it's not my fault, i was sleeping.

you know your misanthropy runs deep when even your subconscious dream state starts throwing stuff around like this:

i don't want knowledge,
i want certainty! 

fucking humans...

to clarify: i'm broadly opposed to capital punishment, on the "what if we're wrong?" foundation of legal liberalism.

but, all rules require exceptions.

and, god's crimes are literally beyond parallel in scope and documentation.

could god receive a fair trial? certainly not. doesn't matter...

if we can prove a god exists, then we can find a way to stop it from existing, further; to an extent, proving that god exists is the same thing as disproving that what we're labelling god is actually immortal.

the only open question in my mind is "how do we actually physically end god's existence?".

of course, killing god will not put an end to faith. but, at least we can point to the historical record, label them flat-earthers and move on.

why should we show mercy to a god that has shown no mercy to us?

i'm not interested in "morals".

i'm interested in logic.

the likelihood of god existing is so low as to be negligible.

but, rare events happen.

and, if we somehow find out that a god does exist, we should try it for war crimes and, when convicted, execute it accordingly.

to put it another way...

my views are so much more radical than manson's, and even were as a teenager, that he just struck me as another way to articulate the status quo.

there will be almost no mention of manson in the alter-reality, because i am not and never have been a fan of his.

i was 15 when antichrist superstar was released, a fan of nin and corgan, and deeply anti-conformist, but i don't think i've ever listened to it all the way through. if i ever have, it was by accident, at a party.

first of all, the music is just not very interesting.

but, i don't think the fan base cares much about how boring the actual music actually is.

the flat truth is that i just thought marilyn manson was stupid. i didn't find him interesting or challenging on any level, and what he said was less thought provoking to me and struck me more as just flat out daft.

my opinion hasn't changed at all over the years.

i probably wouldn't have been able to articulate this at the time, but this is the difference: i was an atheist from a very, very young age. not a satanist. an atheist. so, he actually struck me as just promoting another ideology that needed to be broken down. and, if you want to tell me that satanism is not a religion, i'm going to have to take the opposite position in a debate on it.

like, i need to be clear: when i heard him speak, i heard an ideological enemy rather than somebody on my side of things. he wasn't telling people to think for themselves and rely on empiricism and science, he was just giving them an alternate means of brainwashing and trying to work them into another kind of ideology.

i was as opposed to manson's views as i was opposed to any other religionist's views.

i guess i was smart enough to see through it from the start.

and, if your ambitions are to smile as you kill, please turn your ambitions upon yourself.

i think the claim that i lack ambition is pretty obviously false.

rather, my argument is that a market-driven, competitive society makes actual ambition virtually impossible to actualize. i mean, look around you. it's a constant. in order to be successful, you have to throw your ambitions away, first.

there's room at the top, they're telling you still
but first you must learn to smile as you kill...

all that ambition is ever going to get you in this society is a one way ticket to permanent poverty.

and that is what you see in front of you when you look at me.

so, what am i even doing?

well, i've just been sitting here ranting for a long time. i'm kind of feeling in limbo, between things.

i keep trying to do the cleaning i need to do in here, so i can sit down and get back to work, but i keep getting distracted. and, i've actually barely slept in days.

i think i'm going to get some work done for the night, and try to focus on the prep for the week tomorrow. the end point is doing laundry & tucking myself into bed to finish the rest of the rebuild, but it will have to wait yet another day before i get that in motion.

"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.