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.

the second half of the record seems to be a lot stronger than the first half.

yeah, this isn't fundamentally flawed the way that vulnicra was, in the sense of the arrangements being so ultimately haphazard - i know vulnicra sounds complicated, but it's complicated in the way that throwing a lot of buckets of paint at a wall is, rather than the way that organizing it into patterns is: vulnicra had a lot of paint in it, but it didn't produce much of a picture. i get that the idea of the record is mostly vocal, and you can listen to it, but only from that intellectual distance. and, bjork works best when she's got you by the heart.

this record is definitely much more composed.

but, i'm not yet convinced that it's as compelling as medulla.

deathtokoalas

this may have belonged on a best of list c. 1967, but, in 2017, fifty+ years after this was novel, it just sounds like an untrained child messing around with a piece of gear she doesn't understand - which is undoubtedly what it actually is.

agustin muerto

strange you say this. have you ever had the chance to play a modular synthesizer? it takes a lot of knowledge to make stuff like this, and she's a great arranger. I'd understand your comment from someone who isn't into music very much and for who it is just "bleeps and noises", but you seem some who actually knows and makes music, so I really don't get it.

deathtokoalas

see, as somebody who is into music, and who has written hours of electronic soundscapes, this is what my informed perception is: that it is, actually, just a lot of 'bleeps and noises', and that the only way you could try and assign order to this, which does not really have it, is if you're being overwhelmingly pretentious to hide your own ignorance.

the buchla is usually associated with the work of morton subotnick in the mid 60s. i'd point you in that direction to hear an example of somebody that knows how to use the device.

i just want to address a point about synthesis, though, because the idea that synthesis is something you study, or that it takes some kind of knowledge to operate a modular synthesizer, is fundamentally a misunderstanding of what any kind of synthesizer is. i guess that, for an uninformed person such as yourself, you might just see a bunch of technology, and assume you need some kind of degree to operate it. it's a big, complicated machine, right? but, the sum total of the actual theory behind how a modular synthesizer operates would be about ten pages long: you just need to understand what each of the components do. after that, what operating the machine actually means is a process of experimentation, until you get what you want.

you can study algorithms to get sounds, if you want. doing these steps would produce a bell-like, or string-like tone. but, why use this device for that?

rather, the device is capable of a far broader palette of sounds than she's utilizing here, which is merely scratching the surface. and, that's what i'm getting at, here. she's using parallel computing to play pong.

and, no, the arrangements are not interesting, either.

agustin muerto

you know you sound kind of pretentious yourself, right? and there's no need to insult me.

deathtokoalas

no.

pretension is an idea that, ironically, not a lot of people understand well. people seem to think that pretension refers to a concept of arrogance, or an air of superiority.

pretentious has the same root as 'pretend', and quite literally refers to the tendency of people to fake knowledge, or project a greater air of understanding than they actually possess or a deeper artistry than they've actually accomplished.

it has historically been used in the rock era to refer to records and bands, and fans of those records and bands, that have inflated their own artistic value beyond what is actually grounded in any reasonable argumentation. prime examples of pretension in the rock era have come from led zeppelin, peter frampton and pink floyd around the release of the wall. the entire metal scene was ridiculously pretentious from the start. and, i'd label a lot of what edgar froese was involved with as beyond pretentious, as well.

so, in context, being pretentious would be holding this up as an opus - when it clearly isn't. i didn't point out that there's literally thousands of records of comparable writing and abstraction up on bandcamp, and that this has been true, now, for years.

the record is really defined by how unremarkable it is.

on the other hand, i am not being pretentious because i actually know what i'm talking about - unlike yourself, who just tried to come down on me, before i put your back in your place. so, if you don't want to be insulted, you should watch your fucking mouth, huh?

deathtokoalas

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.

three dee melodie

evaporated from drug use? she wrote this song to remind herself the dangers of it. it's about quitting, not consuming. be open minded, this album is very different

deathtokoalas

it's trash.

and, people rarely get their minds back after they've wasted them.

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.

https://sonlux.bandcamp.com/album/brighter-wounds