Saturday, 25th of December, 2004

OK well it had to happen. I’m doing a best-of-2004 Utility Fog tomorrow night, so I’ve therefore pretty much got sitting on the floor my best music of the year list. So… Considering I thought 2004 was a bit of a disappointing year, it’s not bad. This is what comes of doing a 3-hour radio show every week I guess!
Including a couple of EPs/7″s as well, my list goes something like this… [oops - and I keep missing things, so if you saw this when first posted, there may be more there now!]

65daysofstatic - The Fall Of Math [Monotreme]
Oren Ambarchi - Grapes From The Estate [Touch]
Animal Collective - Sung Tongs [Fat Cat]
Keef Baker - the widnes years [n5md]
Björk - Medúlla [One Little Indian] (only like about half of this - nowhere near as good as Vespertine IMHO but I’m listing it anyway)
The Boats - Songs By The Sea [Moteer]
Bola - Gnayse [Skam]
Boom Bip - Corymb [Lex Records]
Boom Bip & Daedelus - 28:06:42:12 [Mush]
Adam Butler - Schmoozing With the Après Garde [Whatness] (came out 2003 but really hard to find and I only picked it up this year - genius!)
Mara Carlyle - The Lovely [Accidental Records]
Andrew Coleman - demons [Tripel]
Comatone - E-50 [Feral Media]
Greg Davis - Somnia [Kranky]
Greg Davis - Diaphonous 12″ [Lux Nigra]
Daedelus - A Gent Agent [Laboratory Instinct]
Decomposure - Taking Things Apart [Unschooled Records]
DJ /Rupture - Special Gunpowder [Tigerbeat6] (half great, half not very good at all (hey ok, “not my thing at all”), but I feel the same about Nettle, only it’s less good)
edIT - Crying Over Pros For No Reason [Planet µ]
Enduser - From Zero [Mirex]
Enduser - Bollywood Breaks EP [Ad Noiseam]
Epic 45 - Slides [Make Mine Music]
Epic 45 - Against The Pull of Autumn [Where Are My Records]
Erast - Goodair & Minimissing [Laboratory Instinct]
Fennesz - Venice [Mego]
Finkelstein - The Art of Escapism [AK Duck]
Jason Forrest (aka Donna Summer) - The Unrelenting Songs of the 1979 Post-Disco Crash [Sonig]
Four Tet - Both when I am alone and we both are (his side of the split 7″ with Hella) [Ache Records]
Four Tet - My Angel Rocks Back and Forth [Domino]
Four Tet - Live in Copenhagen 30th March 2004 [Domino]
Funckarma - Smizm [dub]
Giardini di Mirò - Hits for broken Hearts and Asses [2.nd rec]
Her Space Holiday - The Young Machines Remixed [Mush]
Herv - Snap Hands [Compactrisc]
Hood - The Lost You EP [Domino]
Icarus - I Tweat The Birdy Electric [Leaf]
Inch-time - any colour you like & root-drinking in the dark [self-released]
Junior Boys - Last Exit 12″ [Kin] (for the wonderful Fennesz remix and their “unbirthday” self-remix - not particularly keen on their normal stuff)
Kattoo - Places [Hymen]
Juana Molina - Tres Cosas [Domino]
Mouse on Mars - Radical Connector [Sonig]
Múm - Summer Make Good [Fat Cat]
Joanna Newsom - The Milk-Eyed Mender [Drag City] {This was added in March 2005 when I discovered how awesome this album is. Yes, her voice can grate, but the songwriting and harp-playing are superb. I don’t like the Wurlitzer & piano tracks as much, but the harpsichord one is great too.}
Nitrada - We Don’t Know Why But We Do It [2.nd rec]
Pedro - Fear & Resilience remixes [Melodic]
Qua - Painting Monsters on Clouds [Surgery]
Quasimojo - Savant Garde [Mira] (apparently 2003 but I only discovered halfway through 2004)
Gabriel Prokofiev - String Quartet No. 1, performed by the Elysian Quartet [Nonclassical]
The Rectifiers - Levy EP [Sensory Projects]
Saddleback - Everything’s a Love Letter [Preservation]
Savath & Savalas - Mañana [Warp Records]
Subtle - A New White (not as good as the seasons EPs but good) [Lex Records]
Sufjan Stevens - Seven Swans [Sounds Familyre/Spunk]
Shadow Huntaz - Corrupt Data [Skam]
Shitmat - Full English Breakfest 12″s/CD [Planet µ]
Slicker - We All Have A Plan [Hefty]
Dwayne Sodahberk - Unfortunately [Tigerbeat 6] (from 2003 but I didn’t find it till 2004 and spun it constantly for about half a year)
Spark - Super Robot Battle Deluxe [n5md]
State River Widening - Cottonhead [Vertical Form] (very late entry, this - only just got hold of it! Added 16/01/05)
Telefon Tel Aviv - Map Of What Is Effortless [Hefty]
Holly Throsby - On Night [Spunk]
Tiki Obmar - Seasons [Merck]
Tin Hat Trio - Book of Silk [Ropeadope]
Tracker - Blankets [Top Shelf Comix/FILMguerrero]
Trinkets - Choose Your Own Adventure [Trinkets Music]
Triosk - Moment Returns [Leaf]
Venetian Snares - Huge Chrome Cylinder Box Unfolding [Planet µ] (I found this fairly disappointing but I’m listing it anyway)
Venetian Snares - Moonglow/This Bitter Earth [Addict] (now DIS is DA SHIT]
Wagon Christ - Sorry I Make You Lush [Ninja Tune]
Keith Fullerton Whitman - Antithesis & Schöner Flußengel 12″s [Kranky]
Xiu Xiu - Fabulous Muscles [Kill Rock Stars via Tomlab and/or popfrenzy]
John Zorn & co - Masada String Trio live / Masada Recital [Tzadik]
V/A - Carbon [Mirex]
V/A - Children of Mu [Planet µ]
V/A - em:t0004 [em:t]
V/A - Flipside (a Candle Records remix compilation) [Candle Records]
V/A - Fork Songs [Audio Dregs]
V/A - Hear You Soon: Part One [Blue Bell Records]
V/A - Misplaced Pets [Misplaced Music]
Isan & Styrofoam - Morr Music Japan Tour 2004 [Morr Music]
V/A - Song of the Silent Land [Constellation]
V/A - TRR50 Thank You [Temporary Residence]
Various 12″s on Mashit! - one of the labels of the year…

Speaking of stuff from 2003 which was only discovered in 2004, I was playing The Books‘ Lemon of Pink from when (before?) it came out on [Tomlab] (Oct 2003), but Spunk licensed it in Australia in 2004… Should be on lots of people’s top-lists for this year here.

Brilliant forthcoming stuff for 2005 that I’ve been spinning a lot:
Gauche - Paints Lane [Invada] (Sydney live electronica, mad-brilliant)
Hood - Outside Closer [Domino]
Amon Tobin - soundtrack to Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell 3: Chaos Theory [Ninja Tune]
Tunng - Mother’s Daughter and Other Songs [Static Caravan] (NEXT YEAR’S ALBUM OF THE YEAR!)

Sunday, 19th of December, 2004

The most interesting people turn up on LiveJournal! Great to have Wendy Grossman, a folk-singer-turned-professional-Skeptic, on my friends list. I’ve been reading her in the New Scientist for years, and she’s very entertaining.

Recently she was asked to challenge a particularly psycho psychic in a televised meeting,which she gives a full account of on her journal. But, skeptics being a clever bunch, she and three others who were also paid to go head-to-head with the guy have discovered that it was a spoof, for a new BBC comedy show - presumably a la Chris Morris’s Brass Eye only stupider. I’m now wondering:
a) whether the skeptics involved will try and at least publicise this a fair bit so that the general public would know about the uncovering before the show was aired (apparently the producer, or whomever he was, was fairly shocked when she rang up and innocently asked “so is it for Marc Wootton’s new project?”)
b) whether the program in question will have the gall to run the skeptics-vs-psychic segment now that they were so quickly uncovered.

If anyone’s thinking to themselves “well dammit, if he was a fake psychic, isn’t the egg on the skeptics’ faces for not uncovering him?”, Grossman’s own accounts have plenty to say on that matter, but basically the point is that they were there to show the psychic up as fake, not to show up the show as fake, so they weren’t looking for signs that the psychic was a fake fake psychic… And indeed there are plenty of unbalanced people in the world, many of whom are convinced that they’re psychic (or at least believe in the supernatural), so it wasn’t too far out to believe this guy was just mad.
The fact is that when they all (there’s a fifth skeptic involved too!) looked at it after the emotional encounter, they suspected something, and uncovered the truth pretty quickly.

Tuesday, 14th of December, 2004

Here’s a website dedicated to exploding the myth that the Allies were unaware of the fate of the Jews in Nazi Germany and its possessions during WW II: We Never Knew. They present a chronological collection of book covers from 1932 to 1943, exposing just how much was known, even from before Hitler came to power. It’s a fascinating exposé, and is fascinating as well for examples of propaganda art and design from the period.
The descriptions for each book (available if you click on the cover images) are illuminating. Take for example Mein Kampf, published in Germany in 1925, an in English translation here in 1933, but “with many of the viles parts omitted”. This nevertheless remained:

“4. None but members of the nation may be citizens of the [German] state. None but those of German blood, whatever their creed, may be members of the nation. No Jew, therefore, may be a member of the nation.�

Large quantities of other evidence pile up, making it impossible to suggest that by 1934, one year into Hitler’s reign, the UK and America could not have been aware of how serious the situation was for Europe’s Jews and other minorities, and for the rest of the world.