own boundaries, combining freeform ideas with captivating instrumental sequences, conceived, at times, by ”happy accidents.” With repeated listens, Cruel Optimism became unshakable, its scope and imagination conveying a divine, indeterminate place and time. Picking out moments to describe the whole feels Sisyphean, as the whole was simply an intense masterclass in sound sustention. Cruel Optimism embraced Berlant’s theory of “crisis ordinariness,” but sought to experiment, to try new forms of living in a deteriorating world. In doing so, this release saw this extraordinarily talented composer deliver his most beautiful, pathos-laden, and, above all, human masterpiece yet. –David Nadelle --- 29 CupcakKe Queen Elizabitch [Self-Released] [WATCH · READ] By turns lurid and lucid, CupcakKe had the stamina to out-pace, out-rap, and out-fuck just about everyone this past year, and Queen Elizabitch was her glistening testament to the fact. Whether she was raiding your shit (“Quick Thought”), preaching body positivity (“Biggie Smalls”), or fucking in the back of an Uber (“Cumshot”), there was little room for the sacred in her urgency and diligence. Put simply, this was 100% profane to its very core, jettisoning any notion of radio-friendliness or crossover appeal in her perverse outlook; if I could point to any one rhyme as a suitable M.O., this might be it: “Name anything freaky and you know I’m ‘bout the shit / Only time I’m not on the dick is when I’m ‘bout to shit” (“CPR”). And, consistent with her meticulous impulse toward what’s real, Queen Elizabitch was bookended by two of the most thoughtful cuts anybody could muster in 2017, introducing and capping off a tale of personal triumph amidst societal anguish. Long live the Queen — true to her word, the 33rd of the month never came. –Soe Jherwood --- 28 Léo Hoffsaes & Loto Retina Early Contact [PERMALNK] [LISTEN · READ] The nuclear family of Early Contact includes father, mother, son, and soon-to-be second child, who, in this perfect narrative, would be a daughter. The first time we heard the pregnant mother, our narrator, speak, her voice inspired a surge of strings to burst forth from her swelling heart and belly and announced two of the album’s three scores: the mother’s internal monologue, written by Bastien Vairet and performed in the distinctly superficial style of true-blue American artifice; and the orchestral arrangements that soundtrack her thoughts with extreme, almost Disney-like pathos. But a third, subtler score was also present, though in suspension, and sounded its poignant piece through muddy, atmospheric synths and electro-acoustic compositions that seemed to come from far off or, more likely, from deep within. It seeped like a vapor through the album’s amniotic fluid — unformed sometimes, as in in the beginning of “11 am”; and eternal other times, as in “2 pm.” The tension created by the three tracks spoke to the whole absurd theater of this life-in-the-day-of, and even though we were listening to the scripted thoughts of an archetype, I couldn’t help but wonder how our own thoughts do so churn. –Cookcook --- 27 Big Thief Capacity [Saddle Creek] [LISTEN] SNOWFALL, a word like an other, a root transformed by circumstances. Words are containers for wonders, imagined expressions of the world we see. In words like in snows, the world is temporarily transfigured, a familiar thing under bright fabric. Sound and snow transfix; “you won’t recognize your house.” MYTHOLOGICAL, almost, legends of our every days, we walk in the feel of falling skies. The dog pulls, happy haywire in the shifted smells of these streets. In snows like in songs, silhouettes of the world resound from under a momentary veneer, a changed air. Somewhere, tree’s leaves. Somewhere, a dead deer under these new white mounds. “Will you recognize the iris of the body?” Half-familiar home, a streetlight of us stepping, “forgetting the word “dog” and looking at that naked animal and getting much closer to it and how it is different to you.” CAPACITY bridges could-know and have-known, fabrics worlds and traumas in folk and rumbles. Capacity contains all our breaking engagements, all our dog-walk joys, the paths that fade from the steps that can’t be taken back. Worlds break but songs make, myths for forward. “You’re all caught up inside/ But you know the way.” Hearth and hurt, coma and home, Capacity takes and holds, getting us much closer to us than we can without it. –Frank Falisi --- 26 Various Artists Club Chai Vol.1 [Club Chai] [LISTEN · READ] How do you build something communal in the face of absolute fragmentation? Is there a way out of the hell of singular ready-made identities, something that allows one to carry solidarity further than individual interests? Club Chai Vol. 1 sought answers to these questions while bridging the gap between the local and the global to find a common tongue, regardless of the variety of struggle. The comp managed to locate a solidarity that progressed beyond common interests of a single identity group, a solidarity of simply caring for others who are different. Rather than artificially creating common ground by imposing an overarching theme or artistic direction, the record embraced the differences of its co-creators, their varied backgrounds, their unique musical styles. This created a sonic world wherein FOOZOOL’s tense “AZAT Ազատ” felt right at home next to the gently sung “BLACK WAX” by SPELLING. Every contribution to the compilation was irrevocably different, and yet it never felt incoherent or arbitrary. In its disregard of borders, be they political or artistic, Club Chai Vol.1 brought to the fore voices routinely excluded by the West and the faux-liberalism of middle-class uniformity. It succeeded by forging out of them a harmony that felt complete and unafraid, destructive toward the existing rulesets and intent on creating new spaces of possibility. –Acedia --- 25 Slowdive Slowdive [Dead Oceans] [WATCH · READ] The news is grimmer every year. We find ourselves at the crossroads in modern society: party over country, corporations over people, division over unity. We fall neatly into categories and find ourselves embracing or rejecting what is reported about our adopted identities. So, here we are, staring at our shoes, deciding where next to stride. I chose the light, where it seems Slowdive have been hiding for two decades with open arms, hoping society came to them naturally. We didn’t, so they’ve reemerged and are urging us toward the inner peace of doing the right thing. Slowdive has broken my shackles, and I’m no longer tethered to characters typed out on a screen that may or may not speak to my demeanor, message, and identity. I’m transcending it all, leaving the orange psychic shadow behind. We have better things to do with our time and energy, and it begins with a deep dive into the return of Slowdive and our roots of making the change we want. –Jspicer --- 24 Chino Amobi PARADISO [UNO NYC/NON WORLDWIDE] [LISTEN · READ] An understated appeal of the circus or carnival lies in the elevation of “characters” that we otherwise neglect to acknowledge in our daily lives, but whom we know exist in the shadows. PARADISO offered a similar promotion, although in lieu of so-called “freaks” with biological conditions, the musical sideshow centered around a plethora of artists affiliated with Amobi’s NON WORLDWIDE label, which arrived on the scene a few years ago figuratively offering the mic to a variety of underrepresented. Elysia Crampton recited Poe with variations on a couple of tracks, and the title track had a veritable litany of artist features, which began with the defiant and possible mission statement: “I’m not an animal.” Cages were for sure lifted accordingly on an overall musical level, and the whole of the release showcased the chaotic stew that possibly represents our current societal state better than vanilla and holidays sales ever did. Some of us still need a blatant welcome, despite a distant organ. –Mike Reid --- 23 Various Artists Twin Peaks (Music from the Limited Event Series) / Twin Peaks (Limited Even Series Soundtrack) [Rhino] [WATCH · WATCH · WATCH] It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that, for most of us at TMT, the most important event of the year (particular stages in the ongoing degeneration of the globe notwithstanding) was not primarily musical, but televisual. But, of course, in the new Twin Peaks series, as with anything involving David Lynch, the musical side could never have been less than crucial, whether as a conduit of signification and significance, as punctuation, or as a peculiar kind of marginalia to the show. The original series left innumerable traces on the wider world, detectable ever since in television, in film, in our favorite music — in our very perception of things. Even detached from the accompanying pictures and story, the soundtrack has always possessed an almost uniquely powerful ability to evoke a polyvalent kind of nostalgia. Now, disoriented by novelties, the old is given strange new salience and sent down an entirely renewed confusion of interpretative possibilities. Twin Peaks has grown, expanded to fill voids it had left behind, and engendered new ones. In the years since its first incarnation, it found points of entry into our own world; this year, ours found a way into its. Could “Laura Palmer’s Theme” ever mean the same thing again? –Michael J --- 22 Jlin Black Origami [Planet Mu] [WATCH · READ] Watch it fold. A few things, maximized, then steady. Singularity: each sound an organelle, tiniest units of tissue, collectively defining the tissue, gradually forming the organ, one formal unit, one after the other, track by track, slowly shifting. It doubles back, flips the script, keels over. Origami. “The fold serves as an apt metaphor,” says Prathna Lor on Renee Gladman’s “Calamities.” “The fold is at once additive as it is subtractive. Folds, as they increase in number, generate more and more possibilities, and completely reimagine the space within which they are reconfigured. Space is reconfigured, (re)constructed, diminished, and translated along new and different planes.” It sounds good. “[It] feels knotted; like being in a mouth.” It speaks from another, from within another (mouth), it moves the body. “What becomes necessary is not the untangling of its density but the tracing out of its textures, surfaces, and shapes. […] It is therefore not in the name of teleology but of experience that we must seek a phenomenology, an erotics, a contouring of writing.” Working with steel, working the body, working toward elegance. Refining, tempering, deliberate, shifting. –Ben Levinson --- 21 Björk Utopia [One Little Indian] [WATCH · READ] Recovery’s tricky. You know it’s been rough, don’t worry, it’s fine now, etc., but shit can and will dive down again. The cycle repeats, and Utopia was an abstract pop frolic through it. Having endured the breakup that inspired 2015’s Vulnicura, Björk, again partnered with producer Arca, pondered the confounding trials of emotion. Against frustrating soundscapes that allowed industrial thuds and ethereal flutes to coexist, Björk cooed and wailed over the sensory/biological overload of first kisses, brokenness, and the responsibility of guardianship. Mysterious noises scattered, never to be heard again. Flames and birds crackled, and the question of their authenticity added to the experience; we have our fantasies of love and pain, but what is the reality? By the end, having addressed tactile, spiritual, and digital communication, she reached beyond herself, bore the world’s angst, and protected its lantern, even though it has prompted her to shift shapes. Guardedly optimistic, Björk faced an increasingly indifferent world, so maybe her hope will falter, but that was Utopia’s point. It was a gorgeous mess, a contradictory album by/for contradictory minds, and its enigmas will persist. –Snacks Kyburz [pagebreak] 20 M.E.S.H. Hesaitix [PAN] [LISTEN · READ] “How did I become so stupid?,” Hesaitix asked, in sonic pursuit of a grotesque metamodernism. An anagram of “cathexis,” Hesaitix invested profound energy into the imponderable bloom — a bloom declared as “essence” by so many discredited philosophies — but a process rightly ignored by the Machine, just as the imponderable bloom of the grape was ignored by the manufacturers of artificial fruit. M.E.S.H. tensely collected the grapes of wrath on record, pooling expired audio into cisterns filled with birdsong, vision, electricity, and pulsing acid-shade hues of burnt purple-gold. The hybrid result was an organic/plastic sound with half-utility as an armored “club record,” while still half-fantasizing a dilapidated attempt at introverted worldbuilding: “This is my world…but how did it become so stupid?” Over-rendered, fleshy, but recast rigidly into stark obsidian, M.E.S.H. sketched hopeful boundaries for form, as if creating lumpy sculptures out of a constantly melting red clay. There was no real reconstruction happening here, only ephemeral reactions that merely complemented M.E.S.H.’s previously deconstructionist audio agenda. Here, there was only the search and the reveal — a revelation in the sound of void-wind cuffing the plaza. –Nick James Scavo --- 19 Chief Keef Thot Breaker [Glo Gang] [LISTEN · READ] They’ve been asking for the old Sosa since he was 17. But how can you miss the old Chief Keef when he can be the pill that you gotta take, your night shift, your light-year, the sun in your rainy weather, your listener, your boat? Your Number 1 Pop Star, your “LOVE.” He’s changed (“Slow Dance”), and he’s stayed the same (“My Baby”), turning his Gucci/Wayne smear resplendent. Thot Breaker arrived overdue and yesterday, a pop time slide, a HNDRXX from the future, in 2017, after the honestly equal albeit unmastered Two Zero One Seven. Anamoly (Almighty So), phantasmagoria (lil glo). The old Sosa’s ttttturbo made us go “Whoa,” then his voice took us inner, outer, and higher. How far is a light-year? –Pat Beane --- 18 GAS Narkopop [Kompakt] [LISTEN · READ] Maybe it shouldn’t be surprising that, even after a 17-year pause between albums, GAS felt, in essence, unchanged. Wolfgang Voigt’s most sublime musical outlet has always felt more like a natural phenomenon than a project, tied not to the passing of trends or eras, but to the epochal aging of the Earth itself. If that sounds grandiose, great — Narkopop was a giant piece of music, tall as sequoia and unapologetically huge in scope. And yet it was Voigt’s personal touch for turning his few ingredients into an entire world that stuck when the record ended — the wisps of fog-synth and floor tom, masterful in their ability to subtly play the human senses. The cap on a now 20-year experiment in opening ambience to its widest point, one hopes this is, for Voigt, just one of many trips back to the forest. –Dylan Pasture --- 17 SZA CTRL [Top Dawg] [WATCH · WATCH] While Taylor stumbles through her deferred quarter-life crisis and Vagabon’s Laetitia Tamko stakes her claim in the socioeconomically monopolized realm of indie rock, Solána Rowe, d/b/a SZA, forged a middle ground between the two artists on CTRL. Her debut long-player after a string of EPs, CTRL channeled Swift’s narcissistic empowerment and tempered it with Tamko’s outspoken insecurity and tacit gender politics. Oscillating between off-the-cuff lyricism and carefully deliberated melodies, SZA located personal trepidation in the album’s stream-of-consciousness musings and discovered affirmation in its mantra-hooks. When she sang “Leave me lonely for prettier women/ You know I need too much attention for shit like that” on the blank-verse confessional “Supermodel,” it was a supplication to be proven wrong. And on the would-be capstone single “Drew Barrymore,” she asked confidently, knowingly, “Am I warm enough for you outside, baby? Is it warm enough for you inside me?” Rowe’s mother graced CTRL’s interstices with soundbites of maternal wisdom and exhortation, the most pertinent of which inaugurated the album: “That is my greatest fear: that if I lost control or did not have control, things would just be… fatal.” –Sean Hannah --- 16 DJ Escrow Universal Soulja Vol. 1 [Self-Released] [ http://j.mp/2Bw9CuU

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