So it goes and so it goes, and in some bleak moments, the world seems a bit more abrasive this year. Sometimes I retreat entirely into art and fiction, absorbing as much beauty and weirdness as I can before having to emerge to responsibility. It’s inevitable, it’s cathartic. It’s where things change.
Marielle V Jakobsons is back with a second full length album under her real name. It’s called Star Core. It’s both sharper and far more expansive than her debut, but shares the same otherworldly tenor that could never be mistaken for anyone else.
Boris playing Just Abandoned Myself.
After years of waiting, I finally saw Boris live. It was incredible. It was exactly what I was hoping for. It changed my perception of a band that’s been a favorite for almost a decade. I now see Boris is completely new light.
Standing in the Pyramid Scheme in Grand Rapids, MI, I felt a blast-furnace heat that burned away any trace of skepticism I had about the power of live rock music. It’s been a long, long time since a band gave me such a revelatory experience.
This mixtape is about that warm glowing feeling you get when you dream about the right path in life. You see it materializing before you, and although it isn’t real yet, you’re filled with the light of understanding.
After this kind of dream, you wake with a newfound sense of purpose and optimism.
This is the soundtrack to my cyberpunk dreams.
More than almost any other release I heard last year, HK sends me spiraling down the rabbit hole of my subconscious, detached from routine, from worry, from time itself.
This week has been as busy as ever so I didn’t have a ton of time for new music, but I made up for that with deep enthusiasm for what I did discover.
Thanks to Dam-Funk’s excellent new entry in the DJ-Kicks series, I’ve been looping a certain new-to-me album half a dozen times over the past day alone. I’ve also spent time in one of the most sublime virtual worlds ever created, in The Witcher 3.
This album has quickly become an absolute favorite of mine and I’ve been aching to tell everyone about it. The music breathes a strange dreamy atmosphere where the subconsciously familiar blends with startling newness, the entire production emerging from the half-recalled miasma of memory. In other words, it feels profoundly new while evoking my own past.
Optimistic Underground 