Part Nine of a year-end email conversation with David Adler, Chris Barton, Shaun Brady and Jennifer Odell (Jump to: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 )
Hello again, all,
First let me also pass along my envy for Shaun on those festivals, those sounded amazing (my hope for that country-folding technology to happen in our lifetimes still stands).
As for the social media hoo-ha, I’m still muddling around with it. Being one of the last on Earth (it seems) with a resolutely “dumb” phone, my Twitterizing remains confined to this desk, a sort of free-fire zone for stray, possibly coherent thoughts and the partly self-promotional link-share. I wonder, with regard to what you ran into, Nate, where else those in-the-moment thoughts would land me at a show? Does the Twitter feed become a sort of notebook where you’re live-blogging a performance, like I’ve seen with a few writers here? I have a hard time imagining wanting to get pixels under my fingernails midway through something like that, but who can tell? There’s probably a lot things we can say that about just looking back to 2009.
And with regard to the artist-as-”friend” question, started to shrug that off too. Just as being someone’s “follower” isn’t the same as a disciple, the “friend” doesn’t mean the same thing to my mind, either. I think it’s more of a question of shortening people’s proximity to each other more than anything else, if that makes sense, and as Jennifer said even that gets diluted amid all the noise. Very curious where our Man of the Year’s little toy leads everyone in, say, five years, after Quetzalcoatl (or equivalent) has enslaved us all.
David, have you priced those ranches in Montana? I’ve been considering a goat farm, maybe on California’s central coast.
Back to the music: Nate, I couldn’t pick a better word than “head-spinning” for that Flying Lotus record, it’s been months and I’m still maybe only halfway toward figuring it out. Missing that release show from that video you posted probably is one of my bigger regrets for 2010, as well as his collaboration with Build an Ark’s Miguel-Atwood Ferguson that happened this summer. I think I’ll still be finding new things in Cosmogramma well into 2011, but given the company Ellison’s been keeping I think whatever he does next will be just as mysterious, in the best way.
On a different tack while my top 10 waits to come out of the oven, this was another “What the hell is going on with Europe” kind of year for me, there was some great ideas behind a lot of what I heard. Peepers, by Polar Bear (pictured at the top of this post), grabbed me with this growling rock-ish drive, along with the simmering world-jazz of Portico Quartet and Food’s moody collaboration with Fennesz. And this trio Elephant9 (above) kept Norway’s run going with Walk the Nile, something that sounded like an over-caffeinated Deep Purple sprinting through a jazz record. Tough stuff to define, certainly, but that thought doesn’t seem to come up as often over there.
Well, I’m missing like seven or eight great thoughts you all brought up, but the day beckons. Looking forward to reading more of these and all you guys have going in 2011 (and more thanks to Nate for shepherding this spiraling project). Happy holidays and happy listening, everyone.
- Chris
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