Everything ever said about the relativity of time — be it serious or jokey or wrong — is right. Short expanses of time can be unendurably long, long stretches of time can pass by without notice, and now lasts forever while the past and the future never existed and never could or will. I whiled away last Saturday by sleeping until two in the afternoon, taking two hours to consider myself fully awake, and then pretty much plopping myself under a blanket in front of the TV for 10 hours, at which point I went back to bed. I think my psyche required such a day, as I had essentially been on the go (Yale, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, San Francisco, San Diego) for the better part of a month. At one point, I had only slept in my bed 8 days of the previous 28. Considering my needs of the world and its needs of me, it is occasionally required that I achieve a fully vegetative state. more follows
best of 2009 music
March first is a good day to post this, right? I mean, the rush to get these out is gone, so now mine will appear more important for lack of competition.
So, remember how I did it last year? The tiering system, as opposed to rankings? Yeah, that’s how I’ve been rating everything since then. Hard and fast rankings are for the inflexible and narrow-minded.
The movers
The xx The xx
Telefon Tel Aviv Immolate Yourself
DJ Sprinkles Midtown 120 Blues
The Lullaby League Dormio Animus
Monolake Silence
Intrusion The Seduction of Silence
Yep, these are the best. Not only are they really good, but they’re really moving. That may come as a surprise in the case of Monolake. It’s a good Monolake album, on par with Interstate, for sure, but moving? Perhaps an odd claim, but I find this album really affecting. The same goes for the Intrusion album. Not only am I completely comfortable calling that one of the best (dub or otherwise) techno albums of all time, it’s so evocative.
DJ Sprinkles is Terre Thaemlitz’s moniker for house-influenced material, as opposed to his usual glitched ambience. Amazing how one guy (er) could do two such diverse genres so well. Midtown 120 Blues is one of the three best house albums I’ve ever heard. Granted I’m not a house head, so my tastes are a bit off, but this is a classic. It’s really warm and organic, uplifting yet moody, and just sloppy enough. Oh, you can dance to it, of course. Now that you know about Terre, I bet the Lullaby League is the obscurest thing here. I don’t know much about them either. I stumbled across this album, and it transfixed me. It’s also warm, organic, and kinda sloppy, but it’s a slightly glitchy ambient album with some great spoken word on top. It does wonderful things: when you’re trying to fall asleep and listening to it, it keeps you in the space between asleep and awake. Really cool.
Many know the story of the Telefon Tel Aviv album at this point: two guys, one of them kills himself the week before this album is released. I don’t bite on those kinds of stories; the music stands alone to me. In the end, I am selfishly moved by his death, because this is the first Telefon Tel Aviv album that blew me away…and now I don’t get another. Shitty. So go buy this one. It’s shoegazey-IDM-synthpop. Odd combo, I know, but I love it.
And then…the xx. Forced to choose, I think I have to go with this album as my favourite of last year (with very close competition from Intrusion). It’s pretty much perfect. A lot has already been said about it, so I’ll try and not repeat any of it. It’s amazing. Go buy it. (Crap, that’s already been said.) The most astonishing thing about this album is its restraint. To make an album so subtle and relaxed is not completely astonishing, but it is for four 20-year-olds. That’s the age when rocking is important. Subtlety is for the old who can’t handle the noise. Let this be the first sign of a new era in barely-there music.