I wasn’t planning to come up with any year-end music lists, because I don’t feel like I really managed to listen to much new music this year. But an email from Joaquin sucked me into it, so I did compile my favorite 2008 releases. Here they are, in no particular order…
For some less subjective lists, here are my most-listened artists and tracks of the last year, according to last.fm (only counting things that I played on my computer or iPod, which then got logged, so it doesn’t include any vinyl plays… also, these clearly aren’t all 2008 releases)
Lansing-Dreiden (154)
Mika Miko (154)
Liliput (163)
M.O.T.O. (165)
Pinback (172)
Shocking Pinks (175)
Crystal Castles (195)
The Lines (221)
Young Marble Giants (264)
No Age (273)
Mika Miko — Take It Serious (14)
Crystal Castles — Black Panther (14)
The Lines — Nerve Pylon (14)
The Lines — Not Through Windows (14)
M.O.T.O. — Primeval (14)
The Lines — Dance For A Drop Of Blood (14)
The Lines — On The Air (14)
Nouvelle Vague — This Is Not A Love Song (15)
Young Marble Giants — Searching For Mr. Right (16)
Young Marble Giants — N.I.T.A. (18)
No Age — Ripped Knees (18)
Young Marble Giants — Brand-New-Life (20)
Ok, that closes up a pretty slow year for posting. Maybe I’ll pick it up in 2009!
Well, posting has been pretty scarce around here, but I did post a whole load of photos on flickr from my trip to Chile. Check them out, if you haven’t already!
I got a new cell phone and it has this really sweet panorama photo function. This happened to coincide with a couple of busy weekends out and about, so here are some photos that I took. If you really look at them, you can find the awkward spots where the three pictures overlap. But in general, the algorithm they use works damn well.
Here’s a shot from left field of U.S. Cellular park, for a White Sox-Red Sox game. The guy’s head in front of me got a bit messed up by the photo merging process, but the grassy stripes on the baseball field look good.
Jenn’s cousin and her boyfriend visited this last weekend, so we got out to do lots of Chicago stuff. The point was beautiful and I got a bit of swimming in. This was the weekend of the Air & Water show, so there were lots of jets buzzing overhead, and we could see the exhaust trails of planes doing acrobatics over Navy Pier.
Finally, we have the highlight of Millennium Park — Cloud Gate a.k.a. the Bean. I felt pretty touristy, snapping pictures there on a Sunday afternoon, but it looks so cool. Looking at this picture closely, I think that the girl in the blue dress just to the right of the sculpture shows up three times!
Yesterday I tried poaching eggs for the first time. I don’t think that I’m doing it quite right yet, but my third egg was much better than my first. Unfortunately, I didn’t have any Radio Zero to listen to (“music you can poach an egg to”), but I think that their web presence has faded since J. stopped doing the show.
The poached egg is served on a toasted Med bagel, with shaved parmesan and pistou. Evidently, pistou is French for pesto. It also seems a little bit different, with more olive oil, less garlic, and no parmesan. I got the recipe out of Bon Appétit.
It’s been a really long time since I last posted here. However, I did just finish up one of the things that has been keeping me busy for a bit too long*. Follow this link to find a long description, with pictures, of the really cool trip to Japan that I took back in May.
One exciting little event was that the Reader published their annual ‘Best of Chicago’ issue. WHPK was chosen as the best college radio station, and Jenn and I got a shout out specifically. Now I just need to work some more creepy odes into the next broadcast…
The last month was a good one for live music. While I have fallen far from my peak concert-going days (I think that my last year in college and first year in Chicago were undoubtedly the high points), I did make it to two pretty excellent shows in March.
The first one was Xiu Xiu, playing at Reggie’s Rock Club. I was shocked to discover, from my obsessively compiled records, that this is the ninth time that I’ve seen Xiu Xiu in concert. While I was really into them back in the Knife Play and Chapel of the Chimes days, I’ve sort of cooled off on their releases, starting with La Fôret. The problem there is that I must have also forgotten what an engrossing and totally excellent live act Xiu Xiu can be. The main thing that has struck me time and time again at their concerts is the way that every song is constantly being tinkered with and re-arranged, so that the same song will be very different from tour to tour. I think that this probably says something about Jamie Stewart’s mental concept of what a pop song is. It’s as if he has a strong compartmentalization, where the lyrics, melody, rhythms, and harmonies all exist in different dimensions and can be experimented with individually.
I guess that a more prosaic explanation would be that the personnel and instrumentation for the touring version of Xiu Xiu changes rapidly. This particular version was a full band set-up with a drummer and bass/cello player, which I think really made some of the songs. It’s probably no coincidence that, when I first heard Xiu Xiu and got really into them, they were playing as a four-piece, not the somewhat skeletal acoustic outfit that they became on later tours.
Anyway, here’s a video I dug up of Xiu Xiu playing ‘Suha’, which was my favorite song of the night (and one of my favorite Xiu Xiu songs period). The video is not from the show I was at, but it is the same arrangement and the same tour. This version of the song has a pretty sweet Disintegration-era Cure sound to it (mostly the keyboard, I think). By contrast, the album version of the song is more orchestral and dirge-y; not as danceable, despite running off a drum machine beat. I also have to give a virtual high-five to the guy who did the videotaping because it came out well. I imagine that Xiu Xiu is a tough band to record live, on account of the fairly extreme loud/soft dynamics.
The next show I went to was the highlight of the month, the highlight of any month, BOREDOMS. I don’t think I can write a lot of description or analysis about this show because you just have to experience it yourself. At this point, they have transformed from a band into a full-fledged force of nature.
In a stroke of brilliance, the concert was moved from Logan Square to the Congress Theater, so that they could set up the stage in the middle of the floor and let the crowd roam all around. I took in most of the show while sitting or standing on the actual stage, which was behind the band, but a great vantage point for photos.
As with the last time I saw Boredoms play, three drummers kept up a tireless, manic, and yet perfectly precise rhythmic whirlwind for a full hour and a half. This time, instead of grooving along in the monolithic Seadrum beat, the drum pattern would shift, wander, and cycle back to themes from earlier in the set.
Of course, dominating the stage was Eye’s seven-guitar contraption. All the guitars were tuned to various complementary open tunings, so that he could just wail on the whole thing with a wooden rod and unleash cosmic-sounding layered chords. Naturally, this kind of abuse broke a lot of strings and required constant retuning. So, here’s the shot of this one dude who hung around a mixing board and then sprang into action to fix up the instrument whenever there was an opening.
I left the show feeling exhausted and satisfied, so I can only imagine what it’s like when any of those drummers crawls into bed after each night of the tour.
Well, I started with a monthly music post just in January, thinking ‘surely I can handle a once every 30 days type of blogging commitment’. Well, the answer is that I certainly listen to enough music every month, but even this laid-back schedule greatly overestimates my blog-diligence.
But, here I am now, and like I said, I did listen to plenty of music in February. The number one contributer to rocking Colin in February was M.O.T.O., hands down. My month started off with a M.O.T.O. show at the Empty Bottle (the Dials also played and they were really good too). M.O.T.O. play Ramones-ish 4-4 punk and pretty much epitomize for me the idea of a Chicago garage punk band (even though they came to Chicago from New Orleans by way of Boston). Every song follows a simple formula — three or four chords, a couple of lyrics, with a short guitar solo after the second verse — and then achieves it perfectly. Here’s a clip (from a different show) of what was probably my favorite song of the night, ‘I Hate My Fucking Job’.
I picked up their album ‘Raw Power’ at the show and have been listening to it pretty constantly since. I just have to lament that I didn’t I know about these guys back when I was in high school. I can’t really think of anything that would have been more awesome back then than a song titled ‘Flipping You Off With Every Finger Of My Hand’. I guess that I haven’t exactly grown out of it yet, so that’s cool. Also, M.O.T.O. play shows pretty much constantly in Chicago, so check it out when you get the chance.
However, I don’t know that all of my hyping of punk bands is really going to go over that well with the like two people who read this blog, so let’s talk about some other styles of music too. In February, I started listening to Mudd Up!, which is a weekly radio show broadcast on wfmu (I just download the podcasts from this page here). The show covers all sorts of beats-based music (hip-hop, electronic, songs for the club but also some pretty abstract stuff) with an international focus, especially Latin American and Caribbean music but also African, Asian, and so on. The host, DJ/Rupture, is a pretty rad musician himself (I saw him play a cool set, opening for the Ex around a year ago). Anyway, I’m digging this show a lot and it is always great to have something that shows up new and fresh every week.
Ok, I’m pretty much done with writing for now, so everything else from February is going into the honorable mentions category. The means Mark Sultan’s solo rocking garage album, awesomely titled ‘The Sultanic Verses’, the Quix*o*tic album, ‘Mortal Mirror’, which I picked up from the Hyde Park Records discount cd section (I’m probably going to have to devote a whole post to those discount cds some day), and ‘Flip Your Wig’, a classic Hüsker Dü album that has been blowing me away. Once again, I’m not really covering any new music. If that’s what you’re hoping for, don’t hold your breath.
The last website for Jenn’s and my radio show stopped working a while ago because of some problem with the php installation on the computers at work. So, instead of just moving it, I decided to spend way too much time making something snazzier looking (but lower tech). Check it out here and let me know what you think.
There’s only a few playlists up there so far, but the rest of them are sitting around awaiting minor formatting, so they’ll show up soon.
I’ve been meaning to post about this for a while, but it took me a long while to get around to making these calculations. See, I went to this party to watch the Oscars. I’m not really a big awards show person, so I was hoping to just ignore the television and focus on eating good food (I made a delicious frittata). However, there was an additional aspect to this party, which was a betting pool where everyone tried to pick the winners in 24 categories. I didn’t really want to expose my ignorance by picking a bunch of stinkers, so I went with a pseudo-random strategy for filling out my ballot.
Pseudo-random sounds very fancy, but really I should have just gone ahead and used a random number generator. The method that I did use took a bit longer to calculate, didn’t do anything that the rng wouldn’t do, and had one small drawback/feature (discussed below). For each category, there were between 3 and 5 nominees (usually 5), listed in alphabetical order. The pseudo-random variable that I used was the number of letters in the name of the first nominee (this was a person for some categories and a movie title for others). To generate my pick, I would raise 2 to the power of that number, subtract 1, and mod it with the number of nominees to determine who to pick.
In this formula, x is the number of letters in the first nominee’s name, Ni is the number of nominees in the categories, and Xi is the index of the nominee that I pick, counting from 0. One problem with this formula, which make me think that I should have just used a random number generator are that some people or movies were obviously nominated in many categories, and if they were at the beginning of the alphabet (‘Bourne Ultimatum’, for example) then the same value of x was used for multiple categories. A second problem is that there was one category (Best Documentary Short Subject) had four nominees; since 2 to some power minus 1 is always an odd number, my formula could only take the values 1 or 3 (not 0 or 2). However, I think that overall, my formula did accomplish the goal of being totally uncorrelated to any of the criteria used by the Academy, and therefor qualifies as pseudo-random.
Now then, here is a plot (with a logarithmic y-axis) showing the probability of getting any particular number of correct answers through random picking. The red line is calculated exactly, by generating all possible permutations of the ballot (there are 2.7 million ways to arrange 12 correct and 12 incorrect results!) and using the actual number of nominees in each category. The black curve is a binomial distribution where the probability of success in any category is 21.23% (there are 113 nominees for 24 categories). Obviously, the black curve is an excellent approximation of the actual probability distribution.
So, the big question is how many correct predictions I made. Well, the expectation value is 5.245 correct guesses. And… I only got 3 right. The probability of getting 3 or fewer correct answers is 19.56%, so you could say that I got somewhat unlucky. However, Jenn did a very good job of showing that the Oscars are most likely not a random process by correctly guessing 15 of the winners. The probability of randomly picking at least that many correct results is only 0.00186%!!
I didn’t really plan on writing two posts about this topic (plus we’re getting into mid-February already, so January is pretty old news), but I ended up writing too much about the Monorchid. I’m going to try to get a bit more brief here now.
Now You Are This by Numbers came out last August and I think that makes it the most current item in my ‘music of january’. I had been interested in checking this album out ever since I heard and saw the video for ‘Mind Hole’ (video is up above). I saw Numbers play with the Mae Shi in San Francisco, back in 2005, and I wasn’t really crazy about them then. In this album, they still sound loud and skronky (they were extremely loud and skronky before) but the whole thing gets a little slowed down, stretched out, and especially fuzzed over into a big thick distorted soup. ‘Mind Hole’ is still the standout song, but everything else is really solid (and there’s a song called ‘Kosmos Love’!).
I don’t have a picture for it, but I got an excellent Red Monkey 7″ for free when I ordered the Numbers cd and a Deerhoof picture disc (it always pays to include some vinyl in any purchase from Kill Rock Stars because then they will toss in a free 7″). Before hearing this disc, I had sort-of liked the idea of Red Monkey more than I actually liked any of their stuff. I mean, they are from England and write Fugazi-ish songs with feminist themes, so that’s pretty cool. The problem is that most of the songs that I’ve heard just weren’t that good. However, the A-side of this single (which was released as part of Kill Rock Stars’ 1998 singles club) is called ‘(Ain’t Nothing But An) Incendiary Device’ and it is awesome. Sure, they still sound like Fugazi but with a worse rhythm section, but I’ll take that any day.
The next thing that I’m excited about musically is Monitor Mix, which is a blog written for NPR by Carrie Brownstein. Carrie, of course, was a member of my number one crush band, Sleater-Kinney. She writes well about music, in such a way that you can really get a good idea of her specific musical tastes (and she does seem to be quite particular about what she likes). The only other musician in my RSS reader is John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats and my interest in his ravings about grindcore has waned. So yeah, check out Monitor Mix. And here’s a S-K video just for fun.
Ok, that more or less covers January. I have some honorable mentions, though. There’s the Deerhoof picture disc that I mentioned above. That one was disappointing (I don’t love the Deerhoof slow songs), but it is a 7″ picture disc, which is pretty much the coolest record format ever. I also enjoyed the extremely slick poppiness of ‘Rip It Up’ by Orange Juice. Finally, I think I got it December, so maybe it doesn’t count, but Jenn got me a perfect Christmas present: the ‘Astral Glamour’ 3xCD set which includes almost everything ever recorded by the Homosexuals.
