"but she didn't say anything about the millennials' music".

well, i'm not a millennial.

sorry.

as though every other critic didn't focus on millennial music, right?

i don't care how old an artist is. if it's good, it's good. but, if it's bad, it's bad - and i'm not going to follow trends or kowtow to the market to fit in or be 'cool'. i'm an adult, and i'm broadly going to be disinterested in music that is being mass marketed to children.

the new dmst disc is my record of the year

in fact, the only new record i spent any substantive amount of time with in 2017 was the new do make say think record and, by default, it consequently wins record of the year.

and, it's a strong record - it's going to deserve somewhere in the low 90s, out of 100. it deserves mention, at least.

if there were stronger records released last year, i'm not the person to look to for elucidation, at this point. broadly speaking, i need to dig hard to find what i want; i'm not going to find much of value in these year end lists, and, for me, 2017 was a 'me' year, where i focused mostly on my own music, while restricting my exploration to acts i already had a high confidence in. i don't expect to spend much time digging over 2018, either. rather, i'll probably end up cycling back over 2019 or 2020.

when i get to the process of digging, you will no doubt be surprised by what i pull out - and much of it will be obscure or forgotten.

i've added a few new acts to my core list over the last few years, and they've mostly run the course, at this point. cloud nothings & la dispute are done. annie clark has gone full junkie retard. i'm going to give touche amore one more, at most - but they're going to sell out, not break up. but, in truth, i wasn't even really keeping up with that, and that's something i'm going to be doing as i finish what i'm doing over the next few weeks.

actually, i have absolutely no idea at all what a "cara delavigne" is.

sorry.

but, it would be nice if, whatever it is, it would return what was once one of the most promising electronic musicians out there back to the home planet.

in the end, nobody is saved. i know better.

but, i'm not interested in the corporate rock mythology. annie clark wasn't some throwaway junkie like kurt cobain or amy winehouse; she had a lot of talent, and it's sad to see it be pulverized under whatever combination of addiction and greed that it got pulverized under...

and, then, bjork.

my expectations with bjork have been dramatically lowered over the last fifteen years, to the point that i'll consider this a successful release if i deduce it's worth listening to a second time.

it's starting off relatively well. let's see where it goes.

i'm at track two, and this currently sounds like every other time that bjork has tried to be serious since vespertine, which wouldn't be such a tragedy if it were more dynamic. it's less that it's the same thing over and over again, and more that it's the same meandering aimlessness, yet again.

i caught the mt zion sample. did you?

i'm going to let this play, because it's bjork and i can still enjoy what is really brutal stagnation from her on a kind of basic level. and, i might listen to it a second time, too. but, she really needs somebody to challenge her, to take her out of these patterns she's built up around herself, to smash whatever mental chains are keeping her running on the spot and prevent her from going over what is really the same song over and over and over.

thoughts on the new st. vincent record.

i skipped st vincent, who i've still yet to see play an actual set, a few months ago after giving the record a very brief listen and finding essentially nothing of value in it at all. i'm coming back to it now as a last chance, and it's just really not remotely in my sphere of interest, at this point.

hopefully, she finds a way to put the pills away and get her brain back. but, that's not how this usually works.

that is my takeaway from this record: annie clark's talent has apparently evaporated due to drug use.

first impressions of the new son lux record

i've been waiting for this one for what seems like forever, and it's actually been a while since i found myself doing anything like that; i've become used to disappointment after a few records, and, in the process, just stumbling upon things, sometimes months after the fact.

the lead singles had me worried, but not too worried, because i went through this with the last record, too - the singles seemed flat when separated out from the record. but, i don't 'get' singles, anyways, unless they're epics. they're just too short. i have a very hard time focusing on pieces of music for less than five minutes at a time...it's done before it starts...and, as an ad, which is all a single can ever really be, artistically, the process of releasing singles seems incapable of hooking me, and may have even turned me off of records i would have otherwise liked.

so, fuck singles. i should really just not bother, and ritually wait for the records. easier said than done, right?

but, any perceived lack of depth that the singles projected when separated from the record evaporates upon a few listens. and i need to stress the necessity to listen. at least five times. son lux has always been a little difficult, that's half of why i'm attracted to it, but it's also always been very rewarding, as pop, once you disentangle it, which is the other half of the reason i'm attracted to it. this record is, at times, just kind of opaque, on immediate first impression. the sound is saturated over the spectrum, and it needs to be disentangled, but it's the syncopation that you need to really get used to before you can mentally decode the songs into something coherent.

if you're not going to give this some time, you're going to get bored quickly enough, and i'll tell you that this will unfortunately happen to quite a few people. but, if you spend the time with it, you're going to uncover a record that is simultaneously a little bit of a throwback to the outsider music of the first record and a kind of a step towards glossier pop, at the same time. the record also reuses a number of themes on the records in between. this makes the project seem somewhat like a summary of ryan lott's career, and i might question his motives in doing that.

if the band pivots after this record into less abstract material, this will likely end up as the normal way into son lux' comparably deeper and more difficult back catalogue. backwards.

as a contained record, this pull between what i'm projecting as a poppier future for the band and the more artistic past that already exists leaves something that is almost existential in scope. while this is where the music i listen to normally lives, i actually kind of liked the sheltered and somewhat neurotic vocals that i'm used to from this band and hope that, at the least, we get to keep this moving forward. but, you can hear that he's interpreted the present moment as some kind of pivot, some kind of paradigmatic shift, some kind of epiphany: weren't we beautiful once?

sure, ryan. back when america was great, right? but, make sure you're careful getting off the cross, because there's another martyr in line behind you.

i don't expect this band to go full boring. if anything, he's projecting a strong palette of pop influences; on this record, the very obvious nods are to freddie mercury and david bowie, and if these are the pop icons he's throwing out in front of him, what's coming is likely to be both ambitious and tasteful.

but, i wouldn't expect another record like this.

http://music.sonluxmusic.com/album/brighter-wounds

so, i'm still plugging away at this.

i've now reached the point where i've caught up to where i left the master document, in late june of 2015, when i finished the initial version of the period one disc. remaining data for the master music document is either in the combined everything document or waiting to be pulled down from the blog itself (after mid 2016). i'll have about a year worth of facebook, youtube & google+ posts to pull out of the combined document before the blog asserts itself as an end point.

what happened was that i realized that the period one disc was not going to be comprehensive, unless i went back to remix the inri/inriched period from scratch. this is when everything started to go wrong, culminating in an eviction at the end of 2017. and, it took me until late 2016 to actually finish the remixes.

as it is, i'm going to have to carry the document on, now, through the rebuild & re-release process that follows. there will be quiet periods in the rebuild, but i'm sure i'll find some distractions to post, include an increase in numbers of concerts attended, starting in late 2015.

the next section runs from late june to late october of 2015 and documents a combination of the gear difficulty and my increasing absorption by the canadian election. it ends when i get a vlog camera. i'm hoping it's a little bit faster than the last period, because there aren't any actual releases.

i'm just past 900 pages, fwiw.

as of jan, 2017, it seems like firefox fixed the problem i was having with streaming flac locally over html5 audio, meaning i should be able to complete the period discs the way i actually wanted to, without any extra windows or funny scripts.

i kind of expected that would happen. glad it has.

thoughts on the new gybe! record

i'm actually interpreting the general feel of the record to be somewhat of a throwback to a component of their first record; one could suggest that this record lacks the variety of emotion that the first record did, but that might be missing the point - they clearly wanted to key in on a specific sound.

but, it sort of misfires.

on the first record, it came off as defiantly hopeful, that is, hopeful in the face of certain defeat; and, considering what the band was at that time, how could they have expected anything besides failure? this is a specific kind of optimism, in that it is understood by all to be futile. what it is is delusion and for that reason was so effective as escape - it was absurd to be hopeful, and that's why it was fun, for a few minutes. the expanded melodic percussion, the xylophones, really aided in this general feeling.

here, it is coming off as an order. BE HOPEFUL, DAMMIT. NOW. HOPE. NOW.

and, here's the thing: that might work better for a lot of people. it really might.

but, i liked the hope better without the coercion.

i'll probably still go seem them play next month.

i am now caught up to where i left off last year, which was may, 2015. so, what i'm actually back to is the rebuild...

i need to rebuild the second part of 2015 over both archives, and varying amounts of 2016 through the both of them.

so, where am i?

i'm in march, 2015.

i'm also filling in a bit of the politics archive, so that's going to slow me down a bit, but i think it's a good idea, because i've been referencing myself in a way that nobody can verify.

this remains a lengthy process and i want to be clear that it's a distant eta.

if you think that it's dark or scary to imagine we have no purpose - as though this is an obscure possibility, right - then you are experiencing something called existential dread.

i would argue that it is really existential dread that is at the root cause of the continuing spread of religion, well into an era where it should have ceased to exist many decades ago.

"but, science says the purpose of existence is to maximize your number of descendants, so shouldn't being an atheist mean you want to have as many kids as you can?"

it's funny how religious people tend to think that science perfectly upholds religion, isn't it? i mean, how could it not, if you're absolutely certain in your faith? that's the thing about faith - all possible evidence always upholds it. if you have faith in santa claus, the absence of presents under the tree any given year just proves you were bad. and, if you have faith in god, then any possible set of events that can be thrown at you will just be perverted to offer more and more evidence for it's existence.

faith is a perversion of logic. that is why it is such a dangerous tool, and must be kept away from the state.

in the western/judaic context, this talk of descendant maximization goes all the way back to the torah. god gave abraham this purpose. but, how did this get attached to science? well, it didn't, except in the minds of religious people, that are seeking out some kind of purpose, because that was what they were taught to seek out.

so, we have this problem: when people raised with religious upbringings come into contact with science, they need to frame it in terms that they understand. religion teaches them that existence is about purpose, and that that purpose has something to do with god (although this itself is circular logic, as the purpose is created to justify god, rather than the other way around). if science is to offer some alternative to religion, it must offer some alternate purpose, right? and, from there, they come up with this vulgar dawkinsianism that deduces that our purpose, as humans, is in carrying on the dna. we exist to breed.

but, the reality is that you'd be hard-pressed to find a scientist (or an atheist) of any ability or renown that would accept that humans have any kind of purpose, as that pre-supposes that a god exists to define it, first. who or what defines purpose, if god does not exist? it's a neat trick that the religious person does, here, in defining existence in purely religious terms, before bringing it to the scientific bodies for answers, as, once you have done that, you have hard-wired religion into the question, and made it useless to science. you can walk down this path with philosophy, it's what it's all about, but not with science, which will provide you with no worthwhile answers if you present it with what are brutally leading questions.

science cannot pre-suppose that a purpose exists. science must gather evidence to determine if it suggests that a purpose exists. whether the nature of the purpose is an empirical question or not, which is what the religionists pre-suppose and assign to scientists as a strawman, is reliant on whether the purpose exists or not, first, which is also an empirical question, and not something to pre-suppose at all.

while it would be extremely difficult to do a comprehensive study that empirically disproves that we have purposes, the lack of evidence underlying any purpose is a convincing argument that we have no purposes, for most atheists and most scientists.

and, so this is what the atheist will tell you: science does not argue that our purpose is to breed, but rather that we have no inherent purpose at all, and are free to define our purposes as we see fit to do so.

i've decided that my purpose is not to raise a family but to to complete my discography, and, because i seek to be free, there is nothing in the universe that has the right to challenge my authority on the point.

so, what am i doing, anyways?

from a distance, it probably seems like i've just fallen through the ground and into a rabbit hole, as i was prancing through the rhetorical field of rhetoric.

yes, the rhetorical field of rhetoric. it's a rhetorical field, remember. of rhetoric.

i think christmas is going to end in the next few days. yeah, it's a long one this year. well, i wanted to deal with all of the alter-reality writing - from 12/1996 to 02/1998 and counting - and, as those who have been following this for a while know, my writing tends to get a little more expansive on, err, holidays.

yes, friday is a holiday. legally. really.

so, i've been maintaining the proper mindset, notwithstanding tolerance, since christmas, preparing myself for the writing in the alter-reality...

....and i actually haven't even started yet.

as we can see, i've ranted here quite a bit, and quite nicely, since the 15th of january, when i closed the audio for the first two periods. today, i've been ranting nearly non-stop for like 18 hours or something - although i'm just about to stop. so, i've done a lot of writing, even if it's not in the topic i was intending. but, what i'm really doing is building a master list of album notes, so that i can pull the parts out that i need as i run through the alter-reality and close.

i need to reiterate that i only have to do this once and that, once it is done, the remaining process wil be much, much smoother.

so, what have i done over the last week?

i've built the first 350 pages of the master list up. the document is currently 700 pages, and has notes going to mid 2015 in it.

at this point, i would guess that the final document (1996-2018) will be around 3000 pages long - word, 8.5"x12", 12 pt - although i only expect to get up to around 1000 by the time i get to actually writing.

which will be when?

march.

christmas will be over before january is.

ok, so i've got the facebook pages updated. i'm going to ultimately convert that timeline into something hardcoded, so i'm actually really using it for data redundancy. but, if you want, you can scroll all the way back to 1996 and see a detailed time-based presentation of my first two periods.

https://www.facebook.com/pg/jessicaambermurray/

there's a condensed version mirrored at my personal facebook site, as well.

i need to close the last bunch of releases for the vlog before i can get back to the alter-reality, but first i need to eat...

i've decided that i need to approach the master list a bit more cumulatively to start. so, i should just get right to reading what was written over 1996, and writing 1997 and planning out 1998. i can get to filling the rest in once that's been taken care of.

i plugged my router back in this morning, and it's made an instant difference in speeding up my machine. i had it unplugged because i didn't want to break the network architecture in the old apartment, but now it doesn't matter any more, because i have to rebuild it anyways.

it's facebook, mostly, that's the problem. i'm guessing that, even with adblock, all of the scripts running are just killing the dns, when it's external. pulling the dns down into the router seems to make a massive difference in responsiveness. that's really crazy, actually. for all of the talk of facebook's influence on elections, it seems to have tied itself to the same generation that is in the process of slowly eroding power, while making it unattractive to younger people. and, these slow pages, if they're widely experienced, are going to just add to the problem.

so, i should be a bit more productive today, as i won't be waiting for pages to load. what i'm doing is distributing the last batch of uploads over facebook, which will be a part of building the master list, soon.

so, i just accomplished something - i've closed all of the audio for period 2.

so, this is where i put the placeholder for period 2, for now.
https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/period-2

that means my discography is now completed for the period 1996-2003, with the caveat that i'll need to add a pdf file to each release for liner notes, and i have to finish the period 1 & period 2 discs, which are html front-ends on a pdf file that is the culmination of all of the individual ones.

i still have some work to do on this.

but, what's next?

it's jan, 1998 in the alter-reality. i left off in dec, 1996.that's a year worth a journal writing, and i'll need to get to it soon. but, i need to recalibrate, first.

first, i need to clean in here. i need to ship the rest of that order. but, i feel better about it now, because i'm over that hump.

i'm not sure how long it's going to take to recalibrate and get all this data in line, but i should be coming up on absolute final closes on inri000-inri015 in the upcoming weeks. and, then i need to stay up to date...

republishing inri074

around october, 2002 i met a friend. i was sort of in need of a friend, and i mean that in the friend sense. but, the mental condition i was in was the explanation of why i needed a friend, if you see what i mean; i was completely unstable in this period and did all kinds of absurd things, which isolated me - and i wasn't getting any better.

i dropped out of school under the realization that i was walking down a path that wasn't getting me anywhere close to what i wanted out of life. i ended up working three jobs to raise money for gender reassignment, and it crossed me paths with somebody that was also trying to think of ways to get out of the box in terms of ways to exist.

she was trying to save up money to go to british columbia. it was some kind of warped take on the grapes of wrath, where everything works out perfectly. but, the rent was eating into her savings, which was making the goal seem impossible. well, unless we stopped having fun.

so, i suggested she should just stay at my parents place. part of it was a hope that she would move her drum kit in, although that didn't happen. and, i might add that this was done with all of the reckless abandon that could be contemplated - we were moving stuff in without even asking, it was really remarkable.

and, it seemed to me that we were getting pretty close over that period.

so, when the time came that she had all that money put aside to go to bc, it was kind of a downer to let her go. and, she initially wanted to go with a friend who dropped out. so, i ended up going across the country with her.

now, i need to be clear: we weren't planning on coming back. we were going to pick fruit or something - we didn't know, exactly, we'd figure it out when we got there.

so, this was meant as a sort of farewell to certain people i hadn't talked to in months and didn't care if i was leaving, anyways. i think it let me work some things out on weird subconscious levels, but the truth is that these songs really aren't about anybody except me, and there's no use in pretending they are - i just liked the idea of a farewell disc.

this disc was initially passed around with a cut up version of the pretentious untitled mix at the end, but this was almost immediately ejected from future burns and is not present on this ep due to the poor quality of the mix. the remaining five tracks became combined into what i now call my eighth symphony.

written and recorded in late 2002 and early 2003. this was initially uploaded unmodified from a cd-r rip in may, 2015, but this was replaced with a version from source on nov 29, 2017 due to clipping due to an unrealized normalization on the burn. disc finalized as symph008 on nov 29, 2017. as always, please use headphones.

the hidden track is the final version and also appears on my ninth record, {e} (inri08x): jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/e

this release also includes a printable jewel case insert and will also eventually include a comprehensive package of journal entries from all phases of production (2003, 2015, 2017). 

credits

released May 3, 2003

j - guitar, effects, bass, synth, voice, piano, drum programming, generative programming (sounder), granular synthesis, sound design, soundscaping, loops, bowls, claps, tables, ebow, orchestral sequencing, digital wave editing, sampling, production, composition

publishing inri073

it was in may of 2015 that i first contemplated the idea of a chamber works. i was creating compilations to end my second period, when i realized that a couple of the tracks that did not fit well into the orchestral works might work better as chamber pieces. so, the chamber works was intended as a kind of companion disc to the orchestral works, both to offer a different flavour and to collect the remaining tracks into a compilation of serious music, so they are not left out.

so, i went back and did a systematic evaluation of the period 2 material to see which tracks could or could not be converted into chamber pieces. the last three mixes were created at this time, while the first was removed of clicks.

then, i stopped. i decided that an electronic chamber works was an idea of questionable worth, and i should put the idea aside for a bit and take a look at the idea again upon reconstruction of the period 1 tapes.

what the issue really comes down to is how good the electronic strings sound. does this actually sound like chamber music, or does it sound like a computer creating chamber music? and, if it sounds like a computer, is the issue resolvable somehow?

when i came back to completing period 2 in the fall of 2017, i decided in favour of the release, as the sound fonts are convincing enough, even if one needs to ignore a few relics here and there. tracks two and three were subsequently added to the compilation.

i decided at the end that this format has some future to it, whether it is fully realistic or not. string music will probably never go away. but, composers are going to find themselves less and less interested in actual physical reproduction, as time moves forward. the question of realism in the tracks is consequently somewhat misplaced, as the chamber music of the future is likely to be performed by computers, and sound like it just a little bit.

initially written and recorded between 2001-2003 and remixed and recorded further over 2014-2015. an idea for this compilation was developed over the last week of may, 2015, but it was not finished or released at that time. corrected and expanded from october, 2017 to january, 2018. finally released & finalized as lp022 on jan 14, 2018. as always, please use headphones.

this release also includes a printable jewel case insert and will also eventually include a comprehensive package of journal entries from all phases of production (2014, 2015, 2017, 2018). 

credits

released May 2, 2003

j - controller input, programming, effects processing, mixing, digital wave editing, composition.

the various rendered electronic orchestras include piano, orchestral drum kit, violin, guitar, viola, cello, contrabass, various string sections and choir.