#there’s just something about those kinds of sonic youtubers that makes me want to throw drywall at them

[0vergrowngraveyard]

the way i’m so ready to defend anything whenever i see a video that’s like “[sonic game/show/literally anything] is BAD” . there’s just a need to disagree with those kinds of youtubers i feel it in my bones

[opashoo]

staring so kindly at your sluglang post,, as someone working on a language as well this looks fantastic (and is also. super organized compared to mine BHAHAH) Any tips for putting together a language? Like resources on how to go about it, or notes? /genq

You are staring kindly... (thank you)

As for tips... Wikipedia is actually one of my biggest, most useful tools, because I love to read articles about grammatical concepts, and they will usually have a varaiety of examples of use if you can figure out how to parse the academic language. There are some core ideas that pop up all over the place crosslinguistically, like case marking or converbs, and you can get a lot from learning how other languages might parse the same idea, both how they handle the idea grammatically and what kind of metaphorical language might be involved; like how in Scottish Gaelic, to say you have something, you say it's 'at' you, or how it doesn't have an exact equivalent of English's infinitive, or how Mongolian has so many word endings that convey meaning, and a bunch of them are literally endings stacked on top of other endings.

There's also really good conlang youtubers, like David Peterson, the one who made Dothraki and other pop media conlangs, Artifexian, Biblaridion. They have videos on both interesting grammatical concepts that don't exist in english AND how to integrate them into conlangs. Davide Peterson especially has interesting videos on things like sound changes, vowel harmony, phonological concepts that can really help shape your language and bring a degree of naturalism if that's what you're looking for.

Etymology can be extremely informative though, and really help you to understand exactly how creative people have gotten with language over the past thousands of years. Etymonline is a great website for that. Did you know that the word "next" was originally literally "nearest"? Or that that the suffix "be-" was originally "by", so words like "before" actually meant "by the fore", and very often these meanings are metaphorically extended to the way we use them today. It's great for helping to develop very important words that can be structural to your language, so that you're not just trying to raw make up a new word with no basis every time.

Aside from that, there's no single source I go to for making conlangs. Everything is on a case by case basis. Something that has been really helpful for me is constantly writing example sentences and finding things to write about, because similar to translating existing texts, it forces me to reckon with the way my conlang works, figure out how to convey certain ideas (or whether or not the language can convey the idea at all).

Usually I'll have a few languages that I keep in mind for inspiration for any given project and if I'm stumped or need an idea, I'll actually look up learning resources for those languages. My slugcat language has had me looking up a lot of "How to say..." in Korean, Arabic, Japanese Filipino, a little bit of Indonesian? Some Russian for verb stuff. Once I find resources, I spend a bit of time dissecting how it works in those languages and figure out how that can fit in the existing framework of my own project, or if it's something I'd even want in the project at all.

Once I have an idea, I'll just start iterating on it, usually on paper, basically brainstorming how the sentence structure and sounds might work until I find something that is both sonically satisfying and logically sound within the existing framework. If I'm feeling extra spicy, I might try to consider how the culture and priorities of the speakers might shape the development of the language. The important thing while doing this is, just like brainstorming, to be unafraid to keep throwing ideas onto the page no matter how unviable or nonsensical it may seem in your head. You NEED to experiment and find what doesn't work or else your brain will be too clogged to find out what does. Exercising your pen will help you get into the mindset of someone using the language (because you are), it'll help you form connections to other parts of the language you've already developed, and once you've developed enough, the language will almost start writing itself.

I've actually had some really interesting interactions happen my scuglang between the archaic system of suffixes, the position word system, and the triconsonantal root system, which actually gave rise to an entire system of metaphorical extension, letting speakers use phrases like "at a crossing of" or "at a leaving of" to mean across or away and also talk about concurrent events like "He talked while eating noodles" (He, at an eating of noodles, talked).

Anyway, I know I got kind of scattered but these are some of the big parts of how I approach conlanging! If I have questions or needs, I look to other languages, find learning resources, apply it, and then ask more questions. Spend time with your language and get familiar with it. There's the time I read "Ergativity" by Robert Dixon, but reading literal textbooks is not a requirement for conlanging. You just need to chip away at it and keep asking question.

Here's some photos of my own conlanging notes so you can see how serious I am when I say iterating and brainstorming are extremely helpful. You need to be throwing shit on the paper. I will handwrite three pages just to contradict myself on the next because those three pages were important for forming the final idea.

[soundsof71]

FIVE ALBUMS YOU NEED IN YOUR LIFE RIGHT NOW!!!

aka, My Top 5 of 2020, but I didn’t want to seem too retro!

Yep, I have a classic rock blog. Yep, I think that the best rock and roll in history is being made RIGHT NOW. And yep, ALL of it is being made by women. 

(Shown at top, Nova Twins by Ant Adams [x] and The Tissues by Michael Espleta [x]. I was planning to make a collage of all my faves in concert, but  not all of them were able to play in 2020. Both of these photos are pre-pandemic.)

There’s been quite a bit of movement on this list, and all five of these have spent some time at Number 1 as the year has done (gestures broadly) All This™. Anyone looking for rock and roll is going to dig any of these. 

Rocking out is just the start of it, though. Wrestling with my bipolarity and schizophrenia is tough on a good day, and there haven’t been too many of those lately. The plague has also taken its toll around me, with two family members dead and a third who’s doing better, but will likely never be all the way back. (Mask up, kids!)

I’ve written plenty about how deeply Taylor Swift and Phoebe Bridgers have moved me this year (and will do so again), but in those rare stretches where I’ve had enough spare energy to listen to music at all these days, I’ve mostly been looking for more than beautiful music. Heavy times need heavy lifting, and I find that in heavy music. 

The five albums here have all helped carry me, pointing the way toward light.

1) BULLY, SUGAREGG

Alicia Bognanno is a force of nature as a guitarist, vocalist, composer, and producer/engineer. (While working on her degree in audio engineering at MTSU, she interned with Steve Albini, who remains both a fan and an admirer). A Nashville transplant from Minnesota, she’s still a natural fit in her home on Sub Pop: as heavy as Soundgarden, as hooky as Sleater-Kinney. 

I was blown away hearing her searing honesty while working through her discoveries of her bisexuality and bipolarity (double bi!), and her triumphant roar lifts me out of my seat every time I listen.

“She sings the hell out of [these songs], her voice fraying to the point of combustion every time she launches to the top of her range. This is phenomenal music for converting anger and anxiety into unbound joy.” ~Stereogum, Album of the Week

Also, check this fantastic interview with Alicia in the New York Times talking about what she’s gone through to get here. 

TURN IT UP!

2) GANSER, LOOK AT THAT SKY

Ganser syndrome is a rare dissociative disorder characterized by nonsensical or wrong answers to questions and other dissociative symptoms such as fugue, amnesia or conversion disorder, often with visual pseudohallucinations and a decreased state of consciousness. ~Wikipedia #it me

‘Just Look At That Sky’ doesn’t presume to offer solutions; it’s an honest document of what it feels like to wade through anxiety, day by day, not a survival guide or handbook of answers none of us actually have. Whether or not you pay attention to this, Ganser are simply one of the most invigorating, exciting new bands. ~Clashmusic

I saw one very positive review compare Ganser to a cross between Fugazi and Sonic Youth, but I think they hit much, much harder than either of those. And as you can surely guess, I also deeply relate to their themes of mental illness and dissociation while trying to make it through All This™. But my god, are they TIGHT. This is a BAND.

Ganser has two fantastic lead vocalists, and on “Bad Form”, bassist/vocalist Alicia Gaines wrote the song for the voice of keyboardist/vocalist Nadia Garofolo. Alicia also wrote a FANTASTIC essay on the strains that making an album during a pandemic puts on the mental health of the entire band at talkhouse: “Writing, recording, reaching out, balancing relationships outside and within the band, I found (and still find) myself under-rested and agitated to no particular end. More than not doing enough, I was not enough.” 

(If you can’t relate to that, I can’t relate to you, tbh.)

This video also does a fantastic job of showing dissociation. TURN IT UP!

3) THE TISSUES, BLUE FILM

“Blue Film” is a ten-song shot of dagger-twisting electro-(s)punk. It’s completely addictive from the very first listen. The tour de force is “Rear Window”, an art-punk masterpiece of slashing guitars and mad caterwauling. Copious doses of jaunty poetics and social commentary reward the earlooker patient enough to untangle Kristine Nevrose’s hysterical meowing about intergalactic salt shakers and hysterectomies, but I’m too emotionally invested to look under the hood.” ~ Sputnik Music

“Rear Window” is in fact my most-played 2020 track. TURN IT UP!

4) GUM COUNTRY, SOMEWHERE

It’s not all heavy! But even when I’m looking for something light and hooky, I need a bite, and Gum Country has done it with the kind of swirly, feeedback-laden wall of sound that Lush or Yo La Tengo would make if they lived in LA. (Recent transplants to SoCal from Vancouver, I do think that the sunshine has gone straight to their heads, in the very best way.)

Indie music nerds will know guitarist/composer/singer/front woman Courtney Garvin from The Courtneys, and she really does throw up a glorious wall of sound. I adore this video too! Sweet, swinging, fun -- and yes, the drummer is playing keyboard with one hand while slapping the skins with the other! 

I mentioned earlier that all five of these albums have spent part of the year at #1 on my list -- I think that this one might have spent the longest stretch there. Like all shoegaze, even as hooky as this, the truth of these songs is revealed in VOLUME. TURN IT UP!

5) NOVA TWINS, WHO ARE THE GIRLS?

Now, THIS is heavy! Amy Lee (vocals, guitar) and Georgia South (bass) are fucking LOUD, and insanely intense. A mix of grime, hip-hop, metal, punk, and good old rock and roll, they’re a harder-hitting, more theatrical Prodigy, with a pyre of intensity that recalls the heaviest howls of Rage Against The Machine. Indeed, Nova Twins spent a good bit of 2019 playing heavy metal festivals and toured as openers for Prophets of Rage. (Tom Morello has been a fan and supporter from the beginning.)

As you may have noted in the photo at the top of this post, their musical audacity extends to visuals too: they design their own clothes, hair, and makeup, they art direct their own videos, and more. They impress the hell out of me, and I’ve been a huge fan since hearing their first singles in 2018. I’ll plant a flag and say that Georgia South in particular is the most innovative musician on any instrument in any genre right now, but they’re both absolutely monsters. 

I’m honestly not at all sure that #5 is high enough for this, but I’m absolutely certain that after this video, you’re gonna need to rest for a little. LOL

“Taxi” is the story of two gleefully and creatively violent women shaking up the local crime syndicate as they use a vintage cab for their moving murder scene. This is the movie that Robert Rodriguez wishes he was making with Sin City, if it were combined with Blade Runner and The Matrix. And gangsters. And a snake.

I’m gonna take your crown I’m gonna, I’m gonna bleed you out We demand it by the hour We devour, control, power

I’m gonna burn it down Even the, even the royals bow

So not the same kind of therapeutic work being explored on this rekkid, but you know what? Fucking shit up is therapeutic too! 

Definitely take this full screen, and for the love of fuck, TURN IT UP!

SO. Not done with the best of 2020 yet? I’m sure not! A lot of my favorite songs aren’t on albums (at least not yet), so for an unedited list of everything I’m finding, check out my Spotify list, 2020: Shuffle This List! 268 songs and counting, over 15 hours, and not finished yet. I’m still checking out everyone else’s Best of lists (including yours! Message me links to yours!!!), so will probably be adding to this for most of 2021, too. 

And for more banging tracks by women from 2020, plus a few 2019 gems that I’m still grooving to, check out my more thoroughly curated Spotify playlist Women Bangers: A Tumblr New Classics Jam. (You’ll see a couple of these tracks there!) I’m working on a YouTube playlist and an essay to properly roll that one out. I’m also still tweaking the ending, but the three dozen or so tunes there are definitely bangin’.

Tell me if you hear anything you dig here, and tell me what YOU’VE found! We’re gonna get through this together.

Yr pal, Timmy

[sanstropfremir]

would love to hear ur thoughts re. these street woman fighter's performances and who you would personally vote as the "better dance crew" in how they interpreted each other choreos and the song.

this was for their first elimination round (ep4) and it was interesting to hear from the judges + why they gave the points they did. (i'm not entirely sure if you're watching the show's episodes. they are roughly 2 hours long. so if you would like more context, pls let me know! i wrote brief comments underneath each one as well as the winners [spoilers ahead!]. assuming you are not: for this mission, each crew is paired with another crew and they have to choreograph one of the soloist songs. songs were "split" into two parts: part one [would be one song] and part two [another song]; one crew would choreograph one part and follow the other's crew choreograph for the other part.)

1. boa - eat you up (want choreo) + better (ygx choreo). dance crews: ygx vs want

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gCfK_qWAhM0&ab_channel=MnetTV

winner: ygx. boa gave 151 pts to ygx and 49 pts to want (the biggest gap in points between crews), sharing that although want choreographed eat you up, ygx was more cohesive (pointing to how want wore hats and it was messy). additionally, ygx had better stage presence and was able to capture the camera more. also, because ygx is the only crew to have a b-girl and use it in their routine, the judges applauded want for doing the best they can.

2. cl - doctor pepper (wayb) + hello bitches (prowdmon). dance crews: prowdmon vs wayb

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GEEpZ9SrvaE&ab_channel=MnetTV

winner: prowdmon. judges shared that doctor pepper's routine is a trademark of wayb and that they should have been the standout. however, they felt like prowdmon did it better.

3. hyuna - crazy (4minute) (coca n butter) + i'm not cool (hook) + lip and hip (hook). dance crews: hook vs coca n butter

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e1ikpPKEA30&ab_channel=MnetTV

winner: hook. the two dance crews are VERY different in terms of style. coca n butter is described to be more hip-hop while hook is definitely more reflective of the current/newer trends. (when hook was first introduced in the show, they were known as the crew who was famous only for tiktok dances.) the judges shared that hook was more fun and interesting, given their stylistic choice of wearing the pink wigs. whereas it seemed for coca n butter, they felt like something was lacking (they showed something but it didn't feel they did.)

4. jessi - what type of xx (lachica) + nununa (holybang) + gucci (holybang). dance crews: holybang vs lachica

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vtZzI11oyqc&ab_channel=MnetTV

winner: lachica. (this was the only battle where both crews came in v close pts. whereas for the other crews, there were huge point-gaps.) judges had a hard time choosing, sharing that for lachica they were more detail-oriented while holybang had better teamwork.

-

imo, i agree with the judges' choices. though i would have to say i think wayb did their routine (doctor pepper) better than prowdmon. they stood out to me then, but when it came to the second part (hello bitches), prowdmon was better. i loved lachica's performance - it was v clean + reminded me of something a kpop group would do (which like, the crew largely works with kpop acts like chungha, boa's better, etc. so it makes sense).

-

this was LONG. thank u if u do read it and post! i miss the kingdom "era" when u would post weekly reviews. the two are v different but this new mnet competition show is the only one i'm invested in. i'm not sure if it's big internationally? i know it is v popular in korea right now. while i've only seen i-fans talk about the show as it relates to chaeyeon (want) because she's an idol. - swf (streetwomanfighter) anon :]

omg this is so long and well organized, forget me writing reviews anon you should do it!! i'm not currently watching the full episodes but i've been catching the few clips that pop up in my youtube recommended occasionally, so i definitely don't have all the context but i'll take a crack at it!

ok so my assumption/from what i can tell, they have a bit of leeway to alter the competing group's choreo as needed to better suit numbers and formations. i also went and found the individual versions of these because why did they make them so small on the split screen, don't they know i'm old and wear glasses. also: MNET FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THAT IS HOLY STOP MOVING THE FUCKING CAMERA. WE DO NOT NEED SCROLLING VERTICAL BOOM SHOTS OF THIS. just keep the same lens at eye level it's really not that hard. this is like, one of the worst possible ways to shoot dance it is SO annoying. ok i'm done bitching about that let's go.

1. boa - ygx vs want i agree with the big point gap on this one, and i think want made a couple of choices that were not cohesive enough, and obviously they also got set up to fail by ygx. actually i think both groups made choices that were not particularly good, but ygx had more of the skills to back up what they were doing than want did. breaking is very difficult and requires a lot of upper body strength and a higher centre of gravity, which are two physical traits that are less common in women. personally i wouldn't have tried to break to better because although boa songs do have more of a beat than other idol music, it's still not at all the right type of music for breaking. it's gotta be fast, breakers rely on speed, because it's all about momentum; they're literally throwing themselves around the stage. here's the final from battle pro 2019 for example. the music is basically beats only; heavily lyric based music, like idol music, is bad for battling in general because there isn't a lot of consistency. i have more to say about this but i'm getting off track. basically by choosing to handicap the other team (because they don't have a bgirl at all) they shot their own bgirl in the foot because the song is too slow to properly show off her skills. i applaud want for making bold choices, like the hatwork and attempting the breaking, but ultimately when combined with their styling the performance looks disjointed. also they have some formation cohesion issues that make it look a bit like they'e struggling to keep up, even with their own choreo.

2. cl - prowdmon vs wayb i agree with the judges, i think prowdmon bodied the wayb choreo. i actually thought that was their choreo at first. they have the best presence that i've seen of all the groups and the performative "hard bitch" attitude fit in with their genre setting. wayb had several mistakes and synchronization issues that in my opinion made them look sloppy in comparision to prowdmon, who were sharper and had two more people to put into formations. 3. hyuna - hook vs coca n butter ok personally i don't like either of these choreos, but i'm agreeing with the judges here, i think hook's was the mildly more engaging. i can tell that they're very young and do mostly short form tiktok content because i see a lot of eye catching moves, but i don't see a lot of strong connective tissue between those moves. they have good ideas but they also really struggle with putting people into formation and balancing it out well. it doesn't help that they're a seven member crew going up against a four member one, so they have three extra people to figure out what to do with. there's a lot of empty space where there are members waiting in position for a group formation. it also doesn't help at all that they (mnet) appear to just be rawdogging the songs together without any kind of mixing, which is a huge detriment to groups that have to choreograph for two in their section. i'm not cool and lip and hip have two totally different feels and kudos to hook for at least trying to get them to at least visually be cohesive when mnet is go girl giving us nothing sonically. coca n butter has much more of an old school hip hop style, so putting these two up against each other was (probably a random lot draw) an interesting choice. personally i would have been more interested to see hook against want with the boa tracks and ygx against coca n butter with the hyuna tracks. however, i think the reason why coca n butter's stage felt like it was lacking is because they tried to emulate hyuna, without having the stage presence or the weirdness of hyuna. it feels like they're trying too hard and there isn't really any personal character in the piece, versus with hook, who embodied hyuna's weirdness a little more authentically and took a completely different direction. 4. jessi - lachica vs holybang lachica took this one easily, although their formations were a bit wonky for nununana, they covered it fairly well and i think they managed the best transition between songs (between nununana and gucci). they were sharper with good stage pictures and had a good gimmick with the double fringe on the gloves and hats. holy bang had some issues fitting their extra person into the what type of x choreo, but they did well with their own choreo. however, like with coca n butter and hook, because lachica took a new visual spin, this felt too derivative of jessi, so it wasn't that interesting for me to watch. i do think they are one of the groups on the stronger end of skills and presence. --- as far as visually what performances i liked the best, since would this even be a writeup by me if i didn't talk about design, here's a quick breakdown:

prowdmon - got some rudimentary setpieces, got a theme, got some fun variations on a uniform look; excellent for what i assume was limited budget capacity and also it's a dance crew show.

lachica - great continuity of effect in costuming with the fringe, and using the gloves as a mouth/lip effect was one of the most interesting choices of these routines.

hook - the pink wigs and the black latex on the checkered floor was a nice gimmick that was a bit of a nod to hyuna's weird without being too derivative. i'm not expecting a whole lot because these are dance crews but i think this was a decent amount of styling effort.

want - they made a bold choice with the hats and even though it didn't quite pay off for them i still respect it.

coca n butter/ygx/holybang/wayb - ygx and wayb did basic hip hop type styling and while it's absolutely fine, it's just boring. holybang went for a directly inspired jessi look, and although yes bodysuits, overall it wasn't that interesting either. coca n butter get props for doing a costume change and actually incorporating that into the choreo but it feels too much like it's trying to be hyuna weird with the caution tape strapped over their tits and asses.

---

as a final note/question to you, my lovely invested swf anon, what's the format of the show? are there stages like this every episode to review? if these were from the fourth one only, is there anything worth me reviewing in the first three? i'm not particularly interested in the aggressive competitive nature of the show and editing so i don't particularly want to watch the full two hour episodes, but if you think it's worthwhile for me to review stuff then i will. otherwise if there's a set structure (like with kingdom) i can seek out the stages specifically and review them if i know what i'm looking for.

[actualbird]

nobody asked but here i analysed polygon’s “unraveled” and bon appetit test kitchen’s “gourmet makes” and i think they are similar and use three key story elements to their success | a 1.9k word long analysis by an unhinged creative writing fresh grad trying desperately to use their degree to connect two dots

If you asked me who my favorite internet celebrities are, I would not hesitate for a second to answer. Brian David Gilbert from Polygon and Claire Saffitz from Bon Appetit Test Kitchen. They’re awesome! They both host popular YouTube webshows about video games and cooking respectively, two things I am terrible at and don’t do very often. And yet I am enraptured by every episode of their shows. Why? How?

My thesis is this: Polygon’s “Unraveled” and Bon Appetit Test Kitchen’s “Gourmet Makes”, while wildly different shows on many levels, are extremely similar in how they use three key story elements very, very, well.

These three story elements are 1) Plot, 2) Character, and 3) FAWWIEOT (it’s an acronym, I’ll explain it later, I promise)

Let me start with the first and most basic story element these two shows wield amazingly: Plot.

Plot is, in simplest terms, what “happens” in a thing. This is what you’ll find on a movie’s Wikipedia page summary, the details of what went down, the events that took place, the things that occurred. There are many different types of plots because there are many different types of stories, but one of the most basic kinds of plots is very clearly illustrated by something called Freytag’s Pyramid.

Freytag’s Pyramid is a very simple plot that is moved forward by a non-negotiable in many, many stories: conflict. All is well, the line is straight, then a challenge arises and things start to escalate. At the climax, a decision or a group of decisions are made that leads to a de-escalation of the conflict, bringing things down until we are back at a flat line and the conflict has been resolved.

Every single episode of Gourmet Makes can be plotted onto Freytag’s Pyramid

Nearly every single episode of Unraveled can be plotted onto Freytag’s Pyramid too (with the exception of some, like a number of the categorization episodes, the Kojima name generator)

I know what you’re thinking. “So what if Gourmet Makes and Unraveled fit on some funky pyramid? What does that mean?” Well, dear reader, it reveals to us just one of three reasons why these shows are so enjoyable.

Freytag’s Pyramid is basic as shit, and yet it is one of the first plot structures taught to fictionists because people, up to this day, like it. Why? Because Freytag’s Pyramid fulfills two very important desires that we, as humans, love. 1) The desire for there to be a problem and 2) the desire for that problem to be resolved. It scratches our eternal itch to want to watch shit go down but doesn’t leave us up on a cliffhanger, it gives us our catharsis.

Gourmet Makes gives you the entertainment of watching Claire struggle with her task. Then Gourmet Makes shows you Claire slowly and surely rising above the challenge (notable in literally every episode of Gourmet Makes). Unraveled makes you watch BDG work himself up into a frenzy trying to do something stupid, but then Unraveled shows the payoff of...of watching BDG do something stupid, but this time towards some kind of resolution (very notable in the latest Unraveled “How to increase your stamina with terrible video game tactics”).

It is clear to me that Gourmet Makes and Unraveled both use plot in a way that gives viewers satisfaction. But what keeps them coming back for more?

Well that leads us to the second story element: Character.

People love Claire Saffitz and BDG.

Don’t believe me? Look through the tags of literally any gifset of either of them. Here, I did it for you. Here’s some tags for Claire:

And here’s some tags for BDG:

It’s pretty obvious to see that these two are well loved, but why? It’s not just because they’re both good looking, it’s because Claire Saffitz and BDG, with how they are presented in their shows, are good characters.

Claire Saffitz in Gourmet Makes isn’t scripted. She brings her own human frustration, determined hard work, and joyous glee to the show and it makes watching the show all the more enjoyable. BDG in Unraveled, however, is scripted, but he brings to the table his chaotic performance and ‘off the shits’ lecturer energy that brings the viewers in. Regardless of their differences, Gourmet Makes and Unraveled are similar when it comes to character because of one thing: they actually have characters.

What am I talking about? Well, for a period of time on the internet, people in the cooking media sphere and the video game media sphere settled for video content that was divorced from who was presenting the information. Videos like the ones from Tasty where everything was filmed top down and you only saw two hands perfectly putting ingredients into a bowl. Videos like the myriad of video game walkthroughs or video essays that are presented only by a disembodied voice who also seems allergic to actually having fun. This is content that hinges on the fact that people like seeing cooking or video games and that the presenter will mostly just be a background thing.

Bon Appetit Test Kitchen and Polygon both did not want to succumb to this style of presenting information. They both made the decision to bring their presenters into their video content, highlighting their respective presenters’ personalities, quirks, and styles. This is evident in all of Bon Appetit Test Kitchen and Polygon’s video content, not just Gourmet Makes and Unraveled. Do I watch Bon Appetit's show It's Alive because I want to actually make foccacia? No, it's because I love how Brad Leone  mispronounces words and makes me laugh. Did I watch "Fixing Anthem’s boring mech’s with ballsy design" because I actually give a shit about video games? No it's because I love how Pat Gill jokes about fake testicles and also I think he's hot.

The fact that there are actually characters for us on screen to see, makes Gourmet Makes and Unraveled good shit. We’ve got a plot with clear conflict, but that means nothing if there are no personas for us to root for. Gourmet Makes and Unraveled gives us these personas. They give us Claire Saffitz whom we want so desperately to see smile and succeed. They give us Brian David Gilbert whom we want so desperately to see go a little bit crazy. They give us people to connect to, and that often bridges the gap to viewers who honestly don’t give a shit about cooking or video games. Viewers like me who just keep coming back to Gourmet Makes and Unraveled because of the fact that these are characters I care about, these are characters who I want to see smile after finally nailing the recipe or slowly take off their suit as they tell me shit about Zelda I don’t understand.

Gourmet Makes and Unraveled utilize plot in a way that makes these webshows satisfying, and they use character in a way that makes these webshows accessible and keeps people invested.

But they go further.

This brings us to our last story element, not exactly a common or rudimentary one, but an important one nonetheless: Fucking Around With What Is Expected Of Them.

(I know there’s probably a legitimate literary term for this, but sue me, quarantine has kept me stuck in my house since March, so I may have forgotten the exact words I learned in class. FAWWIEOT will have to suffice.)

The gist of FAWWIEOT is that stories have been around for fuckin ever, and because of that, there are clear patterns and tropes that stories follow. FAWWIEOT is the recognition of those patterns and tropes, using them, but finding a different outcome or flair to make themselves special, to make themselves stick out. Kinda like when you’ve got a fic on AO3 tagged with ‘friends to lovers’ but also tagged with like, I dunno, something completely random like ‘character is also a dragon’. Use the tropes, but do something different. Give the audience something they already know, then throw in something new to make them remember your content specifically.

Gourmet Makes and Unraveled FAWWIEOT (I’m using the acronym like a verb now, this is my post, I’m allowed to) very purposefully using an important technique: Flaws.

The standard trope of a cooking show is the chef easily talking to the camera as they perfectly put the ingredients together. All the food comes out perfect on the first try and everything is heavenly and wonderful. Classic cooking shows like Barefoot Contessa (hosted by Ina Garten) and Everyday Italian (hosted by Giada de Laurentiis) followed this pattern, and it made for good television.

But who fucking watches television these days? Everything is online now, and the internet is vicious. If you aren’t interesting, the internet will throw you out to the gutter. So how did Gourmet Makes set themselves apart?

By showing you that things aren’t perfect after all. Gourmet Makes shows you every trial that Claire tries, they show you her successes, but also her failures. They show you when she gets tired and hopeless, they show you when she bounces back and tries again. Gourmet Makes made a cooking show that was flawed, and people loved it.

And what about Unraveled? The design of Unraveled, from BDG’s suit and mug to his presenting style, key us in to the fact that we are watching some sort of lecture. Some kind of educational performance. Personally, this makes me think that Unraveled is FAWWIEOT-ing academia and basically any other media where an “expert” talks at you.

The standard pattern of experts talking to you are basically like TedTalks. You have somebody very well versed in the topic trying to explain to you something, showing you their hypothesis, their process, and their findings.

Unraveled FAWWIEOTs expertise by making BDG research the most crazy shit like OSHA regulations or the Geneva Convention, make the wildest hypotheses like ‘Monster Energy in the morning will be a good idea’ or ‘Sonic is blasphemous’, and then, ultimately, completely unravel himself. The expert in Unraveled isn’t an all knowing being who is always right, he is flawed (and loses his marbles, more often than not.) And we love it.

FAWWIEOT-ing is key because of how it gives us a pattern we know, and then does something new. Novelty is important on the internet, and Gourmet Makes and Unraveled have made a name for themselves on the unique way they Fucked Around With What Was Expected Of Them.

Gourmet Makes and Unraveled are two of my favorite webshows on the internet as of now, and there are many reasons why, many reasons I didn’t include in this post. What I wanted to do here is to highlight how these shows use story elements to be good content because at the core of these videos, even if they aren’t literary fiction, they are good stories. Good stories with a plot that satisfies us, with characters we can see and love, with new twists that keep us on the edge of our seats.

Good stories make for good content, and Bon Appetit Test Kitchen and Polygon have me as a subscriber for as long as they continue on this road.

Thanks for reading!

(Read my other Polygon-adjacent analysis essays at actualbird.tumblr.com/tagged/nobody-asked-but

If you have any suggestions or ideas for more Polygon-adjacent analysis essays I can write, send me an ask!)

[bltngames]

The Balan Wonderworld demo came out yesterday. If you haven’t been keeping up with this, it’s a game by Yuji Naka and Naoto Ohshima, two of the original creators of Sonic the Hedgehog. A lot of that original team has gone on to do solo work outside of Sega, but this is the first time two former members of Sonic Team have gotten back together to make a new game.

If the demo is anything to go by, Balan Wonderworld (which I keep trying to type as “Balan Wonderland,” because it has a much nicer rhythm to it) is a game that lives deep in the shadow of NiGHTS into Dreams and Sonic the Hedgehog. It is very clearly trying to be an “Old School Sonic Team” experience, which it... sort of succeeds at, for better and worse.

This feels like a game they ripped straight out of 1995, warts and all, and remastered it with modern-ish graphics. I say “modern-ish” because in broad strokes, I think Balan looks pretty good. The character designs are charming, the level themes are interesting, but if you really stop and look at the game, it’s honestly pretty ugly, with simple lighting, limited detail and blurry textures.

One gets the impression maybe that’s because Balan is on everything -- Playstation, Xbox, PC, and even Switch. The gross texture work could be to squeeze the game down for Nintendo’s handheld, but apparently it runs extremely poorly there. On the PS4 Pro, it sticks pretty closely to 60fps, though there are occasionally hiccups here and there. Nothing worth fretting over, honestly.

But how does it play?

This is where the shadow of Sonic the Hedgehog looms large. Balan is designed to be simplistic to a fault: You get one button to control your character. Or, more specifically, every button on your controller will do the same thing (for the most part). This is right out of the Sonic handbook, as that game was also designed to be operable with only one button, as well.

Now, what your one button does can change. Scattered around levels are different costumes for your character to put on, and each costume has its own unique ability. The full version of Balan promises 80 different costumes, and there’s probably half a dozen in the demo. Each one serves a unique purpose, and some of them don’t even have the ability to jump. Which is fine, mostly, because you can carry a stock of three costumes with you that you can swap between sort of like the team mechanics in Sonic Heroes. Once you finish a level, those costumes get added to your dressing room, allowing you to customize a loadout of costumes at any checkpoint.

On paper, that much sounds fine. But this is where things start getting weird.

Costumes are not freely available to pick up. The jewels that hold costumes are locked with a key. This creates an obvious gameplay loop: find key, unlock costume, use costume to solve puzzle, right? Right.

Except that, at least in the demo, most keys are only a few feet away from any given costume jewel. On top of that, keys respawn. Crack open a costume jewel, grab the costume, but hang out for a little while and eventually the key will reappear. In doing this, you can stock up on keys early on in a level, smoothing out the process of acquiring new costumes as you go. I’m not sure why Balan does this. The time between key respawns is a few seconds too many -- just enough that it starts to feel tedious. But, as far as I can tell, there is no penalty for farming up a bunch of keys from the first key spawn point, either. It’s the worst of both worlds. If it was trying to be convenient, keys would spawn more quickly, but if it was trying to plan puzzles around acquiring keys, you can completely side step that by just waiting it out and hoarding keys early on.

You’ll not only want to hoard keys, but hoard costumes, as well. If you’re unlucky enough to take damage or even die while wearing a costume, it’s gone. You can build up stocks of costumes so you’ll always have spares to pull out of the dressing room, but that requires you to specifically go out of your way to get duplicates and bank them. If you don’t, you might find yourself at a puzzle that requires a specific costume that you simply don’t have anymore. When that happens, your only recourse is to backtrack in the hopes of finding a crystal that contains the costume you need, and characters in Balan aren’t exactly fast moving.

The chances of you losing a costume seem pretty low, admittedly. Balan Wonderworld doesn’t really seem like it’s aiming for anything resembling difficulty. Enemies exist, but only in very small numbers, and they’re easily dispatched. Most of the game is more about exploring the dream-like environments and playing around with the various costume abilities in order to solve basic puzzles.

You aren’t working against a clock, there isn’t a scoring system, and you usually aren’t being graded on your performance. Talking it over with some others, the vibe is that this could be a good game for young children. It requires little in terms of controller dexterity and is generous in every sense of the word.

The primary complaint against that, I guess, is that Balan Wonderworld is a weird game. Like, “Elsa and Spider-man Finger Family Youtube Video” weird. Every level is packed full of gently dancing ghosts that phase out of existence once you get too close to them. They’re all the creatures your costumes are based on, but they don’t exist as NPCs in the world for you to touch and interact with. Like I said, they’re ghosts, and they disappear the moment you get within a few feet. Those same ghosts will suddenly materialize when you touch certain checkpoints, throwing you something of parade. They interrupt the level music and everything just to play their own special celebration song. Move more than a few feet and they will fade back out of existence again, taking their special parade song with them, never to be seen for the rest of the stage.

It lends a strangely “uncanny” feeling to the game. I think the dancing characters are meant to add a sense of carefree fun, but they look like people wearing mascot suits, doing the same basic scripted routine over, and over, and over, for eternity. They don’t look like they’re having fun, they don’t appear to be choreographed to the stage’s music, and yet there they are, eternally dancing the days away. It’s kind of eerie. They were performing before you got here, and they'll keep performing after you leave.

The demo pits you against a single boss, which is notable for being someone who has the same powers you do, but combined and amped up. Seeing the same costume motifs come up in the boss as they draw from the same abilities that you have is actually a really fun idea, and the game rewards you for getting creative and swapping between costumes when you deal damage.

Balan Wonderland is a very odd game, and I’m not sure what to make of it. It took me a while to start wrapping my head around its aesthetic and vibes. It contains shades of something like Super Mario Odyssey to be sure, but it feels like it’s trying to elevate itself above that. Again, it’s a game living deep in the shadow of NiGHTS and Sonic, and in particular, it feels like it borrows NiGHTS’ penchant for putting artistic expression at the top ladder rung. Balan often feels like a very inscrutable sort of game, but in a way that seems to be reaching for some kind of greater meaning beyond simply gameplay. Everything in Balan feels like it might be conveying a message of some sort, even if it’s not immediately apparent. Its ideas do not come from a vacuum.

But here’s the deal: even though a lot of people couldn’t grok NiGHTS into Dreams, I did. I love that game to death. But with Balan Wonderworld, even I’m often left scratching my head. Despite its dead-simple gameplay, it may be just a little too high concept for its own good.

But at the end of the day, it’s not a game I hate. It’s strange, and charming, and even if it feels sort of impenetrably "artistic," at least that makes it interesting. The simple gameplay works its magic, making it an easy game to drop in to even if you don’t necessarily understand what you’re looking at.

Like, what’s the deal with the “Isle o’ Tims” between levels? It kind of has the vibe of a chao garden from Sonic Adventure, but the individual “tims” creatures don’t seem to have statistics or anything like that. You feed them so they crank a wheel, which builds a tower that helps them crank the wheel better. It turns in to a bizarre sort of perpetual motion machine. To what end? I don’t know. And what exactly is Balan himself, anyway? Some of his visual cues call to mind character designs for NiGHTS, but he appears to be a different sort of creature altogether. There’s a rather lengthy intro FMV, as you can no doubt see from the Youtube embed, but it’s more about swirling colors and hyperactive animation than conveying what’s going on or who Balan is. How much of this is even really happening, and how much of it is purely metaphysical? It’s very unclear.

I’ll be interested in seeing how the full version of Balan Wonderworld fares. I get the distinct impression that this will be another NiGHTS -- a game beloved by a core audience of hardcore fans, but shunned for being “too weird” by the populace at large.

I’m not quite sure which group I belong to yet.

[cxhnow]

Growing Up With Chloe x Halle

The Bailey sisters on why they didn’t switch up overnight — the world just caught up to their speed.

On their 2018 debut album The Kids Are Alright and on Freeform’s Grown-ish, a 19- and 17-year-old Chloe and Halle Bailey sang “Watch out world, I’m grown now.” So you’ll have to forgive them for acting out a little on their new sophomore record — they warned us. While Ungodly Hour might sound like a pivot to the grown ‘n’ sexy side of R&B similar to plenty of their peers, trading TKAA’s colorful doodles for chrome angel wings and skin-tight latex, they’re really just living the same truths they preached up and down TKAA: Own your insecurities, work hard, don’t get distracted by drama. “When we created this album, we said, Okay, we want to show all the different sides and layers of us,” Chloe tells me, sitting side by side with her sister, over Zoom from their family home in Los Angeles. “We don’t just want to show this one side. A lot of people still think we’re teenagers.”

Now 22 and 20, the former child stars are ready to explore the topics they’ve been singing about since they were kids making covers on YouTube, the ones that landed them a record deal with music royalty before they were old enough to vote. The new album calls out former flings, seethes with jealousy, and apologizes when necessary. Lyrics like “It’s four o’clock / you sendin’ me too many pictures of your …” and “No drama, no baby mamas” immediately started dating rumors online, roping in their Grown-ish co-star Diggy Simmons. While most fans are having fun with it, those a little, um, outside of the Baileys’ age demographic are still struggling (try to get through this Breakfast Club questioning without cringing). In case you missed it: They no longer have to change Beyoncé lyrics from “You showed your ass” to “You showed your butt” — on “Do It,” they proudly sing “I’m a bad girl, shake a li’l ass.” Alongside all the perks of growing up, the album makes sure to normalize the struggles, too.

When the coronavirus pandemic sent Halle home to L.A. from The Little Mermaid rehearsals in London, their house (complete with mom, dad, and younger brother, Branson) became their album rollout headquarters. One of the few albums to not be pushed due to the coronavirus, Ungodly Hour was originally planned for June 5, but the deaths of George Floyd in Minnesota, Breonna Taylor in Kentucky, and far too many others across the country, created a moment that Chloe and Halle felt they couldn’t ignore. They pushed the album one week, to June 12, and continued to use their platform to share petitions, funds, and awareness, while also personally signing petitions and making donations. As both an escape and work, they’ve been focusing their energy on the album, diving into elaborate DIY remote performances and mashing up songs, but making sure to leave Sundays for rest. After a busy weekend tearing up the BET Awards and Global Citizen virtual stages, channeling Aaliyah in one performance and going full rock and roll in the other, they’ll be back on Instagram Live this Thursday for Ungodly Hour Tea Time, where they often chill out in Snuggies, try to remember what day of quarantine it is, and update their supporters on their lives.

How has it been, emotionally, to have to sing and dance while all of this turmoil is happening? Halle Bailey: Emotionally, what’s keeping us afloat is music and feeling better through the art. I think that’s why we love music so much because even though we create it and we sing it, we use it as our healer, too. Everything going on really makes you reflect. But we’re young black women, this hasn’t been anything new to us. Our community has known about this for a very long time, and it’s constantly upsetting. But what I’m appreciating about technology and social media is that our voices can’t be silenced anymore. And the things that they used to try to hide, they can’t any longer. We’re seeing these injustices happen over video, and [so is] the rest of the world who’s usually ignorant to the racism that’s been underlying in this community. They’re seeing it and they’re upset as well. So it’s good because change can only happen when we’re all working towards a common goal. I can’t wait to see what comes out of this.

I feel like every time we have one of these moments where everyone is just mourning so publicly in such a communal way, there’s also music that uplifts us. Talk me through deciding to postpone the album.

HB:  During the height of the George Floyd protests, emotionally, we just were not right to release a project. Our little brother and our father — when we see a video of George Floyd getting killed in the street, we think that could be them tomorrow. And we wanted to shine the light on what needs to be seen. That George Floyd video, Breonna Taylor, all of the other brothers and sisters that we have lost to police brutality — that is what needed to be at the forefront and what still needs to be at the forefront.

And when The Kids Are Alright came out that was right around March for Our Lives, the Women’s March was happening. How does this moment compare for you?

Chloe Bailey: Wow, now that I’m thinking about it, this time, it feels a bit more like change is really going to happen. Around The Kids Are Alright, we went to the March for Our Lives and we were around that incredible energy; it was really positive and uplifting because we were all banding together. But for some reason, this time right now … I feel like we have the entire world’s attention. Actual change is going to come out of what’s been happening. So, it feels the same but different, right?

HB: Yeah, I definitely think this one feels more massive. Feels like, Okay, maybe we’re getting somewhere this time. Maybe it won’t just go away a week after all of this is over, you know?

In the early stages of Ungodly Hour, did you go in wanting it to be something that showcased your maturity? Or did that come out as you were going with it?

HB: We absolutely knew that we wanted it to showcase our growth, the evolution of us into young women. Because I feel like The Kids Are Alright was very much us finding ourselves and that project took three years to make. So with that length, you can kind of go through and see like, Oh, wow, they must have been really shifting through and figuring out what’s wrong and what’s right. So, for this project, it was like, Yes, we are here. We are now grown women. I’m 20. My sister’s about to be 22 this week.

CB: Hey!

HB: So we took that and we were just like, Let’s show who we’ve become. And let’s show the side of us that people don’t see whether it’s the naughtier side of us or the insecure side of us, or the part that picks every single thing apart about ourselves out. We wanted to show all the layers of us as young women, once you kind of know who you are, but also you’re still learning.

You’ll never be a finished product.

CB: Never, constantly evolving. And that’s the goal.

There have always been glimpses at your boss-bitch attitudes, hints of it in your music and on Grown-ish. Do you ever get the sense that you’re waiting for the industry and fans to sort of open their eyes and catch up to where you’re at?

CB: I’m not gonna lie, there are some moments. And I remember when we were even creating this album we were putting a certain pressure on ourselves. Because we were thinking, What do we want the world to hear from us? What do we think the world wants us to sound like? What would make people become more receptive to us? I remember we were creating for, like, one to two months in that mind-set, and we were creating some of the worst music we ever have.

HB: Yeah, it was. It was trash.

CB: It was because we weren’t creating from our hearts. We weren’t being honest with ourselves, and as a musician, you gotta be vulnerable and share that true part of yourself or the music isn’t going to be very good. Once we threw that out the window and said, You know what, let’s create a good body of art, the album continued to write itself. But that main lesson for us was never change yourself; the world will catch up to you when it’s ready. I feel like they’re kinda ready now for this project. It’s older and more mature than The Kids Are Alright because we’re older and more mature than who we were when we created that.

In making a more vulnerable album, were you nervous about expanding your image in that way? Was there anything that you debated not including or things that didn’t make the cut?

HB: Wow, so, I will say that our parents kind of had a hard time … well, not a hard time, but just like opening their eyes to the fact that, Okay, these are the topics that we’ve decided to talk about. This is what’s happening. It was really fun for us to watch them. I completely understand how they feel because, you know, we’ve been just little babies to them and now we’re growing and they’re hearing [about] certain things that we’ve been through, or that we just wrote in the music. They have been like, “Oh, okay, so that’s that.”

Fans tweet collabs at you all the time, but what’s your actual approach to choosing who you work with? (Ungodly Hour features just two major collaborations: Swae Lee on “Catch Up” and the title track with Disclosure.)

CB: Definitely we have to be fans of them, number one. Even though we make music, we are such big music fans and music lovers. Two, we have to feel like the person can sonically fit the song. We don’t want to throw just anyone on a song just because they have a big name, which is really cool too. It’s really great to get big features. But it’s so funny because we have a big wish list of who we hear on which songs and some people bite, some people don’t. It’s always fun to see what the end result will be. And I know we’ll start putting out remixes and stuff soon, which will be fun.

HB: It’s very interesting because it’s hard during the creative process. You kind of have to open yourself up to somebody you do not know when you make music; it’s a part of your heart that you’re sharing. So, it’s a very intimate thing to do with a stranger. Which is why with my sister it’s really easy. But when it comes to us working with new people, we gravitate towards the ones who have very open spirits and souls, nice people.

Chloe, would you ever produce for other artists?

CB: Absolutely, 1,000 percent. That would be so much fun. I would be getting out of my comfort zone, because the only person who I can comfortably produce in front of is my sister and blast it loud over the speakers. Whenever we have other sessions with other producers and we’re collaborating, I’ll put my headphones in, I won’t blast it on the aux with theirs. I have my little computer on my lap because I like using weird sounds and samples and chopping them up in a weird way. Sometimes it’s trial and error, so I don’t want people to hear my mistakes.

HB: She’s amazing and she should just blast it everywhere she goes, okay?

CB: I would definitely love, love, love to do that.

Yes, we want to hear you everywhere! So, when shelter in place started, you guys very flawlessly transitioned to doing these home covers and incredible remote performances. What’s the process of coming up with these concepts, especially the more elaborate ones?

HB: Oh my gosh, it’s really just a bunch of play. When we’re coming up with concepts, our creative director Andrew Makadsi is really amazing at seeing our vision for the songs before we actually perform them live. It’s been really interesting and exciting to have new songs to play with. But as far as the covers, you know, those are easy. We can do those in our sleep; we just love singing other people’s songs.

How long does it take to pull together a remote performance like the Today show one for example?

CB: Our amazing creative director came up with that and it took him a day. He just kept sending us a bunch of references and photo ideas he thought of and we picked the backdrop we wanted. The song arrangement, because we always like to switch it up every time, takes —

HB: Like a day.

CB: It takes us like ten minutes to arrange the songs. But then we took some of the choreography [by Kendra Bracy and Ashanti Ledon] that we learned during the music video shoot, and we added new choreography ourselves for the Today show performance. We were like on the floor and stuff — we did that the night before we filmed it. That took us like 30 minutes because we wanted to make sure the moves weren’t awkward because we’re not choreographers, so we would prop up our iPhone and that would be our little dance-studio mirror.

You guys are really doing it by yourselves in quarantine. So, what’s the tennis court situation? Has that always been there?

HB: Yeah, it has actually, we just haven’t really used it. I mean, we’ve been where we live for about two years now. We never really thought to use it until quarantine happened ‘cause we always go somewhere else to shoot performances. That’s been a beautiful evolution — using what we have. We feel so blessed to just be able to do what we love and also do it somewhere nice.

The tennis court performances have been life-giving.

CB: It’s been so useful, from the at-home photo shoots we have to do and then the performances, like I’m so grateful. We don’t actually know how to play tennis, but there are basketball hoops on each side so our little brother Branson’s usually out there. So, when we do have to do these things, I feel bad because he’s always out there shooting hoops, but he’s like, “Okay, you can have it for two hours …” [x]

[vapormaison]

2019 Best Japanese OST Press/Repress: Elfen Lied by Tiger Lab Records

Like many late millennials with artistic pretensions, I used to have an “Anituber” channel back in the wild west days of youtube. From 2010-2013 — roughly corresponding with my first three years in university — I reviewed DVD releases from ADV, Manga Entertainment, Central Park Media, and Geneon — all the big players in Western anime releases at the time, all dead and gone now with the rise of streaming. Everyone but Funimation — a sad irony and perhaps telling about the nature of the dubbing industry that the studio with a serial rape problem and established casting couch was the only one to survive.

In the interest of maintaining my personal ethics, posterity, and sanity I’ve long since deleted that channel. While there was definitely a “moment” on the platform for a nineteen year-old cokehead film student in front of a MacBook webcam doing his best Slavoj Zizek impression, that moment has long since passed. I’ve long since cooled on “substantive” media critique anyway. The world doesn’t need another Eisenstein-aligned Marxist analysis of Neon Genesis Evangelion — or, a 6-part series on using Lacanian techniques to develop a leftist praxis for Fate/Stay Night. Media exists in the present moment to be a salve for the postmodern hellscape we inhabit together.

As an interesting sidebar, the most popular video on that channel — raking in just north of 10k views over its lifetime from 2011-2015, was a twelve minute video essay on the 1995 anime Elfen Lied, where I asserted that it was the ultimate expression of contemporary Japanese anti-modern rage. While I don’t find myself particularly nostalgic for any of the content on that channel, I’m actually kind of proud of that one in particular.

While most of my analysis was fixated on the visuals, narrative, and recent oeuvre of its mangaka, Lynn Okamoto, and series director, Mamoru Kanbei, I did lay out a framework on why I consider it to be one of the most successful soundtracks ever produced for an anime. I did not heap this praise lightly, as that roughly fifteen year period of 1995-2010 was bookended by the OSTs of Evangelion and K-On! — and certainly proved to be one of the most sonically iconic periods that the medium has ever produced.

it was also one of the first soundtracks that spurred my own history of Japanese OST collection.

And, then, almost a decade later, I found out that Tiger Lab was releasing a vinyl of Elfen Lied.

In spite of this, when I originally the news, I felt a tinge of trepidation. This is not to throw shade at Tiger Lab, however — but at the reputation of previous releases of the Elfen Lied soundtrack in Japan. A quick adventure with google translate across the Japanese net for various Elfen Lied OST roleases — especially on CD — will reveal for you a lot of contempt from Otaku and anime-enthusiast audiophiles for any number of reasons. Most hinge on the quality of the physicals. This is often because Japanese physical media releases of anime soundtracks are often laden with fresh, exceptionally crisp and clean-sounding masters for CDs, and usually exclusive posters and other content geared toward the “collector” nature of many Otaku. This has usually not been the case with Elfen Lied.

A friend of mine in Kanagawa quipped “Sometimes it sounds better on the DVD” in regard to a number of OST releases of soundtracks from anime produced by Studio Arms with CD releases published by VAP. Admittedly, some of it must have been born in resentment, but I’ve always trusted the man’s opinion — as he’s invested a small family fortune into building a shrine of sorts to that studio’s output. He chalks up the poor release quality to the studio’s inability or lack of funds to master the content properly for a CD or HQ digital release, and VAP’s decline in release quality during the early 2000s roughly corresponding to a sale to another Zaibatsu. “Studio Arms made hentai for many years to stay solvent, maybe they could not send a good master to VAP [the publisher]” he told me. While I can’t know if it’s VAP, Arms or another studio handling the CD-master work, a cursory check of their oeuvre seems to confirm confirms that claim of his — but I acknowledge I’m wandering into uncharted waters here.

In spite of all that — I ordered the wax from Tiger Lab and was duly impressed. In lieu of reviewing each track as per my usual review format, in the following section I want to talk about my listening experience from the two formats I own the soundtrack in — the SA/VAP published CD from 2004 and Tiger Lab’s release. Once we finish going into the core differences — and why this vinyl is absolutely worth your purchase over competing physicals — I’ll go into the virtues of the listening experience on the whole.

Part 1: Comparisons of Select Tracks

I suppose the expectation is that I start off by taking about the most iconic recording from the series — the OP, Lilium. In the spirit of defying expectations, I’ll begin with what I consider a better litmus test.

My personal shit-test for a good master and press is how well it can handle a track that is sonically robust and diverse, crossing genre and form — requiring an intensive, sufficiently wide mix and refined master. You don’t get that on every OST album — but Elfen Lied offers one such potential track in particular, and that particular track happens to be my favorite composition on the entire album. Uso Sora, composed by Kayo Konishi and Yukio Kondo is a truly magnificent piece, and it’s used brilliantly in the series — for those familiar, I only need to quote one line: “M-m-mommy…?”.

It begins with lulling piano chords that gradually build in tempo and energy with the addition of percussion, and then it undergoes a full metamorphosis in its last minute or so to become an aggressive, frenetic techno piece with distorted lows and an angry drum kit. Mirroring the evolution of its subject in the show with understated aplomb, and functioning as a robust and enjoyable composition divorced from its source — it really deserve more recognition than it receives, but I do not doubt it will ever step forth from the massive shadow cast from the haunting chorals of Lilium, and the brilliantly directed visual intro that accompanied it.

Needless to say, Tiger Lab more than passed muster here, to the point where I’m almost blown away by just how good it sounds compared to the rest of my Elfen Lied related physicals. I experienced a definite brightness from the vinyl master over my stereo that I don't get from a lot of other Western label releases, like say Milano, which tends to cash in on a Westerner’s preference for warmth.  Tiger Lab deserves credit for this approach, because it genuinely feels like a more authentically “Japanese” sound. In my experience, the Western labels that care the most about the dedicated audiophile adhere to this sonic profile, and Tiger Lab deserves all due credit here.

Finally, I might as well include my thoughts on Lilium. In short, it sounds fantastic. The mix here really brings out the most of the chorals, and provides crisp and clean sounds where you want them most. It’s also one of those tracks where you can just feel the dynamic range before you even hear it. I ended up listening to these on my Cambridges, and I’ve got to say that’s there’s something in the way they treat this particular profile of song — strongly vocal dominated, extremely muted piano, and supporting string inhabiting the negative space — absolutely incredibly. It put the KEFs to shame. I’ve always asserted that you’ve got to pair certain songs with certain speaker pairs. I’ve never been a huge devotional music guy, and I’m not entirely sure that the Cambridge or KEFs provide ideal profiles for the track. That said, Lilium sounds great anyway.

But I can envision these on a pair of high end Yamahas, or a pair of vintage Blaupunkt bookshelves sounding as stone-cold killer as Lucy when Kouta’s threatened.

I sent a rip to my friend Hiroshi, the StudioArms Shrine man, who immediately snapped up a copy after listening. I also learned that it was actually the first vinyl purchase he’s ever made after two decades of serious collecting. So perhaps that is a testament in and of itself!

Part 2: Physicality

I rarely devote an entire section to talking about the vinyl/OBI itself, but then again, Tiger Lab has put out a release certainly worthy of this. First off, the cover, which pairs perfectly with the overall aesthetic of both the series and previous soundtrack releases. I can imagine this being a release that has already attracted some attention by Japanese collectors, as the cover seems to tap into a certain sense of continuity that I know are a huge hit with that community. It certainly pairs well with my two releases from VAP, and a laserdisc set that I have. They all opt for that very iconic Klimt Vienna Secession style with appropriate creative flourishes — but I like Tiger Lab’s take on it the most. The side characters populating the back in a choral array reminiscent of the Beethoven Frieze is also a really nice touch for any enthusiast of the fin-de-siècle style.

I picked up the pink vinyl on release, one of the few pink vinyls that I’ve bought that at least feels thematically consistent with the release and not just a default “vaporwave” or “city pop” or “future funk” styling. Diclonii rock the pink hair, after all. That all said, I’m wishing now that I got the “metallic gold” edition, as its another color that feels both apropos and stunningly beautiful. With all that in mind, this is also one of the better waxes that I’ve felt in-hand, and manages to feel robust. I’ve yet to find specific info, but it certainly feels like a 180g.

In conclusion, I’ve got to give immense credit to Tiger Lab for handling this release with a class and vigor that few Japanese publishers have given it. It certainly bodes well for the future of anime releases on vinyl, and makes me eager to fill out an emergent collection.

[falcon6]

Learning to Create

It’s really difficult for me to admit that I’m an artist of any capacity. A lot of times, I consider that sort of term to be dedicated only to the working artist. You know, the ones who actually get paid for their work. The ones who end up creating things for everyone. The ones I admire greatly, to the point that I consider them to be living on Mt. Olympus while I’m stuck at a temple waiting for a chariot up a very steep road.

The place I work at now is a place where I don’t get to really create for myself. I create for other people. When I’m done there, I seldom get to make things for myself at home. There is an effort, of course, when I’m able to do so, but it’s hard to be that focused after toiling a retail job for 7 hours a day. You end up taking the opportunity to decompress and that ends up becoming an 8-hour decompress and you need to go to bed. That’s how it is for an adult, I guess. Don’t recommend growing up.

And that “9-5 Job, Now Do Nothing For Hours” mindset is something I need to work on, to be sure. In my mind, I see myself as someone who needs to be able to do something. I can’t make art to decompress, because art is supposed to be something important. I toil and toil, thinking about the process I need to decide on doing. “How do I become an artist like my favorite artists?” “What is the correct methods of learning it?”

How do I climb the mountain and join the greats?

In my monthly stint of introspection, I was watching a friend play Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door. To this day, it may still be my favorite game. Watching it again brings back a lot of genuinely good memories, both inside and outside of the game. The charm that filled the game’s varied and interesting world and cast has still yet to be matched for my personal tastes. And for years, it was the game I played whenever I needed a good pick-me-up.

Watching him play it for the first time and getting to hear the same sort of reactions I had to it 14 years ago ended up bringing an...odd memory back to me. And it involves this image.

Low-Quality Vivian For The Low-Quality Needs

Perhaps not this specific image in particular - the internet could have phased out that one- but something similar to it.

See, back in 2004 I was just getting in on the whole Internet thing. This was back when people used what was called an “internet forum”. This was a place where people can post their thoughts on a wide range of topics, such as: “How do you jump in Metroid?”, “This game sucks”, and “Do you think Kingdom Hearts 2 will be on Gamecube?”.

I was part of one forum for a good part of my teenage life. I started at around January of 2004, in fact. I suppose I consider that a turning point in my life if I remember it to that degree.

I was fairly active in that forum. And as I began to make my posts, I began to notice something. At the bottom of every post was what you called a signature.

Copyright Falcon 2018, filed under the Trademark of Best Girl 2004

They were a cute little way to signify that you were the one who was making the post. It was one of the small creative outlets this particular forum had given users, though you still needed it to be both 45-ish pixels tall and kept at a low file size to help those with 56k modems.

Typing that out makes me feel really old.

There were people who were making these small images underneath their posts and the cool, hip guy I was as a teenager was like “OH BOY I WANNA DO THAT TOO!”. Of course, in order to create this sort of stuff I had to be...sneaky.

Back then, I found a pirated copy of Paint Shop Pro 7. It worked decently enough for me, but as I was a young lad with strong moral values - I didn’t even curse until well into my later teens, the frickin’ twit - I felt extremely guilty doing this. So for my birthday that year, I ended up getting a legit copy of Paint Shop Pro 8. It was at that point, I suppose, that my desire to create stuff was ignited. I was thrown into the wide world of graphic design, making sigs for myself and others.

I eventually upgraded to Photoshop 7 - after throwing away all of those moral values and growing the confidence to say the fuck-word - walking even further into this new world for me. I started making signatures for people in flashier ways, abused lens flare to the point of blinding half of Nintendo fanboys, and even dabbled in creating wallpapers for people to use. This was back when 1024x768 was the norm, if you can believe that.

I talk about this because when my friend was playing TTYD, I decided to look up art of some characters again, and found Vivian - one of the party members in the game - once more. Only, this time, in a way higher fidelity than I had 14 years ago.

Best Girl in A Good Resolution.

In general, I’d consider TTYD as the game that first got me encroaching into graphic design. This was not due to the game’s art, which is still fantastic, but because of so many people suddenly wanting signatures of their favorite new party members in that restrictive 48 pixel height.

I would get private messages in the forum asking for sigs with Mario, Goombella, Koops, Yoshi, Vivian, Bobbery, the X-Nauts, Bowser, Peach...Rawk Hawk a few times...even had Zess T. the cook in there. It was wild.

So imagine my surprise going through Google Image Search for a post about Vivian and finding an image of her that was extremely close to the kind of art I had to work with back then. I worked for a long time trying to figure out how to deal with the blur of the pisspoor scan with its low resolution and JPEG artifacts. Back then, finding official art was pretty difficult alone, and official art that actually looked like it was scanned with proper care? You were basically stuck with what you had and needed to figure out how to hide it. The people who could find clean concept art became our dealer providing the good shit while we provided our services to others.

Otherwise, you just worked with what you had. This was problem solving. Back then, you didn’t have access to as many tutorials as you do now. You absolutely didn’t have as much access to tablets. Those were from Wacom only and they were expensive. So you were essentially on your own, only getting help from the occasional artist who decided to make small tutorials on the forum.

Thankfully most of the people for signature requests were also teenagers as well, who just thought you were amazing for doing this for them.

I suppose all this reminiscing got me thinking about that mountain again. The paths up the mountain are long but they’re rarely ever getting longer or shorter, just easier to traverse. Nowadays, tablets are so much easier to acquire and art programs have gotten a lot more manageable. Art you want to look at or study or even use for your small projects are readily available, with services that makes buying personalized art easy and supporting artists even easier.

The knowledge about art programs and processes is nigh-infinite at this point. You can get a young artist’s commentary about their own virtues of art in a single tweet at lunch and get an experienced artist’s commentary at dinner. You can get atelier-level art lessons for free on Youtube.

Almost anything you want to learn is feasible now. Climbing the mountain is easier than ever.

So naturally, with my inferiority complex in full swing, I always have to ask myself why I haven’t started climbing the mountain yet. Why haven’t I just started the trek up the mountain pass already towards becoming a technically-skilled artist?

And the answer is, I am.

It’s just at my pace.

When I was a kid playing make-believe with others in the playground, I was making steps. Throughout all my teenage years of making signatures for people, making wallpapers for others, and even making a properly-awful sprite comic, I was making steps. When I was getting people stealing my sketchbook and making marks over my drawing of a Sonic character at lunch in high school, I was still making steps. When I was being critiqued by people for my skills in ways I felt were unfair or spiteful, I was still making steps. Every time I open Photoshop or SAI and stare at a blank canvas and will myself into making a mark on there, I’m still making a step.

Every step further from the start point, which is far and away from where I am now.

In my mind, I still can’t help but feel like where I should be is as some sort of master of art, but it’s really not fair to me. In hindsight, if I had drawn something every single day with intent, I could be a technical genius with knowledge of all the principles of design lodged firmly in my mind. It sounds amazing, but that’s not something I did.

Considering “what could have been” ignores what I am now. I am someone with knowledge in these various programs for over 14 years. I’ve dabbled in multiple projects, some in my own design. I can consider those things invariably shit, but the stuff I did there was stuff I did on my own terms, which I learned from. I wrote fanfics, did signatures for people, made wallpapers and webcomics, designed websites, did roleplaying, made a storyline based on friends’ characters in an MMO, and played tabletop games creating characters that became some of my favorite creations in my lifetime.

I would never want to trade that away for some sort of technical skill level-up. I’ve made too many great friends because of all of this. I am who I am because of how I’ve gotten here.

Learning how to create is all about taking the opportunities as they come along. Even this post is, essentially, me seeing one image online after a game session with friends and getting a nostalgia blast for something completely unrelated to the game itself.

The act of creating is simply doing. If you do, you create. If you create, you create art.

If you create art, you are an artist.

Don’t let your inner thoughts dissuade you from that fact, ever.

Thanks for reading.

[blazehedgehog]

With the recent EGX demo and the reception it's got from fans and critics, do you think there's reason to worry, at least for the Switch version and, since I can't think of a way to put it nicely, has the overly defensive tone some fans taken towards critics who've played the game, or even criticized it, been just or unjust? I know Sonic has this maligned reputation with game journos, but it's not like every person who's been critical are haters looking to take Sonic down.

I think a lot of Sonic fans wear some very deep scars. Many have stuck it out through some pretty dark times, myself included. You learn to put up some pretty strong defenses. You make it easy for yourself to dismiss opinions that don’t line up with what you want of expect. “IGN never knew what they were talking about, so why trust what they have to say about Sonic?”

Plus, there’s a very weird growing distrust of games media right now. It started with Gamergate, I guess. It goes without saying, but GG was an awful hate group actively centered around misogyny (or worse), and it’s a shame how many people did not realize that immediately. But that’s the thing: GG tapped into something that was also real. It did so purely by accident; under the surface, Gamergate was nothing more than an ex-boyfriend getting revenge for being slighted by his lover, and it snowballed out of control into something some are calling the new culture wars, and we’re still feeling its effects today.

But part of the reason GG originally gained momentum in the first place is because there’s an underlying distrust of any and every major games media outlet. Kotaku sucks, Polygon sucks, Destructoid sucks, Giantbomb sucks, GameSpot sucks, IGN sucks, Game Informer sucks, CVG sucks, Famitsu sucks, EGM sucked, 1UP sucked, GamePro sucked, Gamefan sucked, PLAY Magazine sucked, GameSpy sucked. Trust no one. The truth is out there. GG connected to those people who were basically waiting for any kind of “game press injustice” to rally behind, because they essentially hated all of the industry’s biggest, most important names.

Where does that come from? I mean, I guess, at least for me, is that once these places lose my trust, it’s basically impossible for it to be regained. And every outlet, at least once in their careers, has a moment that betrays that trust. Where personal interests or even financial interests outstrip the reader’s interests. Trust is so valuable and so fragile that even a single bad editor can spoil a site forever. Even if that person gets fired, the damage they caused can haunt the site’s brand basically forever. Why would I trust IGN? Hilary Goldstein worked there. I think I disagreed with everything that man ever wrote. Why would I trust Polygon? Ben Kuchera writes for them. He said Mario Kart 8 would be the worst selling Mario Kart of all time, when it was probably the single biggest sales driver for the Wii U until Zelda came along. And so on.

This isn’t even touching stuff like Kotaku’s advertising, where they dedicate whole weeks of coverage to a single game because they are paid to do so, which always ends on a glittering review. Even if the review is written honestly, the frame around it places doubt on and hurts that honesty, which above all else should be protected first and foremost.

And I think the thing that really crystallizes all of this is that once an outlet has this happen to them, where they betray someone’s trust, they never, ever, EVER make even a single iota of effort to rebuild that trust. They move on, they bury it, and it’s just assumed that the person yelling in the comments about bias is just “another crazy fanboy.” It turns into this kind of war – the scorned fan in the comments section who obviously still likes the site enough to hang around versus the person employed by the site parroting a “never read the comments” mantra while also repeatedly insulting the very same people they’ve scorned (actually some of their most dedicated fans) just for cheap laughs.

And so the fanboy’s bitterness grows. Salt in an open wound that never really heals.

It’s turning into a serious problem. Maybe there’s no turning back now. It’s that moment in the opening scene of Pixar’s The Incredibles where (spoilers until the end of this paragraph) Mr. Incredible stops the bank robber but the kid, Buddy, gets in the way. Mr. Incredible scolds him for it, and we as the audience think, “That’s right, the kid shouldn’t be there.” Rejected by his hero, Buddy then grows up to become a super villain, channeling that bitterness into a force to kill Mr. Incredible and permanently destroy his entire culture.

“Little guys” like Videogamedunkey, with nearly 4 million Youtube subscribers, are being treated as the new voice of the people. Dunkey has actively attacked what he called “limp dick game journalists” for not doing what he thinks is their job. Dunkey makes some good points against these journalists, even if he does cross some lines, but overall, the message he’s sending is that sympathy for traditional game press has run out. And Dunkey will probably not be the last big name to launch a direct attack against these establishments. They grew up reading these outlets, got burned by some type of distrust, and were constantly told their feelings of betrayal didn’t matter. And now, as these big establishments begin to show signs of weakness in the face of individuals on Youtube, guys like Dunkey are throwing all of that stored up bitterness right back in their faces. As it turns out, not every betrayed fan in the comments section will remain a faceless raging nobody forever. You might not be reading the comments section, but the comments section reads you.

Anyway, getting back to your original message, do I think some people are going overboard with their Sonic Forces hatred? Maybe. Also tying back into what I was just talking about, there is a tendency on the internet to go overboard. With so many voices speaking in unison, in order to be heard, you have to speak REALLY loudly. It’s not enough to simply communicate with friends, some people are competing for reblogs, retweets, likes, thumbs and favs. The loudest, rudest fan is just trying to be heard above the background noise. That’s why you’ve seen this trend, time and time again, where a person will meet their biggest internet heckler in person and they turn out to be nothing. Some of them just want to be acknowledged. So yeah, there are definitely people out there trying to be as loud as possible, hoping somebody will listen to them.

But here’s the deal: I’m not one of those people, and I think there’s a lot about Sonic Forces that’s worrying. As worrying if not more than Sonic Lost World was. It definitely doesn’t look like the successor to Sonic Generations people were hoping for. From what they’ve shown us, I think this looks pretty blatantly like another game where Sonic Team is flying blind and hoping they can stick the landing. I don’t blame anyone who thinks they won’t.

[pleiadesounds]

Where To Start With,  Pt 1

 This week, Harry Fanshawe from UK noiseniks Modern Rituals acquaints Kai with the inimitable Silver Jews, while Kai in turn shows him the finer points of British post-punk stalwarts Wire. 

  Kai Woolen-Lewis Wire are, for me, one of the great bands in the history of punk music. Whereas a lot of other bands you’d describe as such would subsist largely on folklore and be a calamity if judged on their incarnation in the present moment, Wire however seem to be one of the rare bands who have managed to be both very influential (if you need punk credentials, they were covered by Minor Threat and if you need trendy floppy haircut credentials, they were covered by My Bloody Valentine) and forever forward-thinking - bridging the gap between the pompousness of progressive music and the snarl and brevity of punk, a bridge between what were two ultra-partisan camps. Though they’re contemporaries of elder statesmen of British punk like the Sex Pistols and The Buzzcocks, there’s far more of an art-school vibe to Wire - one gets the impression that they must’ve stood in stark contrast to the image and the attitude of their peers, with cerebral and challenging songs that refused to succumb to the immediate hedonism of the punk music of the time. One gets the impression that they have far more in common with genre outliers like Patti Smith, Pere Ubu and Kraftwerk than with any of their counterparts in the British punk scene. 

 When I first saw them, at the Lexington in London 4 or 5 years ago, they played almost entirely new songs, with only a few songs from their “seminal” LP’s included in the set. Now that the horror of not knowing many of the songs has worn off, it’s a clear sign of their continuously forward-looking approach. With seventeen studio albums and god knows what else in the way of releases, here’s where to start with Wire - despite their huge legacy, absolutely not a legacy act…

 Playing Harp For The Fishes

 KWL Even after decades of churning out consistently stark, highly original songs, Wire still absolutely excel - although lots of their current and recent material is a lot more digestible than in their early years - this, from 2017’s Silver/ Lead is big slow-grooving song which gives an excellent idea of the kind of discomforting experimental noise Wire have always dealt in. A steady rhythm section struggles against all matter of ethereal out of key guitar, weird oscillating noises and throbbing synth lines. Musically and lyrically challenging and abstract without ever feeling overwrought. Sardonic without any hint of bitterness. Dense without even a smidgen of unpalatability. Is it always so? Aye.

Harry Fanshawe Wire for me have always been a band on the periphery of punk history. Not to say that is rightly so, but they're a band that I've seen has being earmarked as integral by the nerdier music fans (I mean that with fondness). Take Joy Division, they formed because they saw the Sex Pistols, but they made something much deeper and more meaningful. My mental placement for Wire has had them alongside the likes of Killing Joke in that history (weirder and less easy to associate with the common idea of 'punk'), and I feel like their evolution has been similar. Like you say this track favours simplicity with the steady beat, allowing a nicely sized canvas to throw as many different colours at, which they do with the layers they chuck on top. That is an approach that I see as being more contemporary of today than the 70s (favouring simplicity and excelling in it has really come back in the last few years). It shows how adaptable this band has been over the decades. 

Lowdown

 KWL Wire’s first album Pink Flag has gone down in music history as one of the seminal British records of the early punk movement, largely down to it’s combination of abrasiveness, melody and brevity. 21 songs in 36 minutes, often fleetingly abrupt, played at breakneck pace and infused with an abstract sense of humour and an art-school sensibility that set them miles apart from their contemporaries. This one, Lowdown, sounds like a soul single on 33rpm; a fascinating disco dirge and highlight of a pretty highlight-heavy first LP.

 HF Right back to the 70s and for me that Crazy Horse vibe is straight in there. This is the THE Wire album. Fight me. Musically, it's a whole different sound to the last song, it's got vibe and groove and all the amazing characteristics of the best 70s bands. Vocally I find it more alike the stuff of the 2010s, though I reckon that's probably debatable! It's obviously got that old school, British punk oi! to it and today they're much calmer. But you can hear it. For anyone who knows Kai and his musical projects of the last few years, this riff is SO Kai.

 Marooned

KWL Here’s an older one - from 1978’s Chairs Missing. The jump between Pink Flag and this in the space of a couple of years is absolutely insane, and the jump from this to the next year’s 154 is also pretty nuts. A highlight on a rich, chilling and unique record of challenging post-punk, Marooned is slow, meandering and awash with oceanic wetness, big synths and sheet glass guitars, with Newman singing about hanging out on a sinking iceberg - both sonically and in terms of sheer epic-ness of scope, it’s closer to Pink Floyd than to any of their genre contemporaries. I put this on at a house party once and the atmosphere nose dived and the whole room just totally explicably got really fucking awkward. Take what you want from that, I guess.

 HF Forward a couple of years and the Pink Floyd sounds are in there, the experimentation is kicking off and yeah we're sat on a soft synth cloud here. It is a massive jump and I love that, I fully dig that 'fuck it who cares what anyone thinks I wanna try that'. I reckon that idea is nicely reflected in your house party play of it. I know that feeling, I did it with Primitive Man myself around a bunch of posh hipsters listening to surf rock in Cornwall. Lasted like less than 2 seconds. Proper wankers. Anyway, point is Kai, it's their loss. The tune slaps.

Map Ref 

KWL By 1980’s 154 - so called because at the point they recorded it, they had played live 154 times - Wire had cemented their place as both stalwarts and genre outliers by following up the seminal Pink Flag with the enormous impenetrable curveball-shaped Chairs Missing. 154 is full of big bangers and awkward, atmospheric synthesiser-led songs - this by the way is one of the big bangers. Lyrically it seems to be a geography nerd gushing about the enormous epic expanses of landscape that make up the American midwest. Before you go look it up, the Map reference is somewhere called Centerville in Iowa or Ohio or something. Map Ref has a chorus I frequently cite alongside “That’s When I Reach for my Revolver” or “The Girl Who Lives on Heaven Hill” as a contender among underground punk rock’s biggest fist-in-the-air choruses.

HF Again, 70s vibes are rife, the energy of the rhythm section just holds it all up so strong. Weirdly, I find his voice sounds loads like Blake Schwarzenbach [Jawbreaker, Jets to Brazil]? Any influence on him there? Who knows. Way more in the way of vocal melody here and the vibe is moving more along the way bands like Talking Heads were at the time. Definitely a banger. Love the lil satirical 'chorus' drop in there. As for landscapes inspiring songs, fuck yeah why should it always be about people? I mean animal rights punk is usually dreadful and dull, let's talk about something inanimate for once.

 Blogging

 KWL Brazen, streamlined and groovy, with a chugging downtuned riff and a glorious uplighting chorus - Blogging showcases Wire’s admirable ability to follow their own pretty standard formula and keep churning out highly original and interesting songs. The lyrics deserve a mention - it’s a hard enough endeavour sometimes for those of us born in the 90s, but if you were in a band that existed in 1976, the current musical landscape must be a pretty soul-destroying place to exist. Actually scrap that. If you were alive at a time when art seemingly meant something or was worth anything, now must be a horrible place to live. “I’m blogging like Jesus/ I tweet like a pope/site traffic heavy/ I’m YouTubing hope” 

 HF Totally agree Kai. Today is a fucking terrible time to be alive if you're interested in anything related to the notion of 'art'. It's all been rehashed and overdone. It's everywhere to be seen and no longer has a sacred place. It's been abused and overused for petulant causes. Everyone's a fucking artist and that's killed the concept. Can't believe how much this reminds me of Jets to Brazil, why!? I suppose we can forget about the present if we stick to Wire's back catalogue.

Circumspect

KWL A product of extensive periods of down-time on their part, which saw the members working on other projects - Colin Newman’s Githead in particular is worth a mention - 2008’s Object 47, so called because it’s the 47th Object in their back catalogue - is a really great record and a hidden gem in Wire’s back catalogue for me. Dispensing with the distortion and the abrasion, Wire made a record of sparse, infectious guitar-based songs that you can really lose yourself in, and this is one of the songs in which I have most frequently lost myself. A slow circular guitar arpeggio, laid-back drums and lush vocals result in an almost Manchester-esque slow disco pills-thrills-and-bellyache vibe - this is Wire at their most hypnotic and enjoyable. 

 HF Slowcore Wire! Yeah this is one of my favourites from this list. Having time away from something can let you come back to it without as much creative control or care, and refreshing your image of what the thing is in the first place. Step away, come back more naturally. This is softer, but it's still as weird as anything else they made in the last 20 years. Pretty banging video too, mind. It feels like you're in one of those dreams where you try and run but you got sandbags on your feet. But in this one, it's Drew Barrymore from Donny Darko and she's apathetic as fuck.

Bad Worn Thing

KWL Their first album properly “back” after a period of sporadic activity through the 2000s, Red Barked Tree is the sound of a band of fifty-somethings consistently at peace with the idea of re-defining what their band IS, without at any point ever stepping on the toes of their older selves. Another album highlight (with acoustic guitars) Adapt, sums it up pretty nicely. "Go east / Go north / Go south / Go west / Leave mouths open / With your best / Adapt to change / Stay unimpressed”. Bad Worn Thing finds the band both tapping into 2000s alternative music and subjecting it totally to their musical and lyrical interpretations. An upbeat, undeniably British-feeling slice of sauntering pop, one that makes me feel like I’m taking an afternoon walk through a British urban landscape to the shop on the first sunny day in weeks - all while giving a pretty caustic account of Britain’s ongoing relationship with its past and by implication, it’s future. “Follow me, no explanation/ the future sold the chancellor paces/ the growing pains associated with a past that no-one faces.”

 HF This feels so much more British than much of what we've had from them on this list so far. This is Britpop Wire. Dam right they sound like they're back, they have something new to say, they're older and more jaded, but they still have something to say. I love the 'overcrowded nature of things' repetition. Like they've come back to this messy DIY music thing and it's a fucking full house. So you gotta build your own. Mind you, I'd say Wire have always lived in the garage.

Used To

KWL Another huge cut from Chairs Missing - and a perfect example of what critic Simon Reynolds called Wire’s “strange clockwork geometry” - a blissful piece of post-punk psychedelia and definitely one of the climaxes of a record that enjoys an embarrassment of rich, blissed out moments. I would definitely cite Wire’s work in this period as proof of the utter compatibility of the experimental, expansive, forward thinking music of the 60s and 70s and the abrasiveness and brevity of punk. Indeed, it sounds like bullshit now, but the same A+R man who signed Pink Floyd and the Sex Pistols was responsible for EMI’s acquisition of the band while they were still in their infancy. For me, basically everything that made the years 1976-1979 so exciting and vital in the history of unpopular music is represented in this album, whether it be this, the Beatles-on-glue vibes of ‘I am the Fly’ or the aggressive minimalism of ‘Being Sucked in Again’, the album just gives and gives and gives. An absolute classic.

 HF Very pleased we went back to this to close. Absolutely loving the post-punk psychedelia tag on this baby. Again, everything you say above that I hear in this record is their observant nature as a band to look back at the twenty years before them and incorporate what's important, what's wrong, what's right and the relationship of all that against their own stronghold. It reinforces their importance and their place in all of this. Not everyone, hardly anyone, has the ability to be the originator of something whilst being so observant (the latter being one of the most troubling things for humankind) at the same time. A perfect place to end with Wire: it repeats, it talks, it stays with you for a moment and then it's gone. Thanks Kai.

 Silver Jews

Harry Fanshawe Like many of us, my summer last year was consumed by the release of David Berman's new album under the 'Purple Mountains' moniker and then his sudden death. I'm sure many of us also went back through his entire catalogue once we'd exhausted our ears of his latest and last offering. Silver Jews have always been a standout band for me, usually sitting with things like Leonard Cohen or the Velvet Underground in my poor attempts at genre categorising. 

What's always stood out to me in this way, making it something I've struggled to place with more contemporary artists, is the looseness in the music and the corresponding looseness in its lines between music and prose. Like Leonard or Lou, SJ have a truly unique way of delivering and intertwining music and meaning. Where the new Purple Mountains record is much more polished in its production, my fondness for the old Silver Jews records has always been like that of an old, familiar room; their rusty structures and broken floorboards bring with them more character and heart than any solid new build could and, given last summer’s events, it now holds a very special place in my heart.

KWL I remembered having heard about David Berman’s suicide because many of my most misanthropic and refined friends had been especially despondent about it - it seems I missed the boat on that particular opportunity to be saddened by the loss of a great artist, so having this opportunity to go back and be able posthumously introduced to him has been a strange experience - cool that Harry and I have these different perspectives on his work and death…like reading a sentence with a full stop at the end, or something.

 Albermarle Station

HF A tender country offering inhabited by old ghosts, broken bridges and ivy covered screens. This song always reminded me of travel, of the lingering memories from recent events in recent places bouncing around the mind after an experience somewhere with people. All whilst anticipating the next destination. There's a train station near my parents’ house and as a teenager I used to travel from it a lot to see friends. That place hasn't changed at all in the 15 years since, and the rare occasions I go there now just bring back all of it; all the old ghosts while I sit and wait near the ivy covered screens and the rickety old bridge.Travel is a time that allows for rumination and retreat, and that can be savoured in all of its broken glory. 

KWL A surprising first listen - I’m not sure exactly what I expected, maybe something a bit glossier and more upbeat, but this is great - ramshackle, melodic and with lyrics that will take a million listens. It sort of reminds me of Red House Painters but with wit, self-deprecation and genuine insight in place of abrasiveness and machismo. Berman is a prepossessing and fascinating figure in light of his suicide, I should imagine before just as much and also considering the esteem in which a lot of people held and hold him. Maybe you led me there but this song definitely feels like they have a foot in the past, in those old, deserted spaces you pass through on the way somewhere.

 New Orleans

 HF From that slightly out of tune guitar at the start to the doubled up lazy groans about the trouble in the stairs; to me this song is the dusty corner of an old house, the gold in the cellar, and it's not the house you think it is. Keeping up with a nostalgic line of thinking, this track captures the 'otherness' of the past, the distance it eventually takes, even when it can be so well set in stone by old artefacts and rooms. It beholds the length of reflective nights and the depth of their texture. Trapped inside the song where the night's are so long, we count sheep to find soothing sleep. An early banger from Berman.

 KWL This is also great - there’s something hugely admirable about a song being able to be this rickety and cobbled-together-sounding while still being so evocative. It’s like, they could probably have recorded it without the out of key guitar lines or the drums losing the beat, but they didn’t - and there’s beauty in the imperfection. The song has that ‘On The Beach’ feeling of the end of a long, drunken night, when the ash-tray is full and the kitchen needs tidying before bed. But you’ll do it in the morning.

Tennessee

 HF Clearly a trend is setting in here: the slowest country SJ numbers titled by places. Aside from the obviously amazing play on the title word in the chorus, this love song has some of the best one-liners as far as I'm concerned. Here's one: 'Punk rock died when the first kid said "Punk's not dead, punk's not dead”'. Here's my favourite: 'We're off to the land of hot middle-aged women'. Is this an optimistic look to a future with a spouse? As far as I care to know, the whole song is. Punk may be dead but love isn’t.

 KWL I always knew you had a type, Harry. Another piece of rickety out of tune folk-country storytelling that somehow plays with superficiality and reaches into the darkest depths at the same time. A bit of cutesy word-play and a really lovely key change in the middle of the song - this is actually going really well, isn’t it. I’m guessing the lady singing is Berman’s wife, just because the whole atmosphere just feels very close and personable - listening to these songs of Berman being in love and happy and stuff is startling in this current context. A great song.

Sleeping is the Only Love

 HF What's that? Another love song? Maybe! As blurred as it seems deliberately to be about loving someone and how incredible a good night's sleep is. As someone who troubles with sleep, I can agree that there are times when I would crawl over broken glass and hot coals to make it to sleep. I also love the reflection from that onto the peace had with a good functioning relationship with someone you love. Sleep and love intertwined.

 KWL All these love songs have taken on a very strange overtone, now. This one has somewhere in it a snapshot of Berman and his wife settling down to the quiet life in Nashville - it’s all pretty beautiful, and it’s very impressive to go about making so intricate a love song about something as banal as sleep. I think there’s a snapshot here of the kind of intimacy that goes beyond the sexual - where somehow sleeping next to someone is the most intimate thing of all - the rolling over, the arms going to sleep, the waking up, the bad breath. The real deal.

 Punks in the Beerlight

 HF A song for the addicts! After a hot summers day, what better than the transcendence found in the cooling of a beautiful summers night? How could you make that even better? I guess you could smoke the gel off a fentanyl patch? This song is for a long summer night where you can go and run away into the night with a friend, find the nicest, deadest park around and watch that sun go down. And what comes after we exhaust our routes for escape? Let's not kid ourselves. It gets really really bad. Gotta love that 80s glam section after the first chorus too.

 KWL Ok, so I feel I need to state here that Harry’s article has sent me down a deep rabbit hole of SJ/David Berman appreciation. It’s strange to find him here, at this point and I just wonder what it would have been like to have been like “I hope David Berman’s doing okay” at random intervals in life. This is easily the most conventionally beautiful song on the list so far and somehow it examines some of the darkest corners of the human experience. It reminds me of the beauty of being in love - all other markers fade into unimportance, rendering the rich paupers and the poor rich beyond dreams, together; a beautiful juxtaposition, part love song, part junkie memoir.

 Advice to the Graduate

 HF 'Your third drink will lead you astray.' Let's follow on from the last theme. 'So you've got no friends and you wander through the night. And now you watch the sunrise through a rifle-sight'. This song speaks for itself.

 KWL This song seems to be quite strongly advocating the “school of life” diploma - that when you finish all the arbitrary self-building, that there’s a big wide world to step out into that’s all misery and addiction and what’s your deep critical analysis of Edgar Rice Burroughs going to do for you then? It sounds so slack, a borderline The Shaggs influence - Berman said that all of his favourite singers couldn’t sing, and it doesn’t sound like he or his backing band was much better. A genuine advert for keeping the musicians out of music…

K-Hole

 HF I've never understood the appeal of a K-Hole, I suppose that DB doesn't either, since he compares it to the feeling of being left alone. Though he does still reserve his fondness for booze as a trustworthy fallback during tough times. Perhaps that's it; it can go too far. I love the string arrangements in this song, it feels outback and rural, the lyrics appeal to that sense of dusty distance too.

 KWL I have a real soft spot in my heart for when the music of a song seems to run in tandem with its lyrical content, and I must say lots of the instrumental here feels like an out of body hallucination of a country song - large swathes of the song feel like Alice in Wonderland or that first Pink Floyd record that sounds like a Kaleidoscopic Circus.  

Dallas

 HF You know the way a city can change completely in character when night hits. When all the blazing sunlight lifts and leaves you with the purity of a place. It's like a deep breath of fresh air after a heavy day, you can feel your spirits lift as the weight peels away. This is a great, simple example of DB, highlighted best in the last lines: 'Poor as a mouse every morning, rich as a cat every night, Some kind of strange magic happens, when the city turns on her lights’.

 KWL The lyrics to this really grabbed me too - but not so much in respect of the city at night, but the string of non-sequiturs that pepper the song, something that DB is obviously really great at - painting those little pictures. There’s the bit about his shrink’s former NFL career, the eroticism of CPR, “our record just went aluminium” - all absolutely amazing. I’ve heard hundreds of songs about hundreds of places, but they never came as unique or as vivid as this.

 I Remember Me

 HF Another example of being a sucker for the whimsical. 'I remember you and I remember me': through the years you can lose the old parts of yourself. When you're in a relationship these losses double, and when you look back in your 'now' state to the person you were right back at the beginning, and the person they were, it makes you appreciate the whimsical and the romantic because they are so short-lived and random. Even though you change through those years, that change enables each quirk and trait that you might look back on and miss. So soak it up while it's there lest you regret its disappearance. In this story, the characters end up apart, but whether or not you do, know that even if you are still together, parts of you can always remain apart.

 KWL This is the best song on the list, for me - absolutely gorgeous and very very moving indeed. Somehow, Berman manages to sum up in his songs and in his writing that life is a huge collection of these tiny tiny moments, and maybe if we looked more closely at the tiny moments, the enormousness of life might not seem so terrifying. A sort of temporal looking after the pennies, so to speak. This one screams “don’t wait for the perfect moment, it’s now”. 

How to Rent a Room

 HF A great ender for this list. 'I want to wander through the night as a figure in the distance even to my own eye'. 'No I don't really want to die. I only want to die in your eyes'. If only…

 KWL Further research into the life of DB has directed me towards the fact that his father represents the worst of the worst of the American Republican corporate lobbying parasite - against environmental protections, the minimum wage, health warnings on tobacco, labour rights and trade regulations, to name just a few, and whose son Berman seemed ashamed to be. I just looked through the lyrics to this and they genuinely seem to be a letter to his dad, who he called “a despicable man … [a] human molestor … an exploiter … a scoundrel” saying “I’d rather be dead than your son.” 

 Thanks for this Harry, it’s been a real pleasure and a great introduction to a fascinating man and his band. May he rest in peace.

For the full playlist, click here

[kostikivanov]

St. Vincent’s Cheeky, Sexy Rock

Annie Clark, the songwriter and multi-instrumentalist known as St. Vincent, has an apartment in the East Village. She’s rented it since 2009. But last winter and spring, while she was in town recording a new album, she didn’t stay there. If she wanted something, she sent someone to get it. “I need to not have to worry about the plumbing and the vermin,” she said. “Also, the trinkets and indicators of my actual life.” She was immersed instead in the filtration of that actual life into song. She was in a hermetic phase: celibate, solitary, sober. “My monastic fantastic,” she called it. A stomach bug in March left her unable to stand even the smell of alcohol, and, anyway, there were so many things she wanted to get done that she didn’t have the time to be hungover. She abstained from listening to music, except her own, in order to keep her ears clear.

She was staying at the Marlton Hotel, in Greenwich Village, a block away from Electric Lady Studios, one of the places where she was making the record. Most days, she got up at sunrise, took a Pilates class, and then headed to Electric Lady, to work past sundown. She had dinner in the studio, or else alone at a nearby restaurant, or in her room. A book or an episode of “The Handmaid’s Tale,” and then early to bed. Not exactly “Hammer of the Gods.”

It had been more than three years since the release of her last album, which she’d named “St. Vincent,” as though it were her first under that name, rather than her fourth—or fifth, if you include one she made with David Byrne, in 2012. All these were well regarded, and with each her reputation and following grew. The music was singular, dense, modern, yet catchy and at times soulful, in an odd kind of way.

Still, the self-titled album was widely considered to be a breakthrough, a consummation of sensibility and talent, a fulfillment of the St. Vincent conceit—this somewhat severe performer who was both her and not her. The act was a blend of rock-goddess bloodletting and arch performance art, self-expression and concealment. (She says that she got the name from a reference, in a Nick Cave song, to the Greenwich Village hospital where Dylan Thomas died.) The ensuing tour was called “Digital Witness,” named for a creepy/peppy song on the album about our culture of surveillance and oversharing. Her life was a whirlwind. There was a Grammy, some best-album acclaim and time on the charts, and a binge of attention from the music and fashion press, and, eventually, from the gossip industrial complex, too, when she began a relationship with the British actress and supermodel Cara Delevingne. The Daily Mail, struggling to take the measure of this American shape-shifting indie rocker, called Clark “the female Bowie.” (The paper’s stringers doorstepped Clark’s family.) When that romance came to an end, after more than a year, she began to be photographed with Kristen Stewart, another object of fan and media obsession, and so the St. Vincent project took on a new dimension: clickbait, gossip fodder. This bifurcation, as Clark called the split between her public life as an artist and the new one as a tabloid cartoon, was disorienting to her, and even sad. But there was a way to put it all to work: write more songs. Clark, quoting her friend and collaborator Annie-B Parson, the choreographer, told me one day, “The best performers are those who have a secret.”

For the new album—it comes out this fall, although Clark has not yet publicly revealed its name—she hooked up with the producer Jack Antonoff, who, in addition to performing his own music, under the name Bleachers, has co-written and produced records for Taylor Swift and Lorde. This has led people to suppose that Clark is plotting a grab for pop success. In June, she released a single called “New York,” and on the evidence the supposition seems fair. It is—by her standards, anyway—a fairly straight-ahead piano ballad, lamenting lost love, or absence of a kind. “You’re the only motherfucker in the city who can handle me,” she sings. Fans immediately began speculating that it was about Delevingne, or, if you thought about it differently, David Bowie, who died last year. “It’s a composite,” Clark told me, though of whom she wouldn’t say. She objects to the idea that songs should automatically be interpreted as diaristic, especially when the songwriter is a woman. “That’s just a sexist thing,” she said. “ ‘Women do emotions but are incapable of rational thought.’ ”

A few weeks before the release she told me, “It’s rare that you get to say ‘This song could be someone’s favorite.’ But this might be the one. Twenty years of writing songs, and I’ve never had that feeling.” It was May, at Electric Lady. She was in the studio with Antonoff. “We’re doing the flavor-crystally bits,” Clark said. This essentially meant adding or removing pieces of sound to or from the sonic stew they’d spent months concocting. “There’s a lot of information on this album,” she said.

Clark, who is thirty-four, was sitting cross-legged on a couch. She had on studded leather loafers, a suit jacket, and black leggings with bones printed on them, in the manner of a Halloween skeleton costume. Her hair was black and cut in a bob. (In the past, she has dyed it blond, lavender, or gray, and has been in and out of curls, its natural state.) She wasn’t wearing much makeup. When she performs, she puts on the war paint, and usually goes in for fanciful costumes and serious heels. For the “Digital Witness” tour, she wore a tight, perforated fake-leather jumpsuit with a plunging neckline, and smeared lipstick. Last year, she did a show while attired in a purple foam toilet. Parson, who is responsible for the rigid postmodern dance moves that Clark has embraced in recent years, referred to her aspect as “wintry,” which doesn’t quite encompass her tendency to throw herself around the stage or dive off it to surf the crowd.

Now she seemed slight, fine-boned, almost translucent—it was hard to imagine her surviving a sea of forearms, iPhones, and gropey hands. She has a sharp jawline, a few freckles, and great big green eyes, which can project a range of seasons. She thinks before she speaks, asks a lot of questions, and has a burly laugh.

On a coffee table in front of her were a Chanel purse and containers of goji berries, trail mix, and raw-almond macaroons. She stood occasionally, to play slashing, tinny lines on an unamplified electric guitar of her own design—a red Ernie Ball Music Man, from her signature line, that retails for upward of fifteen hundred dollars—which, on playback, sounded thick and throbby.

She shreds on electric guitar, but not in a wanky way. It often doesn’t sound like a guitar at all. Her widely cited forebears are Robert Fripp and Adrian Belew, of King Crimson. “I don’t love it when the guitar sounds like a guitar,” she said. “The problem is, people want to recognize that it’s a guitar. I have facility, and so I feel like I should use it more. I don’t have any other ‘should’ in my music.” (It can be funny, if dispiriting, to read, in the comments sections of her performances on YouTube, the arguments that guitar nerds get into about her chops.)

When she listens to a playback, she often buries her head in her arms, as though she can hardly bear to hear herself, but, really, it’s just her way of listening hard. Once, during a mixing session, while she was at the board and I was behind her on a couch, surreptitiously reading a text message, she picked up her head, turned around, and said, “Did I lose you there, Nick? I can feel when attention is wandering.” Her cheery use of the name of the person she is addressing can seem to contain a faint note of mockery. There’d be times, in the following months, when I’d walk away from a conversation with Clark feeling like a character in a kung-fu movie who emerges from a sword skirmish apparently unscathed yet a moment later starts gushing blood or dropping limbs.

Part of this is a function of Clark’s solicitousness, her courteous manner. “She’s created a vernacular of kindness in her public life,” her close friend the writer and indie musician Carrie Brownstein told me. “But the niceness comes through a glass case.” Clark has observed, of the music industry in this era, that good manners are good business.

Clark and Antonoff had met casually around New York but hardly knew each other until they somehow wound up having what he described as an emotionally intense dinner together at the Sunset Tower in Los Angeles. “She was very open about the things in her life,” Antonoff said. “That’s what I was interested in. Continuing to reveal more and more. I said, ‘Let’s go for the lyrics that people will tattoo on their arms.’ ”

Clark has eight siblings, some half, some step. She’s the youngest of her mother’s three girls. Clark’s parents divorced when she was three. This was in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Her father, from a Catholic family with eleven kids, was a stockbroker and a prodigious reader who could recite passages from “Ulysses”; for a while, he had the girls convinced that he was a Joycean scholar. When Clark was ten, he gave her “Lucky Jim” for Christmas. At thirteen, she got “Vile Bodies.” She acquired a knack for punching up: in junior high, she toted around the Bertrand Russell pamphlet “Why I Am Not a Christian.”

By then, Clark’s mother, a social worker, had remarried and moved to the suburbs of Dallas. Clark was reared mostly by her mother and stepfather, and considers herself a Texan. Her father remarried and had four kids, with whom Clark is close. In 2010, he was convicted of defrauding investors in a penny-stock scheme, and was sentenced to twelve years in prison. She has never publicly talked about this, although she told me, “I wrote a whole album about it,” by which she meant “Strange Mercy” (2011), her third. When I asked her if she felt any shame about his crimes, she said, “Shame? Not at all. I didn’t do anything wrong. It’s not my shame.”

As a child, Clark was shy, quiet, studious. She played soccer. (There’s a charming video from a few years ago of her demonstrating the mechanics of the rainbow kick, while keeping her hands in the pockets of her overcoat.) Her nickname was M.I.A., because she was so often holed up in her bedroom, listening to music. She was a classic-rock kid—Led Zeppelin, Jimi Hendrix, Jethro Tull—but the real gateway was Nirvana. “Nevermind” hit when she was nine, and she was precocious enough to notice. Like a lot of kids, she found a mentor behind the counter of the local record store, who turned her on to stuff like Stereolab, PJ Harvey, and Nick Cave. Also like a lot of kids, she started playing guitar when she was twelve. Her first live performance was at age fifteen, at a club in Dallas’s Deep Ellum neighborhood—she sat in with her guitar teacher on “The Wind Cries Mary.” She played bass in a heavy-metal band and guitar in a hardcore outfit called the Skull Fuckers: riot grrrl, queercore, Big Black.

Clark’s uncle—her mother’s brother—is Tuck Andress, a jazz-guitar virtuoso who, since 1978, has performed with his wife, the singer Patti Cathcart, as the duo Tuck & Patti. When Clark was a teen-ager, she spent summers as their roadie on tours of Asia and the United States. After graduating from high school, she worked as their tour manager in Europe. It was a lean outfit, so she handled pretty much everything, from settling with the clubs to fetching towels and water—an aspiring rock star’s mail room. The greatest lesson, though, may have been witnessing the power that music could have over strangers. “I’d watch Tuck & Patti bring people to tears,” she said.

“We knew she was serious about this music thing,” Cathcart told me.

“You couldn’t keep her from it,” Andress said. “But, until you hit the road, you have no idea. Of course, now she travels in a dramatically more luxurious way than we do.”

Clark went to Berklee College of Music, in Boston, but dropped out after two and a half years, itchy to write and record her own music rather than train to be a crack session hire, which is how she saw the program there. The best thing she got from it, she says, is a love of Stravinsky. She still can’t read music. She moved to New York, but after three months ran out of money and retreated to Texas, where a friend who played theremin with the Polyphonic Spree, a big choral-rock band out of Dallas, encouraged her to audition. She toured with them as a singer and a guitar player for a while.

Later, she hired on with Sufjan Stevens, the orchestral-folk artist. He first saw her at the Bowery Ballroom, where she was performing solo as the warmup act for a band she also played in, the Castanets. “She was up there with a guitar, standing on a piece of plywood for a kick drum, two microphones, one of them distorted, and two amps,” Stevens told me. “Obviously, she had talent.” Off she went with another giant band. “At that time, there were a dozen musicians touring in my band, and there was always a moment in the set where people could ‘take a solo,’ ” Stevens went on. “All the men usually just played a lot of notes really fast. But, when Annie’s turn came, she refused to do the obvious white-male masturbatory thing on the guitar. Instead, she played her effects pedals. She made such weird sounds. It was like the Loch Ness monster giving birth inside a silo.”

At the time, Clark had her first album, “Marry Me,” in the can, and sometimes she performed solo before her sets with Stevens. “I didn’t have that performance character she has,” he said. “I kind of wish I had. It’s both personal and protective. To get attention as a woman, in a heteronormative context where sex appeal sells, and to sell yourself instead by emphasizing your skill, ingenuity, and work ethic is an incredible feat.”

The first song on “Marry Me,” “Now, Now,” had her singing, “I’m not any, any, any, any, any, any, any, anything,” which, intentionally or not, sounds like “I’m not Annie, Annie. . . .” You might say that it was the opening salvo in St. Vincent’s still unfolding act of concealment and disclosure.

“This scaffolding that she has been so deliberate in constructing has allowed her to take more risks,” Brownstein said. “She presents this narrow strand of visibility. She can mess around with the whole thing of her being called doe-eyed or a gamine. There’s a classic kind of professionalism in the act, sort of like the old country stars—Loretta Lynn, Johnny Cash. They let you know when you have access to their world. It’s a contrivance.”

The new album, by Clark’s own reckoning, is the gloomiest one she’s made: “It’s all about sex and drugs and sadness.” It ends with a song about suicide, which she sings in a husky voice that is downright frightening. (“Like any red-blooded American, I’ve considered suicide,” she told Marc Maron, on his “WTF” podcast.) She says that she wrote it on a tour bus en route from Lithuania to Latvia. Sure, sometimes the Baltics can bring you down, but, beyond that, there’s clearly some serious heartbreak and darkness underlying this new project.

Around the release of the “St. Vincent” album, Clark had been on tour more or less perpetually for ten years. “I was running hard. There were family things, illness,” she said. “I’m a little like a greyhound. Get me running in a direction, and I’ll run myself into the ground.” Among other things, her mother had a health crisis, which Clark doesn’t like to talk about.

“I was hurling myself into crowds, climbing the rafters,” she said. “I felt like, if I’m not bruised and bloody when I come offstage, I haven’t done it right.”

There’s a song on the new album called “Pills.” “Pills to grow, pills to shrink, pills, pills, pills and a good stiff drink / pills to fuck, pills to eat, pills, pills, pills down the kitchen sink.” (As it happens, those lines are sung by Delevingne, who will be credited, for the benefit of the British gossip press, as an underground sensation named Kid Monkey.) “I was trying to hold on,” Clark recalled. “I didn’t have coping mechanisms for tremendous anxiety and depression. I was trying to get through pharmaceutically.”

Clark may resent the assumption that everything she writes about is personal, that the protagonist is always her. “You couldn’t fact-check it,” she said. To questions about sexuality, she insists on fluidity. “I’m queer,” she said. But “the goal is to be free of heteronormativity. I’m queer, but queer more as an outlook.”

Yet there is just one narrator on this album. “The emotional tones are all true,” she said. “The songs are the most coherent expression of them. Songs are like prophecies. They can be stronger than you are.”

One day, during a mixing session at Electric Lady, Clark told me that her favorite lyric on the album was “Teen-age Christian virgins holding out their tongues / Paranoid secretions falling on basement rugs.” Later, she texted me to say that her favorite was actually “ ‘Remember one Christmas I gave you Jim Carroll / intended it as a cautionary tale / you said you saw yourself inside there / dog-eared it like a how-to manual.’ Cause Christmas—carol—Emanuel.” That’s from a song about a hard-luck old friend or lover named Johnny, who hits the singer up for money or support. “You saw me on movies and TV,” she sings. “Annie, how could you do this to me?” I asked her one day who Johnny was.

“Johnny’s just Johnny,” she said. “Doesn’t everyone know a Johnny?”

As Clark neared the end of recording, she turned some attention to the next phases—packaging, publicity, performance. She has observed that, when she makes the rounds to local media outlets or on cattle-call press junkets, she is repeatedly asked the same questions, many of them dumb ones. “You become a factory worker,” she said. “When you have to say something over and over, there’s a festering self-loathing. No better way to feel like a fraud.”

She’d made what she was calling an interview kit, a highly stylized short film, which consists of her answering typical questions. She sits in a chair with her legs crossed, in a short pink skirt and a semitransparent latex top before a Day-Glo green backdrop, with a camera and a sound crew of three female models in heels, dog collars, dominatrix hoods, and assless/chestless minidresses. A screen reads, “Insert light banter,” and then Clark reappears, saying, with a strained smile, “It’s good to see you again. Of course I remember you. Yah, good to see you. How’s—how’s your kid?”

There follows a series of questions and answers, with the former presented as text onscreen—generic placeholders:

Q. Insert question about the inspiration for this record.

A. I saw a woman alone in her car singing along to “Great Balls of Fire,” and I wanted to make a record that would prevent that from ever happening again.

Q. Insert question about how much of her work is autobiographical.

A. All of my work is autobiographical, both the factual elements of my life and the fictional ones.

Q. Insert question about being a woman in music.

A. What’s it like being a woman in music? . . . Very good question.

The camera cuts to her interlaced fingers. She wears paste-on fingernails, each with a letter. They spell out “F-U-C-K-O-F-F.”

There are more—What’s it like to play a show in heels? What are you reading? What album would you want on a desert island?—and her answers are mostly but not always sardonic. They were written by Brownstein. Clark shot another film, a kind of surreal press conference, with a similar deadpan gestalt and Day-Glo color scheme and trio of kinky models. In this version, in reply to the woman-in-music question, she performs a “Basic Instinct” uncrossing of her legs, as the camera zooms in on her crotch, accompanied by the echo of a drop of water in a cave.

These videos don’t quite serve the utilitarian function that Clark had put forth—that of saving her time and energy by furnishing her interrogators with workable answers—but they do convey a sensibility that suits the brand: cheeky, sexy, a little Dada. (They’re more on message, perhaps, than her recently announced role as a star of the new ad campaign for Tiffany.) She’d prefer to embody certain ideas than to have to verbalize them, when the context comprises dubious, inherited, unexamined assumptions about gender, sexuality, songwriting, and celebrity. She prefers gestures to words. She sent me a photo of herself from a video shoot and wrote, “Me performing gender.”

Meanwhile, she was having a costume made for her solo performance: a “skin suit” that would give her the appearance of being naked onstage. One morning, I met her in downtown Los Angeles, at the L.A. Theatre, an old movie palace. She arrived alone in a black BMW M-series coupe. The costume’s designer, Desmond Evan Smith, met her outside, to take advantage of the sun. He had swatches of latex, to compare with her skin. One was too pink, another too yellow.

“This is me with a slight tan,” Clark said. “I’m pretty pale.” She had on cutoff jean shorts, a Western-style shirt knotted above her navel, and the studded loafers. Smith led her to a gilded hallway on the second floor to size her up with a tape measure.

“What do you need me to do?” Clark asked.

“I just need you to stand there and look pretty,” Smith said.

“Done and done.”

He read out her neck, waist, and bust numbers.

“Hear that?” Clark said. “Perfect babe measurements.”

He peeled down her shorts to measure her hips. “Cheetahkini,” she said. “Is that a portmanteau?”

“Spread for me,” Smith said. “Your legs.”

“Comedy gold, Nick,” she said.

Later, when she’d started calling me Uncle Nick or Nicky boy, I’d find myself wondering if this skin-suit episode hadn’t been an elaborate setup, a provocation or even a trap laid by someone known to be in command of her presentation in the world. Or maybe it was just show biz, the same old meat market now refracted through self-aware layers of intention and irony.

“Should we get someone to volunteer to be my body?” Clark asked. “To add a little pizzazz? I could choose my own adventure here. I could get a custom crotch.” She began referring to this as her “perfect pussy.” “I’ll scroll through Pornhub and find one.”

After the skin-suit sizing, Clark drove across town, to a coffee shop off Melrose called Croft Alley, to have lunch with her creative director, Willo Perron. Perron, who is from Montreal, does visual and brand work for a variety of pop stars—Jay-Z, Kendrick Lamar, Rihanna. He helps them conceptualize music videos, album covers, and stage shows.

Perron, who is forty-three, wore white jeans and a light-gray T-shirt and black-and-white leopard-print skater shoes from Yves Saint Laurent. (“They may be a bit too rad dad,” he said.) He had a droll, weary air; his expertise was assured but lightly worn. He drives a Tesla. His girlfriend was the waitress at Croft Alley.

He wanted to discuss the album cover. There’d been a shoot in Los Angeles, on the same set they used to film the satirical interview kit. “Did you look at the photos?” he asked Clark. “Can we just do it? It’s good. It’s bold, too. It’s the one that stood out.” He was talking about a photograph I’d first seen on the home screen of Clark’s cell phone: an image of her research assistant, a photographer and model named Carlotta Kohl, with her head stuck through a pinkish-red scrim. Really, it was a picture of Kohl’s legs and rear end, in hot-pink tights and a leopard thong bodysuit. “This is not my ass,” Clark had said. “This is my friend Carlotta’s ass. Isn’t it a nice ass?”

Perron explained to me, “It all started, well— There hasn’t been a female lead who’s been able to be both absurdist and sexual. Sultriness but in a New Wave character. The energy of ‘Pee-wee’s Playhouse,’ ‘Beetlejuice,’ the Cramps, the B-52s, with some chips of Blondie. Think of Poison Ivy, from the Cramps: absurd but hot.”

“Manically happy to the point of being scary,” Clark said.

“We built these Day-Glo canvases and had people sticking limbs and heads through the canvases. Then we found that the most entertaining thing was the back of the canvas: Carlotta ostriched into the wall, just her ass.”

“Can we do it?” Clark said.

“It says everything that we want to say,” Perron said.

“But will people assume that it’s my ass? I’m doing all these body-double things.” She went on, “I was thinking a photo of my face that encapsulates the entire record—but maybe that’s a bit of a fool’s errand.” She mentioned an image from the shoot of herself with some stylists around her.

“It’s too ‘1989,’ ” Perron said.

“Too on the nose?” Clark said.

“It’s a single cover, not an album cover.”

Clark and Perron hooked up four years ago, when she was working on the “St. Vincent” album. “That thing was near-future cult leader,” he said. “We were talking about media and paranoia and blah, blah. Annie referenced ‘Black Mirror.’ It had only been on the BBC. And the films of Jodorowsky. We were working with a 1970 psychedelic aesthetic, plus postmodernist Italian, but in Memphis style.” The cover showed Clark sitting on a pink throne, with her gray hair in a kind of modified Bride of Frankenstein.

“One of the early conversations we had was about how indie rock always does the unintentional thing, so that it doesn’t have an opportunity to fail,” Perron said. By this, he meant, say, a band in T-shirts, looking tough, standing in the back of a warehouse—authenticity as a euphemism for the absence of an idea. “But we wanted pop-level intention.”

“The best ideas are the ones that might turn out to be terrible ideas,” Clark said.

They got into Perron’s Tesla and headed to his office, on the second floor of a house on a residential street nearby. A few assistants worked quietly at laptops. There was a rack of file boxes, with the names of clients: Drake, the xx, Bruno Mars, Coldplay, Marilyn Manson, Lady Gaga.

They watched a rough cut of the interview-kit press conference. “There are moments where you seem really pretentious,” Perron said. “But then, the brand should be ‘absurdist.’ ”

Clark said, “Yes, there are moments where people will be, like, ‘Is she just a pretentious dickhead?’ ”

They discussed possible music-video directors and brought examples of their work up onscreen. (One was a duo called We Are from L.A., who are from France.) Then they talked about the solo show, with the skin suit.

“Remember when I said the only ideas worth doing might be terrible ideas?” Clark said. “This might be one. Me solo with the guitar, and other characters who are shambolically me. It’s high-tech Tracy & the Plastics. I want Carrie to write the dialogue.”

“There’s dialogue?” Perron said, wearily.

“Yes, I’m putting aside postmodern choreography for this round. But I like for there to be some physical obstacle to overcome, to help me focus. It’s about manufacturing your strength. You’re wondering why I came to you. It’s because you worked with David Blaine.” Perron said nothing. “It should feel bananas, not pretentious,” Clark went on.

Then Perron said, “Do we want to make a decision on this cover art?”

“Let me look again,” Clark said. “Option one: Carlotta’s ass. Two, one of my selects. A head shot.”

“That gives me the last two or three records,” Perron said. “I want this one to be more aggressive. Let’s move away from that thing.”

“You mean that kooky thing?”

“That sedated thing.”

Clark said, “Let’s do Carlotta’s ass.”

“The label will give us some pushback,” Perron said. “But, honestly, I think it’s great.”

After a few moments, Clark said cheerily, “Fun fact: Carlotta has scoliosis.”

“It’s been a generative time, creatively, and I would like for it to set the stage for a broader vision,” Clark told me one day, with uncharacteristic career-oriented self-seriousness. Talk like this, out of rock-and-roll people, usually means projects, sidelines, interdisciplinary schemes. For example, Clark had an idea to take old Mussolini speeches and make Mad Libs out of them. She’d have her nieces and nephews fill in the missing words and phrases; then, in an art gallery in Italy, Isabella Rossellini would sit and recite the Mad Libs (the script delivered to her by Clark via an earpiece, to add a layer of awkwardness) to a soundtrack of chopped-up, sort-of-recognizable Verdi and a monitor playing clips of Mussolini himself.

Or motion pictures. Last year, Clark co-wrote and directed a short film called “The Birthday Party,” for “XX,” an anthology of horror films directed by women. In it, a suburban mother hides her dead husband’s body inside a large panda suit at her young daughter’s birthday, and it keels over into the cake, providing the film’s subtitle: “The Memory Lucy Suppressed from Her Seventh Birthday That Wasn’t Really Her Mom’s Fault (Even Though Her Therapist Says It’s Probably Why She Fears Intimacy).” At one point, Clark had a development deal to write and direct another film, called “Young Lover,” which is also the name of a song on the new album. A writer in her twenties has a sadomasochistic affair with an older married woman—“ ‘Swimming Pool’ meets ‘Bitter Moon’ meets ‘Blue Velvet’ ” is how Clark pitched it. Recently, Lionsgate, mining properties out of copyright, approached Clark with the idea of directing a film based on “The Picture of Dorian Gray,” with a female protagonist. The writer is David Birke, who wrote the screenplay for “Elle,” with Isabelle Huppert, which had become an obsession of Clark’s. (In the film, Huppert’s character’s father is in prison.) Birke, it turned out, had taken his daughter to see a show during the “Marry Me” tour, ten years ago. So, here was mutual admiration, a chance to play together in the sandbox of success.

The “Dorian Gray” treatment called for six historical settings. “It would be an expensive film to make,” Clark said. She reckoned twenty-five million dollars. “The likelihood of making this film is, like, two per cent. But I don’t care, because it’s fun. Worst-case scenario is I get seen as a hardworking person with ideas in a medium I’m interested in. I sort of subscribe to the idea of the busier you are, the busier you are.”

The day after her session with Perron, we drove up to Laurel Canyon, to Compound Fracture, which is what she calls the house that serves as her studio and working space. Technically, it is not a residence. There is a live room in the den (good for recording drums), a studio in the garage, and, just inside the front door, a white grand piano, with a book on the music rack of the complete Led Zeppelin (tablature for intermediate guitar), and, next to it, some lyrics scribbled on stationery from the Freehand hotel in Chicago: “Doing battle in the shadows / Baby you ain’t rambo (rimbaud).” She keeps a neat, sparse house. She’s a born de-clutterer. The art work is eclectic: a Russ Meyer nude, paintings made by people in extreme mental distress, and a photo mural of the high sage desert of West Texas. There’s a downstairs sitting room—“If musicians want to take a break,” Clark emphasized—with a stocked bar, William Scott busts of Janet Jackson and CeCe Winans, and some show-and-tellable mementos. She took one down: “I was on an ill-fated surfing trip to Barbados, in my 90 S.P.F., and I looked down and there was this cock and balls made of coral.” This had survived the purges. So had a brass heart sent by the surviving members of Nirvana. In 2014, when the band was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Clark played Kurt Cobain’s part in a live performance of “Lithium.” There was a plaque in recognition of her inclusion, in 2014, on Vanity Fair’s international best-dressed list. “I’ve been wearing athleisure ever since,” she said.

For a while, her friend Jenny Lewis, the singer-songwriter, had slept on the couch down here. “She’s like a tree,” Clark said. “I would take shade in her. She made me eat food, because I forgot.”

Lewis told me, “I would go upstairs, make a quesadilla, cut it in half, and leave a half there. Maybe the little mouse would come. I’d come up later, see the half gone, and think, My work is done here.”

“As an adult, I haven’t cohabitated with another human,” Clark said. “Jenny and I have been on tour so long, we know the ways to not annoy people.”

When they first got to be friends, years ago, “we Freaky Fridayed,” Lewis said. Clark, eager to get away from New York, moved to Los Angeles, and Lewis, escaping some personal rubble in California, moved into Clark’s East Village apartment.

“We shared so much,” Lewis said. “The sacrifices you make for your music, not having a family. Some things unique to being a woman on the road, silly stuff like removing your makeup in filthy sinks around the world. Just being a woman out there trying to keep it together. Also, being a woman in charge, and the nuances of that.”

They also both had fathers who had been incarcerated. Lewis’s had been in prison for two years—“Everyone in my family goes to jail or prison,” she said—and then was diagnosed with colon cancer and died soon after.

Clark wanted to go for a hike in the midday heat. Every day, she tries to put herself in what she calls a stress position—some kind of physical difficulty, to force herself to persevere. We made the short drive from her house to a ridgeline with a view in the direction of Burbank, and began descending a trail through scrub and poison oak. She had on some flats that she called tennis shoes. The dryness made the steeper pitches slick, and she approached them with great care. At one point, a hum of bees caused her to shriek and run. I was reminded of her song “Rattlesnake,” which is about an encounter with a rattler while she was hiking naked in the Texas desert. “I’m afraid of everything,” she said. “I’m almost inured to it. Same with shame. I figured out years ago that, if everything is absurd, then there is nothing to be afraid or ashamed of.”

Despite her stress-position talk, Clark is a creature of habit, a curator of routine. Brownstein recalled insisting that they go on a different hike from this one, a couple of miles away. “She asked that I never drag her anywhere unfamiliar again,” Brownstein told me.

An hour later, we were back at the house. A mixing engineer named Catherine Marks arrived, to listen to some of the mixes on the new album. Clark wanted a fresh set of ears. (The principal mixer, back at Electric Lady, was Tom Elmhirst, an eminence who has worked with Adele, Lorde, Bowie, and Beck.) Marks, a tall Australian, was wearing a tank top that read “La La La.” Clark had showered and changed into a Pink Floyd “The Wall” T-shirt.

They talked about the low end on one of the songs. “I want to give it more balls,” Marks said, which had a good ring to it, in the Aussie accent. “Tom is a genius, obviously.”

“Best idea wins,” Clark said. They talked for a bit about how unprepared each of them had been for how hot Elmhirst is. They went out to the garage studio, which was full of wonderful toys—racks of guitars, various mikes, and an array of vintage synthesizers. Check it out, an E-mu Emulator II.

Marks sat down at the console. “Smells nice in here. It doesn’t smell like dudes.”

“It’s this Japanese incense.”

A Pro Tools session in the dying light of a Laurel Canyon afternoon. Marks got to work checking out the mixes. It was easy to imagine Clark in here alone for hours, days, weeks, thickening and pruning the sound as it scrolled by onscreen. Outside, you could hear a neighbor playing drums and the occasional honk of a lost Uber. Inside, Marks was listening to a track that Clark wanted to reimagine. “The vocoder’s not working for me,” Clark said. “I like the guitar better. If you need to sleaze it up, add Gary Glitter tuning. Just add glam guitar.”

“I can’t turn off what turns me on,” Clark’s voice was singing, while Clark herself stood behind Marks, checking her phone.

“Oh, my God,” she said, eyes suddenly wide. “This is so stupid. Oh, my God.” She typed a response, put her phone down on a preamp, and began pacing in anticipation of a reply. “It’s so convoluted.” She scooped up the phone and read a new text. Typing a reply, she was shaking her head. “What?” Marks asked.

“It’s a cuckold situation,” Clark said. “I can’t talk about it.” This was more than just hot goss. It was the most excited I’d ever seen her. Another exchange of texts, more pacing, head-shaking, the burly laugh. “It’s the first time I’ve felt glee all day.”

Last month, Clark went into a studio, in midtown Manhattan, with her friend the producer, composer, and pianist Thomas Bartlett, to record an alternative version of the new album: just her voice and his piano, a chance to hear, and to preserve, the songs stripped down to their bones. She had signed off on the final masters of the record the day before they started. “I took a whole night off,” she said. She was wearing a leopard-print bodysuit. “Now I’m done with my emotional anorexia, my monastic fantastic. It’s so good to just play music.”

It went like this: An engineer, Patrick Dillett, played a track from the record, then Bartlett spent a few minutes learning it and vamping on an electric piano, and then they went into the recording studio and laid down a few takes, him on a grand piano and her cross-legged on a couch, singing into a mike. After the first take, Dillett said, “It sounds pretty. Is it supposed to?”

“Will I be ashamed of myself?” she asked him.

“I hope so. Isn’t that the point?”

They recorded in sequence and got through several songs a day.

Later that week, she and Bartlett invited a dozen or so friends to hear her perform the album. Among them were David Byrne, Sufjan Stevens, and the singer Joan As Police Woman, who was celebrating her birthday at the studio afterward. They sat in folding chairs. Clark was on the couch, made up and dressed fashionably in a long jacket and pants.

“Now I can feel the feelings,” she said. She made a show of unbuttoning her pants in order to sing.

“The acceptance of beautiful melody is sometimes difficult for a downtown New York musician,” Byrne had told me earlier in the day. But here was Clark, without all the sonic tricks—the jagged guitar and the scavenged beats—accepting her melodies, feeling the feelings. She told me later, “I didn’t realize the depth of the sorrow on the album until I performed it that night.” The next day, she was shelled and had to cancel appointments. “It turns out that that was crucial to my being done with the experience of making it. Now I need to do what I need to do as a performer: I need to be able to disassociate.”

The final song on the album, the one about suicide, concludes with her repeating “It’s not the end,” in a voice that makes you want to bring her hot soup. On the night of the studio performance, she finished singing and sheepishly accepted the applause of her friends. Then she buttoned up her pants and said, “Party time, everyone.” ♦  http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/08/28/st-vincents-cheeky-sexy-rock

[lovemesomesurveys]

What color of suit did your father wear to your parents wedding? If your parents were never married, what kind of dress / suit would you like to wear to your own wedding? I don’t know if I want to get married, so.

What is your favorite show? How often do you watch it? I have several favorite shows.

Are Zhu Zhu pets really that awesome? No.

Ideally, how many children would you want in the future? I don’t know if I want kids, either.

What is something that you hate to do every day? Take my medicine.

Do you believe that true love can be found online? It happens.

Have you ever just lost interest in a friend? I’m often the one people lose interest in.

If you had to live in an extreme environment — think Sahara, Antarctica, under the sea, on the Moon— where would you want to live? Why? Antarctica. I’m afraid of deep water and I can’t swim, the idea of outer space scares me, and I don’t do well even just during the summer. Those places just sound worse to me.

What does your last outgoing text say? I don’t feel like checking.

How was your day overall? It’s been okay now that I’m somewhere that has working AC and I’m not dying.

Have you kissed someone more than 20 times in 13? In 2013? Yes. At 13? No.

How many people of the opposite sex do you fully trust? One.

How often do you hold back what you want to say? Most of the time.

It’s 2 in the morning and you get a text message, who is it most likely? I have no idea. No one texts me except for my parents and brother, and I live with them.  Although, my mom does sometimes text me from her room and she has done so at night to tell me something she just remembered or about something on TV.

Ever cried while you were on the phone with someone? Yes.

Who did you last ride in a car with besides family? It’s been so long since I’ve been in a car with anyone other than family.

How do you know the last male you texted? He’s my brother.

Remember the first time you kissed the last person you kissed? Yes.

Did your last kiss take place on a bed? No.

Do you think the last person you kissed cares for you? In a general sense.

Last movie you saw in theaters? Beauty and the Beast.

Do you laugh a lot? Sure.

Are you good at giving directions? Nooo. I’m horrible.

What does your mom call you? Sis or Steph.

Are you afraid of roller coasters? Yes.

Ever had a song sang about/for you? No.

Is there a person of the opposite sex who means a lot to you? Yes.

Have you ever been nice to someone who treated you like crap? Yes.

Is it hard for you to be happy for someone else? No.

If you could have one language, one habit, and one skill “downloaded” straight into your brain, what would they be? I’d be fluent in Spanish, take better care of myself, and be able to draw.

What are some upcoming films you’re looking forward to seeing? The Last Jedi, but I still have a few months to go.

Write a sentence in another language: Estoy escuchando un video de YouTube.

Do you know what emancipation of minors is? Yes.

Are you one to ditch set plans? Sometimes, but I always feel crappy about it. I try and give a good amount of notice, though. I don’t wait last minute.

Have you ever sent an X-Rated picture to someone? No.

Can you actually play an instrument or do you say it to be cool? I can’t play one and I don’t say I can.

What big city do you live near? Los Angeles.

Do you like breaded chicken sandwiches? Sure.

Is there a Sonic in your area? Yes.

Have you ever gone to a thrift store? Yes.

When is the last time you sneezed? Yesterday.

Are you happy with your weight? No.

If you had to choose, would you rather be anorexic or bulimic? I would rather not be either. That’s a very serious thing.

Have you ever starved yourself/made yourself throw up? No.

Do you think Johnny Depp is attractive? No.

Are you happy with the state you live in? Yes.

How many times have you seen the opposite sex naked? Never in person.

How many times have you seen the same sex naked? Never in person. Other than myself, ha.

Do u type lyke dis or do you type normally? Oh my gosh no I don’t type lyke dis.

Have you ever gotten in a physical fight? Did you win? Never been in one.

Are you registered to vote? Yes.

When days go by, do you cross them off on the calendar? Nope.

Are you currently counting down to something? If so, what? Summer being over.

How old were you when you got text messaging? Sixteen was when I got my first cell phone.

Do you pay rent to your parents? No.

What do you think of Obama’s new healthcare bill? Old survey.

How many icons are on your desktop? Zero.

Do you spit or swallow? --

Ever wrote something on a bathroom wall? No.

Do you dye eggs for Easter? I did all the time growing up, up until like three years ago. ha.

What color hair did the last person you kissed have? Brown.

Do you like your eye color? It’s alright.

What’s the nearest beach? One that’s about 2 hours away.

Ever been to Florida? No.

What type of car did you ride in last? Honda.

Are you excited for summer 2013? Buddy, it’s summer 2017.

What class were your parents (ex. class of ‘75)? I don’t feel like calculating.

Are you in debt right now? For what? Yes.

What color is your phone? Rose gold.

Have you ever had someone read a text message they weren’t supposed to see? No.

What’s the minimum age you think someone should have a cell phone at? I don’t know. Like 12 or 13.

Would you ever work night crew? No.

How old is the last person you texted? 50.

Has the power ever went out in your area when it wasn’t even storming? Yeah. It happens during the summer sometimes. Or if someone hits a power line or something.

Do you sleep with all the lights out, or do you leave a lamp or even the television on? I sleep with the TV on.

Do you ever get scared of the dark? Under what circumstances do you feel afraid in darkness? If I’m alone.

Who was the last person that lied to you, or that you can recall lying to you? What did they lie about? How did you find out they were lying? I don’t recall.

Do you know anyone that says they don’t lie, ever? How do you feel about this? No, but if someone said that they’d be lying.

Do you ever use the term “smashed” to describe someone as being very drunk? No.

What do you think makes a person ugly, physically? Well that’s rude.

What do you think makes a person ugly, personality-wise? Arrogant, cocky, obnoxious, disrespectful, thinks they’re better than everyone, rude...

Has anyone ever called you ugly, straight up, before? How did you react to this? No.

Who is the most stubborn person you know {excluding yourself}? My dad. I get it from him.

[6onmyshoulder]

wroteuplikethis*

Having watched countless concert compilations on youtube, and having been to The Weeknd’s concert when he touched down in Singapore, I think it’s safe to say that when it comes to hip hop, there is a slight(and I use this carefully) disconnect in the hip hop concert culture, as compared to the crowd’s energy and hype in the US/UK/Canada/Holland etc. The recent A$AP Rocky performance at Marquee seemed to be a testament to that, as the crowd only seemed to know two songs Rocky performed, one of which wasn’t even his own song to begin with...goddamn ‘Plain Jane’.

Some of the performances that have stood out in those compilations have been Playboi Carti’s performances, whenever and wherever.

(Now, I just want to add a disclaimer that I’m not dissing Singapore’s concert crowds. And that I would love to have had the opportunity to fly over and catch my favourite artists live. But my bank account doesn’t let me, which pretty much sucks...)

Carti’s performances seem like the place where you’d...die...lit h a h a. He’s barely singing along to his own song, and seems to spend a large majority of his stage presence hyping the crowd up and screaming 10 of his 1026 ad-libs at any given point. The crowd vibes along, going completely ape-shit.

It’s raw. It’s animalistic. It’s loud. It’s in your face. It’s wild. The fact that Carti fans sing along to his snippets at concerts is amazing to me. A 30 second snippet completely changes the mood of the crowd, sending them into a frenzy, as evidenced by the countless concert recordings of Carti performing ‘Cancun’.

It’s in this raw energetic sphere that Carti absolutely thrives in. And that’s exactly where Carti’ sophomore release, ‘Die Lit’, exists.

‘Die Lit’ has also become kind of a comfort album. I was on a bus at night a while ago, and as usual, I felt this overwhelming urge to listen to ‘So Far Gone’ or ‘Take Care’(2 Drake albums notorious for putting one in their feels). As my thumb hovered over the ‘Drake’ artist arrow, something shifted and I found myself playing ‘Die Lit’. Granted, I was initially feeling kinda sad(what’s new), but ‘Die Lit’ weirdly put me at ease with my emotions. I didn’t think, I didn’t reflect and I didn’t feel, as I’d usually do with those two Drake albums(or other sadboi albums). ‘Die Lit’ allowed me to sink into the beats and Carti’s repetitive hooks that were catchy and easy to listen to.

The album art features a black and white photo of Carti jumping into a mosh pit while flipping people off and it serves as a perfect metaphor for what the album is about. The picture looks brash, unadulterated, insane, chaotic and yet, weirdly poetic, and the album itself, sonically, captures all those.

Die Lit opens with ‘Long Time - Intro’ with Carti talking about how he hasn’t ‘felt like this in a long time,’ while repeatedly ad-libbing in the background(pss, slatt, ooh, pow, pa, yeah). Some really nice synths on the instrumental that sound organic. Carti saying ‘I’d rather get caught with it than without it,’ is the highlight of the track. A fun track that serves as a nice opener to an enjoyable album.

I don’t know how many of you have watched ‘The Matrix: Reloaded’(reloaded is the second movie and it’s trash, so is revelations. only the first movie is fire and worth the watch.) but there’s this underground rave scene where people absolutely lose their minds and party like there’s no tomorrow(i mean they have to seeing as they’re living in a technologically dystopic world). The second track off ‘Die Lit’, ‘R.I.P.’, sounds like it could have been the perfect song to accompany this particular scene. If organised chaos was a song, it would be R.I.P......stripped back production, a slightly overblown bass that has a weird metallic quality to it and Carti’s flow over such a simple instrumental creates such an intense atmosphere, a chaotic one. At certain points, the song is literally just the bass line, one synth and ad-libs, and it somehow, fits into the whole ‘organised chaos’ idea. ‘I’m on demo lit, I’m on migo lit,’ raps Carti. He fits into the track perfectly, and finds the perfect gaps to spit his ad-libs. Him saying that he ‘bought a crib for momma, off that mumbling shit’ begets a sense of awareness of exactly what he brings to the table lyrically.

‘Lean 4 Real’ feels like a mellower ‘R.I.P.’. Slower but just as stripped back, the instrumental has an animalistic quality to it, probably because of the weird background synth that makes it sound like it was recorded in a forest at midnight. Skepta comes in with a reliable verse, countering Carti’s chaotic nature and giving the listener a sense of uniformity with his verse. Carti hops back on and re-hypnotises the listener by repeating ‘I’m on the beans 4 real, i’m on the lean 4 real.’ Simple in its execution, insanely good in its presentation.

Old Money picks up where Lean 4 Real left off, with Carti repeating ‘old money, new hoes,’ then throwing a bunch of ad-libs around, peppering the song with a few more simple rap lines. The bass kicks in with a vengeance through out the song, and Carti’s effortlessness is just put on display for one to enjoy.

Love Hurts(lmao) comes in with a jarringly metallic synth and a hypnotic bass line that just seems into every nook and cranny of your mind, creating a very dark and slightly hellish soundscape. This track genuinely gave me Stockholm Syndrome, as I found myself listening to this insanely jarring song on repeat. ‘Shawty want a rockstarrrrr okay!’ sings Carti, while Travis Scott comes in with a pretty good verse, encapsulating all that’s good with the entire track. His delivery fits the mood of the track perfectly, and the auto tune blends in gorgeously with the grungy vibe of the track.

Lil Uzi Vert and Carti can’t do anything wrong together and in the wake of wokeuplikethis* and left, right, Shoota becomes another song that strengthens their power couple status. Uzi flows on the track even before the beat drops, and once it does drop, Carti picks up where Uzi leaves it on this bouncy and slightly happier sounding track, with the shimmering synth creating an upbeat vibe.

Right Now and Poke It Out are pretty fun to listen to. Bouncy production, Carti’s effortless flows and Pierre’s and Nicki’s features are decent(Pierre’s is actually pretty good not gna lie...would write more but I really just wna focus on my faves).

I like Home(KOD) enough and it’s mainly cause Carti says ‘bring that money home, daddy waiting for it’ over and over and over again...

Fell In Luv’s production is something else man. Really simple lyrics from Carti(i mean did you really expect anything else?). Pierre’s production throughout the album has been special and Fell In Luv is no exception. The vocal sample is such a minor aspect of the song but adds so much character to the beat, and Bryson Tiller’s lofi feature(sounds like he recorded it on his iPhone) actually adds to the aesthetic of the track.

Foreign and Pull Up are pretty decent tracks. Not really my faves and felt a bit ‘filler-ish’.

Mileage has one of the funniest choruses I’ve heard in a while. ‘Molly cyrus, catching bodies, don’t care if your pussy got some mileage mileage....’ Carti dismantling the idea of slut-shaming in one line that’s who I stan uno. Chief Keef’s deeper voice lends a certain gravitas to what feels like a ‘higher pitched’ track cause of Carti’s voice and the production of the beat.

Flatbed Freestyle gives us a good look at baby voice Carti. The beat’s high synth and repeated bass create a repetitiveness that’s unrivalled by the other beats, and Carti literally starts of with ‘BUH BUH BUH BUH BUH BUH’. The beat and Carti compliment each other insanely well, and the track actually ends up being one of the most fun tracks on the entire album. ‘Beeh!’ is my favourite ad-lib after ‘Buh!’ on here. Baby Voice Carti really shines through on this track. He doesn’t sound annoying and doesn’t sound cringe. The Baby Voice is actually...here to save hip hop....

No Time is such an underrated track. Feels like a trap nursery rhyme instrumental, and the sleepy and shimmery xylophone type synth creates an innocent atmosphere as Carti sings about having ‘no time’. Gunna flows over the instrumental like he was born into it. He’s smooth and charismatic, and is perfectly positioned between two Carti verses, forming the perfect palate cleanser within the same song. Definitely one of the better beats on an album already stacked with excellent beats.

I honestly skip middle of the summer...don’t really fuck with it...

Choppa Won’t Miss is an absolute bop in terms of production, and Carti going ‘pew pew pew pew’ in the back is TO DIE FOR. I also just want to ask if anyone can explain the line ‘suck on my dick like a tick’ to me. Thug is pretty good as usual. Flows in and around the beat mans a fucking GOD among men.

R.I.P. Fredo interpolates the R.I.P. beat and sounds amazing sonically. Top is...decent I guess.

Carti created something timeless and fun by sticking to what he knew. Insane production from Pierre and an insane beat selection helped Carti create one of the better albums of 2018(okay i will not play into the 2018 aoty meme).

An album that I enjoyed vastly in 2018, and am still enjoying in 2019, it has snuck into my all time favourite albums list. Carti worked to his strengths and the reception the album received is testament to that. While Playboi Carti may not be for everyone, and especially not for hip hop purists, the effortlessness and simplicity create amazing soundscapes within and across songs. Carti is definitely an acquired taste, and I’m really glad I got into his music.

*^!

[bronyinabottle]

TROTCON 2017 EXPERIENCE

Well my 2nd trip to Trotcon has wrapped up. And as with my first time to give some general thoughts on the trip as well as a breakdown later on of the stuff I got while I was there. So head on after the break if you'd like to hear how things went.

Let me get one thing out of the way first though. Admittedly this trip started out a bit rough at first. And for a little while, and in some ways it's still true. It feels like I had an overall better time the first time I went two years ago even though I was only there for at most 5 hours. As opposed to nearly a full day this time around. It got much better by nighttime. But things like almost forgetting my ID, traffic jams, my computer for some reason had no way to connect to the Wi-Fi there, and when I tried getting a coke from a vending machine it didn't dispense any. Presumably because it was empty for that particular one. (I went to the front office about it and got a replacement out of it, so that was rectified. Buuuuuut yea…). Most of these are pretty minor and by the end of the trip I enjoyed being there despite the hiccups that happened. Just makes it sound like a bummer compared to my first trip where I had so much awesome stuff happening one after another in the few hours I spent there two years ago. The only bad thing that happened two years ago was throwing up when I got back in the car (Apparently my body had an adverse reaction to having a full Steak n' Shake lunch and a few hours of Convention fun all at once.). But then again that's also high expectations I put on the trip since the first one was so special being my first ever convention and everything. Again I still had plenty of fun and got some cool stuff that I don't regret going for. Just besides some minor inconveniences and moments where I sat in my room and/or walked through the building out of boredom it definitely was far from perfect.

But with that out of the way let's get to a few things that definitely livened up the trip.

REUNITING WITH PIRATE DASH

First of all of course I had to see the mod of Pirate Dash again. Very nice to see him and chat a little. Got a few things from him including a small Twilight print and 2 buttons. Though the true fun with him began with something that I'll get to not too long from now.

M.A. LARSON AUTOGRAPH

Also coincidentally M.A. Larson returned to Trotcon the year I went to again. He wasn't here last year. But it was awesome once again to see my favorite writer of the show. Last time I got a photo with him and that's it. This time I just got an autograph. But what exactly did I have him autograph? Well it's something I decided to make real fast last week where I did a spirited thing for each of his episodes that he's credited as a writer/co-writer for. I'll show them here as digital versions.

This one he would sign and give back to me

This one I would give to him as a gift.

He really liked it and asked what my favorite episodes out of them were. And I said Cutie Mark Chronicles, Magical Mystery Cure, and Amending Fences. And with that I had the autograph and everything. I did come across Larson a few more times while walking in the hall. Waved to him at least once, and noticed him at the bar wearing what I believe was a Detroit Tigers hat which was interesting. But yeah it was definitely great seeing my favorite writer from the show in-person once more.

DARKEST EPISODE OF MY LITTLE PONY PRESENTATION

At about Nighttime I went to a panel about the Cutie Remark about how it's the darkest episode of the show and some theories about the episode. While that episode is kind my least favorite out of the Finales it is definitely an intriguing episode to give some thoughts about. And the thing at the end where he explains a major part that is often unmentioned is how Starlight prevented Spike from being born. Or at the very least, not born under the same circumstances where he would of been helpful (Even putting up the possibility that perhaps an untamed dragon Spike born in Equestria ended up being the cause of the timeline where there's nothing left of Equestria) even showing clips of the first episode where indeed Spike assisted in even getting Twilight to meet the Mane 6. So while Twilight was trying to save their timeline, Spike's entire existence may have been at stake here. A scary, but interesting thought. I don't think it's going to change my opinion on the episode too much, but again very interesting to hear and it was good to hear from who he said to be a Spike fan since I'm somewhat one as well (If I wasn't I sure wouldn't give him the attention I've done for him in I Dream of Twilight Sparkle heh)

RUSTY NAIL MEMORIAL AUCTION/PARTY

But I think the absolute best time I had at this year's Trotcon was at they Rusty Nail memorial service. Now I'll say this. I've been a member of Tumblrpon for a while though I never had the opportunity to meet Rusty Nail. So unfortunately I had no personal attachment of my own, that said I still feel condolences for those who were. And when Teej asked if I'll be there I said I could. Now of course while they were serving drinks, I didn't drink any alcohol since I avoid that at all costs. Basically all I did there was sit, watch the auction and the Quiplash game with plenty of adult humor, drink a coke, talk with a few friends like Teej and Out of Work Derpy's mod and laugh. But that was enough for a great time. Cause there were so many humorous moments and for an event that was in memorial to someone recently deceased, it had a really fun tone to it that basically said that while Rusty is gone. The spirit of the pleasure he gave his friends and the Tumblrpon community still lives on ^^ I did donate a dollar to the proceeds for the diabetes. Also hope a recording of the livestream that was going on will make it to Youtube or something. Would love to watch it all over again. Also awesome that the total proceeds after the whole event was all done was over 1,300 dollars. It was definitely a night worth attending ^^

VENDOR HALL/TRAVELING PONY MUSEUM STUFF I BOUGHT

Now last but not least is the items I got while there. I'll start with the two non-pony items. I got Pac-Man branded pocky that's milk chocolate and cream in the middle. Never actually had any kind of Pocky before but gotta say it was pretty good. Now Pocky Twi's mod will be proud of me :V

Once I saw this Sonic figure in the corner of the Traveling Pony Museum, I was instantly come over with the urge to get it. And get it I did. It's certainly an awesome figure with so much more articulation then probably any figure I've had before. Plenty of potential for poses (Though admittedly I have had trouble just getting it right for certain poses without it falling over). Really glad I got it. It looks really cool on display.

There's some Tumblrpon stuff including buttons from PD that I mentioned, stickers from Out of Work Derpy, a card from Ask Rye Drimer when I met him. And there's also the badge I got with the convention guidebook. Also apparently I so happen to choose the faction that won. Not that I really cared too much about that heh. I didn't really get the chance to go play in any of the nerf gun battle things. There was probably a point where I could of done that instead of just walking around but I just couldn't find myself to do it. Oh well.

I got a 4DE Twilight plushie for myself. I know I already got a Twilight plushie from last time. But this one has the wings opened instead of permanently closed like the one I got last time. And admittedly when I compared the two when I got home the 4DE plush looks much better. I mean no offense of course to LunarShine as I still like the ones I got from him. If a certain episode coming up in Season 7 works out to what I hope. The Velvet plushie I got may suddenly become a very worthy investment

The Guardian of Harmony Twilight is pretty neat. I've always kinda wanted a better official model of Twilight. And this works pretty well considering this is part of Hasbro's first attempt to gear MLP for both genders that has come up in the past year or so. The changeling figure is cool too but I mostly got it for action figure Twilight pretty much.

Last but not least at least for items for me is this large print I got from Bobdude0 AKA the adorable Sweetie Belle art guy with this very cool picture of Twilight teaching magic to Sweetie like Celestia once did for Twilight. He said it was a collab with Viwrastupr and it's just beautiful work altogether. I also got it signed. As a fun little note. Bobdude0 had a thing where he had a 20 sided dice and if you were lucky you got a free item. And guess what, I got a 20 right off the bat! That meant that I could of gotten a free smaller print. Though I downgraded just a little for a sticker on the back that has a chibi Twilight and Spike. At that point I was apparently only his 3rd Natural 20.

There's actually one more item I gotta mention. But it's not in the photo of all the stuff I got because sooner or later it won't really be mine. And it's a 4DE Pinkie Pie Plush

You see, last year I met the family of my Mom's best friend and they happened to have a little girl who's a fan of the ponies herself. Her name's Josie and she's almost like the little sister I never had at this point. Her favorite pony I found out early on was Pinkie (It may be at least partly because Pink's her favorite color though given how hyper and excitable she can be I could easily see why else she likes Pinkie a lot). So keeping that mind coming into the con I definitely had to pick up something Pinkie related for her. And I think this worked out best. At the point I've put this up I most likely will not have gotten it her yet. But upon the next visit to their house I'll certainly have it as a surprise for her. On a side note this family I plan to see the MLP Movie in October , and Josie's probably just as if not more excited for it then I am. So that should be a fun time whenever that comes.

CLOSING THOUGHTS

Anyway, that's all for now on my Trotcon 2017 experience. I can't say this one was quite as amazing as the short time I spent at Trotcon 2015 but it nonetheless had it's moments that was plenty fun and I'm definitely still glad I got to go again. Even more general stuff such as having my own hotel room for nearly a full day was very nice as the bed was very comfy and they have a nice bath in there. There is possibility I go again some other time. Maybe even next year as my parents haven't ruled it out. But definitely no promises on that in case things come up.

Thanks to all who bothered to read this and thanks to everybody from fellow friends I talked to, the entire Trotcon staff for another fun convention. ^^

[voguingtodanzig]

AFTER LONG LAYOFF, PAVEMENT OFFSHOOT SPIRAL STAIRS RETURN TO THROW POIGNANT ‘DAGGERS’  (3 months ago on Clyrvnt)

By Raymond Cummings

Time was, Scott Kannberg’s strongest songs — from Pavement's iconoclastic “Hit the Plane Down” and pugnacious b-side “Stub Your Toe” to something like Preston School of Industry’s spindly “The Idea of Fires” — took flight on a riff and a prayer. These tunes were catchy, brusque and instinctually wrought, 7"-worthy wonders party-crashing the LPs or EPs they happened to come packaged along with. Doris and the Daggers is the Stockton, Calif., native’s fourth post-Pavement album and his second as Spiral Stairs, but it’s his best album because it arrives without those sonic M-80 firecrackers of yore. His songwriting here is eclectic, self-assured, mature and heartfelt, reflecting time’s unyielding march and a heavily stamped passport. A few weeks prior to the release of Doris and the Daggers, I interviewed Kannberg via telephone.

I thought you were back in California. When did you move to Mexico? We were. We moved back to Los Angeles in 2013, I think. We’ve been here in Mexico for like the last 10 months, in Merida, in the Yucátan. My wife’s parents, we lived kind of near them. They decided to move to Mexico because they had a house here in Merida, and we had an opportunity to be close to my parents and be close to them in Mexico. Then, in the end, we wound up following them to Mexico. I’m not sure how my parents feel about that. And also, Australia’s so far away, and we were spending so much money on travel. And I wanted to make music, and the people I make music with are in the States. We wanted to move back to San Francisco, but a lot of my friends from San Francisco are moving to L.A. At that time, L.A. was still pretty cheap, and it felt like San Francisco on the east side of town. But in the three years we lived in L.A., it got so expensive.

How do you like living in Mexico? Merida’s a pretty cool place; it’s really growing because it’s a real safe city. A lot of people from Mexico City and Monterrey are moving their families here, so it’s kinda bursting at the seams. But I don’t know any Spanish. Well, I know a little bit. You kinda have to know a little Spanish. There’s a lot of expats here. We have some friends, my wife knows a little Spanish. The food’s amazing, the culture’s amazing, the climate’s a little too hot for me. [Laughs] So, it’s okay, for a while.

I feel like, of all your solo records, Doris and the Daggers is the one that fits together best as an album. There’s normally albums where one or two songs stand out as “the singles”; the Preston School of Industry albums had that, to an extent. This one doesn’t have that; it feels like a whole. I try to create a comfortable listening experience. I look at it as two sides, like a vinyl record; I don’t make it for a streaming or CD kind of world, because I don’t know that world, really. I don’t know how bands like the Beatles made 35-minute records. The goal is to make it so that a listener is interested for 20 minutes, and then they turn the record over, maybe revisit the other side at another time.

For this record, I recorded probably 15 songs with Justin [Peroff, drummer of Broken Social Scene] and Matt [Harris, former bassist of the Posies], and then another 15 with others, and the songs really fit together well as a cohesive kind of thing. I never really try for singles, but I guess I can definitely see the Preston records as having more singles, or “single”-type songs.

This also feels like a more personal album, like you’re really putting yourself out there. I think so, too. There’s an emotional theme to it, I guess. I’ve been listening to a lot of those kinds of records — I really started to get into Lloyd Cole, who has sly lyrics, but they’re emotional. Maybe it comes from that. But maybe it’s that I’m older, more at ease with my songwriting.

One of my favorite songs from the album is “The Unconditional,” which conveys nicely what it’s like to be a parent as children reach that age where they can start making demands. Was there a particular moment that inspired this? I had the riff, and I had the basic music of the song. It was kind turning into this kind of Van Morrison-y thing, with horns. I had a rough idea of some of the lyrics, but a lot of these songs I actually made up the lyrics driving, or riding my bike. Behind our house in L.A., we had this amazing hiking trail. I’d go out there every day and listen to these songs, and whatever popped into my head, I’d jot down. Basically, you’re driving your kid to school and these things pop out of their mouths. [Laughs] I’ve always liked songs people wrote about their children. Everybody does that at some point; I wanted to have one.

Has your daughter heard it? Yeah! She loves it. She knows all the lyrics. She pronounces some of the words wrong. The thing I’m always amazed by with kids is how they retain the language. She’s saying some pretty complicated words. We let her watch little YouTube videos of people playing with toys, and I think that’s where she gets most of it from.

“No Comparison” was a surprise. It flows with the album, but it’s very staccato. It’s almost like disco. How did that one come together? I’ve always been a big fan of the Talking Heads. That’s where it started. I like the Happy Mondays, and I’ve always liked a good dance beat. Originally, “No Comparison” wasn’t intended to be like that, but it kinda morphed into it. The synthesizer element came way late. Kelley Stoltz, when I went up to do some things with him, he added those synthesizer lines; they’re so brash and funny-sounding that I had to keep them. This was my stab at a song off of Remain in Light or something, or something off of Flesh and Blood by Roxy Music. I did that in Pavement, too; “Passat Dream” was a dance-y kind of song. They come out every once in awhile.

I feel like this album has a lot of little touches that bring something special, like how on “Dance,” every time you sing that word in the chorus, there’s a horn stab. Yeah! The horn guys I had were incredible. That song took a real turn. If you heard the demo, it’s completely different — it sounds more like an early Wire song. It went in another direction when I got the horns on there, and I asked this friend of mine, Doug — who actually plays in a Roxy Music cover band — to play on the song and make it sound like Roxy Music. [Laughs]

I know that your longtime drummer, Darius Minwalla, passed away before recording started. Knowing that the vocal at the end of the title track was his really adds something — it’s kind of left-field without the context, but it’s emotional if you know. Can you tell me a bit about him? That vocal was a snippet from a video we put together for a tour from maybe 2004 or so, because Darius kinda came on after [Preston School of Industry's] Monsoon. It was kind of fitting to place it at the very end of the record, because the whole record is emotionally part of him, and I wanted to have his voice in there somehow.

A couple of these songs are about him. “Exiled Tonight” is about a dream I had. It was the last song I was going to record the vocals for. I didn’t have any good vocals, and I came into the studio one day, and the engineer stopped me halfway through and said, “Those lyrics are terrible.” I said, “I know they are.” He said, “Come back tomorrow.” That night I had this dream, where Darius is stuck in the afterlife, and it was a kind of a sign that I had to finish the song so I could finish the record. Another song, “Angel Eyes,” has a verse about him, that the very last song he ever played on drums was “No More Heroes” by the Stranglers.

I think it was a freak accident. He had a bad heart that he didn’t tell anybody about; he had a heart attack and died a month before we were supposed to record up in Seattle. It kinda threw everyone for a loop. It sent me in a different direction for this album.

He was a great guy. I’d known him a long time. He seemed pretty happy in his life. When I moved to Seattle in the early 2000s, he was the Posies’ drummer; Matt Harris, who played on Doris and the Daggers, was the bass player for the Posies. After the Monsoonrecord, Darius started playing with us; he’s the drummer on The Real Feel. After I left Seattle, I moved to Australia, and we lost touch for four or five years. He was supposed to play on Doris.

Justin from Broken Social Scene was really good friends with Darius, too, and he called me up and asked if he could drum.

“Exiled Tonight” seemed, to me, like a touring travelogue. With Pavement, you were touring constantly. Do you miss the touring life? I do miss it. With Pavement, in the old days, we worked it pretty hard. We did every single show anybody asked us to do. We did it on a shoestring budget. I think it kinda wore us down in the end. The reunion tour was great because it was at a much bigger level, and we had a crew and could stay in hotel rooms; it was like a nice vacation, really. This solo stuff is still shoestring, but it’s still touring, and I’m excited about it. I’m going next week to play SXSW, six shows there, then we’ll do a West Coast tour in April, an East Coast / Midwest tour in June.

Eight years separate The Real Feel and Doris. Do you have a big backlog of unreleased songs? Sorta. I didn’t really write that many songs after The Real Feel. But the way I do things, it takes me a long time to get up and running, and when I do start writing songs, I write a lot of songs. I try to use most of them on the records or as b-sides. Most of these are from the last few years. Some of them date back to The Real Feel era, but they sound a lot different than they used to. I’ve already written my next record, and I’m ready to record that!

You’re way ahead of the curve. I don’t wanna fool around. I don’t think you need to, anymore; you can kinda just put things out when you wanna put 'em out. I’m not gonna wait another eight years.

What does the song title “AWM” stand for? It stands for “Always Wanted More.” It’s about my ex-wife. Chrissy was a big part of Pavement; we split up in 2003 or 2004. She’s still around, in San Francisco. She comes to shows. It was tough. It was pretty tough times in Seattle, after the divorce, but then I met Sarah, and things changed after that. I’m much happier.