Year End Playlist

I almost made it out of 2011 on my own. That statement is a huge exaggeration. It wasn't even close, but I'm getting there. Still spent as much time in the depths of space as I did in 2010. A lot of it took a lot of time to remember and reconstruct. To allow the construction of a playlist. Last.fm and scrobble helped a lot. There were several dead spaces of weeks where I was nowhere to be found and they were like wildlife tags, homing beacons to where things really fell apart and even that negative space, the nothing, could tell me a lot about what I was listening to on my headphones, apart from my desktop and sometimes here and sometimes gone internet connection. Wild.

It was difficult and joyous combing through the year week by week and trying to sum up months in a single song. Here it is, though. The music that made life a little easier to comprehend and, frankly, live through last year.

Jan 2011>> Menomena - Muscle N' Flow Go
Feb 2011>> Björk - Wanderlust Go
Mar 2011>> El-P feat. Camu Tao - Oxycontin Go
Apr 2011>> Mono - Mere Your Pathetique Light Go
May 2011>> Matthew Dear - R+S Go
Jun 2011>> Hot Chip - No Fit State Go
Jul 2011>> The Black Angels - Better Off Alone Go
Aug 2011>> Gorillaz - To Binge Go
Sep 2011>> Mouse on Mars – Circloid Bricklett Sprüngli Go
Oct 2011>> Cold Cave - The Great Pan Is Dead Go
Nov 2011>> Lo-Fidelity Allstars - Weather 2 Go
Dec 2011>> Daedelus - You're The One Go

This is the official tax return for 2011. The books have been, after a fashion, balanced. The door is officially closed on what was a year of unexpected highs and grim marched lows. Looking forward to doing another one, but no promises. Hopefully something there connects with you, but it is, kinda selfishly, mostly a record for me. Validated parking? In a way, yes. But hopefully, it'll paint the year, my year, for you.

Massive thank yous go out, regardless of what it is, to the people who left and came back, the people who left and never did return, the people who made life great, and the people who made me wake up some days with that twinkle in my eye that said "today is going to be incredible." Extra special thank yous to the people who got me out of doors when I least expected to be called out, to the people who shared drinks, and the people who made sure, as I went down in flames, that I had somewhere to land where there would not be any collateral damage to other lives. Thank you to the rescuers, and the warners, and the policemen and policewomen without badges, the damage controllers, the picker-uppers, and the cheerers. The shooters and the hand claspers. It was a transformative year like few before it. An enlightening, disheartening, nearly dying more times than I would like to admit go at being more human than the human I was the year before and I'm sorry it took so long to put together for many a several reasons I don't need to get into right now.

I'm happy it's over, but more than that, I'm happy I'm alive to see it go.


///múm - Dancing Behind My Eyelids ...see the fog on the horizon

All Your Base, Repair, and an Album

So I wasn't sure if I'd have time to stop by today and of course the debate ran right up to the last minute so I figured it would be alright to do this while I wait for my dinner to cool off before I jam it in my face and run off to the labor camp to receive the minimum amount of pay allowable by law for the maximum amount of human labor they can yank out of me. In a bizarro sense it's like paying your life savings for the worst imaginable hand job the human mind can devise. Go nuts with that.

I was over the bridge again and, wow, I wish you could of seen it. I don't know what happened between my last visit and this one, but whatever action was being prepared for happened. The entire place was gouged to hell. There was not a train to be seen or car or bus and there was ash on the ground everywhere thick enough to cup a fist in and still lose your hand all the way to the wrist. The sun was out when I got there and I was able to eventually find a bicycle. Actually I tripped over it while walking through a wide street and it kicked loose from the thick gray and ultra fine sand and the air was so still that the cloud it raised just sort of hung there like ghost moss. I rode around for hours and the tires were thin enough to cut through the ash where it wasn't mixed with gutter water into a paste. There was no ash in the air until my eyes traveled all the way up the sides of the ruined buildings rising up glassless and skeletal here and there and saw that the atmosphere way up where the cotton balls of clouds should be was just one big fluxing shifting mass of brownish black and tan where the sun tried and failed to poke through. Everywhere there were the shapes of people. That was the creepy thing. It was as if every person not killed or fled, or almost every person, was turned into some hunched mass of iron pipe or some caught rag work in a chain link fence or a collection of boxes and broken timbers lumped in an alleyway or crawling along atop the ash in a collection of black and white and torn trash bags being tugged along by a stray's leash. It was all very wide and very hard to take it all in at once. The few people I thought I saw ended up being these cruel heaps of shapes and material and rust and broken pipe so I started to give it up and tried to find my way to more broken down and open areas so I could at least feel less claustrophobic when night fell. As I resolved to look no further and to get clear of places where other things that I probably did not want to meet might be hiding in the high iron and burned out rises around me I came across a tablet that I picked up and started watching on and off as I rode out. For some reason Jerry Seinfeld was all that it could play and he kept going on and on about restaurant appetizers and how they come up with all sorts of gimmicks, but in reality we would eat them right out of the bulk freezer bags they're shipped in because we don't care. We just want our taste buds to feel good for a while. I guess he had a point. I tossed it away and it skipped in the dust like a frisbee. I rode for several more hours, but the city kept stretching on and when I stopped to sit on a fire hydrant, after dusting the several inches of gray off of it that piled like a dunce cap I heard his voice cut on again and it scared the living shit out of me. So much so that I lost the connection and woke up back here.

Whatever happened, all their base are now belong to something I didn't think could happen or at least haven't seen before. Possibly evil Jerry Seinfeld. But, I'm sort of looking forward to going back. Sort of wary. Not at all enthusiastic. I'm looking forward to it the way you look forward to going to see a doctor when you have a persistent headache that won't quit and you just need to sleep that badly.

Also yesterday was a day off. Or a night off. This job is really taking it to my shoulders. Over worked and under sexed. No way to limp through life. I spent that day asleep. Well mostly asleep. That and I put in the serious effort to eat three times in one day. Surprisingly difficult. I mean, the thing really is if you sleep you don't need to eat. So if you sleep all the time, you never need to eat. You'll die at an accelerated rate to the average death spans of so many decades, but in sleep things accelerate anyway so you could potentially live much longer asleep than awake eating and trying to prolong this side of things. Of course you wouldn't have to worry about things randomly breaking down around you, but then again things randomly break down in this world all the damn time, so I'm not even sure that's particularly valid. At any rate. I spent most of that day sleeping and eating and trying to feel my muscles knit back together. I don't think I succeeded. I didn't front load enough material for my body to work with before it needed it and now the spaces that should be bridged with proteins and whatever else are now probably jammed with garbage or just left as empty tears... frustrating.... but that's what happens when you blow up your mileage and your engine and don't have the convenience of laying that load on a car and have to lay it on your body. But that'll change.

I started writing another album. Horsemen of the Sun. Released the single earlier on. The full length album is rolling out tomorrow at some point (I hope). It's been gestating long enough. Flash the Firmware was the first album. I wanted it to tell a story of personal mutation and sea change. This one will focus more on the desolation of knowing who you are. Exciting. Depressing. Exploration. Strange territory. Part of the life I'm building apart from the life that has sustained the effort required to do the building. If that makes sense.



///Daedelus - "You're the One" I love you. Not in case no one tells you that. Not in case no one has told you that in a while. Just cause I do. Where would I be without the oft imagined you/me. Try, if you want, to slap How to Operate With a Blown Mind and Northern Stomp together with Love to Make Music To in one playlist and set it to shuffle. It's like black fireworks at night so close to the ground they'll burn you if you watch too close, but too pretty to look away and worth every second of skin peeling flying metal and rock shards.