so, did i get caught up this week?

well, i lost wednesday looking for a bicycle and i think that was fairly decisive, as i'm about a day off from catching up. i have hundreds of event listings to sort through still, but i've at least organized them into separate tabs and removed myself from them, and that should make the process much quicker. but, it was very time consuming to set up...

hundreds of tabs to sort through might not seem like much progress, but i know that 75% of them are going to get immediately discarded, and that does actually clear the list out from facebook's end. so, instead of having 500 past events that i didn't go to marked 'interested' to sort through and remove myself from, i have 500 tabs to sort through, and mostly discard. it's a big step there. i got through roughly 10% in just a few hours this morning.

but, i'm going to take a nap, now, and when i wake up i'm going to be getting ready for the weekend.

did i catch up? it depends on how you define it. and, when i get back to it on wednesday, i should be able to more effectively multitask.

unlike punk rock, which is so heavily reliant on just getting the right guitar tone and being able to play fast enough to keep it pushing forward, the electronic pop music of the early 80s (variously called new wave, post-punk, darkwave, coldwave, post-industrial, etc) has demonstrated itself exceedingly difficult to emulate in an interesting manner. the fundamental problem seems to be that the form has been so disastrously reduced to empty fashion, leaving little more than a set of gimmicks to string together; whenever somebody has decided to sit down and make music in the style over the last 30+ years, and we all know that many have, the intent has almost always been to recreate the moment through whatever romanticized rose-coloured glasses are being dragged in, rather than to try to add to the existing body of work.

by simply not being the same bland knock-off that almost every act that has operated in this space has been for what seems like forever, this is mildly exciting. that is, however, an extremely low bar - and i'm not sure they transcend much further than it. but, if this is suggestive of a long overdue surge to actually evolve the style out of the cultural stagnation our grandparents have left us, that's reason to look forward to something.

i like this style, but i'm very critical of the acts that operate in it and i've long been frustrated by the reality that you're better off looking for 80s bands you don't know yet than listening to something contemporary, if you want a style of music that at the time was very futuristic, and today actually sounds badly dated. there are things they should think about, including updating the synthesizer technology. but, just getting something that is passively listenable is so unusual that i'm not going to push the point too far.

https://secret-sign.bandcamp.com/album/night-rituals