Of late, into

Jessy Lanza - Oh No (2016)

I've been listening to this a lot. Rather addicting in it's sexy, halting vaporousness. Footwork influence for sure, the way beats skitter, build, mutate. But Lanza's breathy, treated vocals emote without hedging their bets on emotion as such. Maybe what I mean by that is that this is music with restraint. Also, great album name.

Harold Budd - The Pearl (1980)

Bedtime music for sure. But more than utilitarian, this is crystalline, intent music, sillouhettes on the objects of our dreams.

Budd has collaborated with Robin Guthrie on some of the music appears in Greg Araki's White Bird In A Blizzard. Adds to the amnesiac who-dunnit and existential quality of the film. Araki's affinity for dreamy pop as juxtaposed with violence and trauma has always been one of mine among his cinematic 'moves'. See the last scene in Doom Generation. Trigger warning for castration and white supremacists, Red Hot Chili Pepper-like dick-sock antics.

1980. What a strange year for this to have come out. I was two years old. For some reason, when I hear this, on the edge of sleep, I feel like it must be music that existed before most people were born.

Future - EVOL; DS2 (2016, 2015)

What Future is not: a nice person(a), a consciousness rapper, a virtuosic MC on the level of Kendrick or a Ghostface i.e. does not blow you away with the vocab and rhymes. A relatively limited vocabulary that however repetive and sometimes ugly in a misogynistic way, has that magnetic quality of a blunted storyteller, half-dazed by success, half-aggressive from walking to and fro on the earth. He gives himself over to the music yet his mind seems to be always on something else, which the music occasionally hints at in a manner of blunted circumlocution. Production by Metro Boomin' et al is equally addictive, informed by New Orleans bounce, ATL luminaries, electronic dance musicks. Less melodramatic, more relentless than 2014's Honest. Simon Reynolds compares him to Iggy. Hmm. I might also add early Tricky.

Television - Marquee Moon (1977)

Haha. I know. Where did he dig this nugget out? Pretty much the seminal album that made Sonic Youth, all of math rock, roughly 80% of American artsy guitar rock possible. Truth is, it really took me awhile for this album to click. Not as wild, or archly trashed as SY. The lyrics are Rimbaudian but not self-consciously insouciant in the manner of Richard Hell, with whom Tom Verlaine edited a poetry magazine at one time before either were rock stars of any sort. "Marquee Moon" is so elegant yet casual: sprezzutura. Look it up. The song has an arc without having a narrative, more a journey than a story, more a tale than a novel. And yet at the end of it's roughly 11 minutes you feel as though you've walked the length of some dense metropolitan city (perhaps Tokyo or Singapore) I dunnooooo) where everything is in flux and the stain of impermanence makes all the grimy sidewalks and awnings glow in excess of the street lights. Guitar playing that is the product of a psychic connection it seems.

Done By The Forces Of Nature is one of the really most wonderful hip hop albums and it a little puzzling that it isn't placed up there with the requisite greats. It depends perhaps on which magazine or whom you're reading but it has always seemed to me that the JB's are one of the most criminally under-appreciated 80's groups. There is almost a perfect balance of musicality with funk and spittin', agit-prop and verisimilitude, not to mention what has to be one of the best ever songs about getting a raise. Alot was made of how not hard they were, which now would just mean they fit snugly in the backpacker section, but it really is kind of crazy to think about how these came out in the same period of a few years as albums by not only PE and NWA but also Tribe and De La and so so many more. And that story's told pretty thoroughly by now though it's hard to imagine our rockist music press will ever give as many inches to this golden era as that hoary baby-boomers' CNN-sponsored zeitgeist in the 60s which feels ridiculous to even to have lament, still, in 2016. The most over-documented period in history in culture in general. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zLqOIyq_OME

Notes Toward The Post-Electronic:

The electronic device, whether a playstation or proper synth, is the sensible device on which to make music. Millenials grew up with the internet, not to mention videogames, google avatars the make music on command. The synthesized sound is natural, a kind of environmental awareness. Chintzy-sounding electronic tones become almost like sentimental objects. Music like Ariel Pink is more the Proustian power of it's obscelesence, its distorted celebration of a failed way of life i.e. material wealth, real estate, property, sovereignty. All of these concepts problematized by constant surveillance in everyday life.

Sound itself, recorded sound, is necessarily synthesized sound: it requires shaping, presentation matters etc.