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.