Media highlights 2023 (July to December)
Published 22 December 2023 ⋅ Comment on Substack
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Media I enjoyed from the second half of 2023. Previous lists:
Ordering remains arbitrary. Let me know if you find something from this list that you end up enjoying.
Books
I keep track of what I read on Goodreads (some written reviews also live here).
- (sidenote: Not quite finished but sure to be my favourite book of the year. It has a nice website here.
) - Bach and the High Baroque — Robert Greenberg
- Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty and Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland — Patrick Radden Keefe
- (sidenote: Philosopher writes on the nature of games in Aesop/Carroll-style dialogues, plus whimsical illustrations:
) - Radical Compassion: Learning to Love Yourself and Your World with the Practice of RAIN — Tara Brach
- The Son Also Rises: Surnames and the History of Social Mobility — Gregory Clark
- (sidenote: I felt slightly sick reading the Twitter story, like being strapped into a ride I wanted to get off. Partly that might have been just how recent this story was — we are talking less than a year old — and much of it still unfolding. And partly it is some awareness, given what else of the picture we get of Musk, that all this money and energy might have been diverted to something great. Bottled mood of Uncut Gems.)
- Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly — Anthony Bourdain
- The Imagineers of War: The Untold Story of DARPA, the Pentagon Agency That Changed the World — Sharon Weinberger
- Parfit: A Philosopher and His Mission to Save Morality — David Edmonds
- (sidenote: “The best way to advise young people is to find out what they really want to do and then advise them to do it” — the best advice is rarely universal but this is so often true)
Music
I log most things on rateyourmusic.com. I also have a Spotify with some playlists.
Albums I most recommend from the last year:
- (sidenote:
) - (sidenote: Bulgarian choral music: unexpectedly captivating!)
- Nicolas Jaar NYC boiler room and another in CDMX
- Freddie Hubbard - Red Clay (1970)
- [공중도덕 Gongjoong Doduk] - 공중도덕 (Gongjoong Doduk) (2015)
- Alice Coltrane With Strings - World Galaxy (1972)
Favourite songs
- Mammal Hands - Nightingale
- Solange - Losing You
- RXKNephew - American tterroristt
- Yule - Apex twin flame
- Bill Callahan - Riding for the feeling and Jim Cain
- Jorge Ben Jor - Menina Mulher Da Pele Preta
New
- Weils — Fugue State (2022)
- (sidenote: 4 hours of sample-heavy house with a kind of “endless neon-lit 90s pool party” vibe. DJSTTDJ mentioned in some kind of live chat that she took after Phil Spector’s ‘wall of sound’ technique, and ‘wall of sound’ is apt.
) - 7038634357 - Neo Seven (2023)
- Ki Oni - A Leisurely Swim to Everlasting Life (2023)
- Sissoko, Ségal, Parisien, Peirani - Les égarés (2023)
- Patrick Shiroishi - Evergreen (2022)
- Hayden Pedigo - The Happiest Times I Ever Ignored (2023)
- Titanic - Vidrio (2023)
- (sidenote: “André 3000 pivoting to new age ambient music wasn’t on my 2023 bingo card” etc etc, but this is really nice by its own rights.
) - Kara Jackson - Why Does the Earth Give Us People to Love? (2023)
Jazz
- Charlie Parker - Best of the Complete Savoy & Dial Studio Recordings (2000)
- Louis Armstrong & Duke Ellington - The Great Summit: The Master Takes (1990)
- Dizzy Gillespie, Sonny Stitt & Sonny Rollins - Sonny Side Up (1959)
- Sonny Rollins - Saxophone Colossus (1957)
- The Dave Brubeck Quartet - Time Out (1959)
- Nujabes - Modal Soul (2005)
- Chick Corea - Return to Forever (1972)
- The Cannonball Adderley Quintet - [In San Francisco Keepnews Collection] (1959) and Cannonball in Japan (1966)
- Cannonball Adderley - Somethin’ Else (1958)
- (sidenote: This one was really cool and captivating. Interested to see his next solo thing.)
- The Ahmad Jamal Trio - The Awakening (1970)
- Gerry Mulligan - Night Lights (1963)
Electronic and ambient
- (sidenote: Premise: “53 musical snippets are to be played in order with each snippet being repeated as many times as each musician sees fit for his or her instrument and, at least in theory, without regard to what any other musician in the ensemble is doing.”
) and (sidenote: Mind-bending ‘plunderphonics’ forerunner, a year before Disintegration Loops.) - British Sea Power - Disco Elysium (2019)
- Vangelis - Blade Runner (1994)
- Space - The Best Of (2009)
- Lamp - ランプ幻想 (Lamp Gensō) (2008)
- [青葉市子 Ichiko Aoba] - 0 (2013)
- death’s dynamic shroud.wmv - I’ll Try Living Like This (2015)
- SkyTwoHigh - 歌舞伎町冒険 (2020)
- (sidenote: I like ambient music that is modelled — per and the album art and title — around an imaginary place.
)
Classical / orchestral
- Amanda Whiting - Lost in Abstraction (2022)
- Le Mystère des Voix Bulgares - Le mystère des voix bulgares : volume 1 (1975)
- Robert Ashley - Automatic Writing (1979), Perfect Lives (1992)
- Nils Frahm - All Melody (2018)
- (sidenote: Baroque proto prog, reminds me of Yes.
) - (sidenote: Tyler Cowen makes the case (here and here) for Bach as strong contender for ‘greatest achiever of all time’.)
- Béla Fleck, Zakir Hussain, Edgar Meyer, Detroit Symphony Orchestra & Leonard Slatkin - The Melody of Rhythm (2009)
Pop / dance / hip hop
- Pet Shop Boys - Introspective (1988)
- Tears for Fears - Songs From the Big Chair (1985)
- This mix, mostly disco
- RXKNephew - Crack Therapy 3 (2020)
- DJ Rozwell - None of This Is Real (2014)
- (sidenote: Zuu and TA13OO were both great but I think this is his best.
)
Everything else
(sidenote: Yes, this is a mess.)
- Jorge Ben - África Brasil (1976), Fôrça bruta (1970), A Tábua de Esmeralda (1974)
- (sidenote: A reviewer: " If these two recorded a normal album together, it probably would’ve been a contender for the greatest MPB album of all time. But instead they took the much more interesting path of going utterly bonkers together.")
- Nara Leão - Dez anos depois (1971)
- Novos Baianos - Acabou chorare (1972)
- Wilco - Kicking Television: Live in Chicago (2005)
- Patti Smith - Horses (1975)
- Billy Bragg & Wilco - Mermaid Avenue (1998)
- Leonard Cohen - You Want It Darker (2016)
- Bill Callahan - Sometimes I Wish We Were an Eagle (2009)
- Lomelda - Hannah (2020)
- (sidenote: Made timeless by its backstory: On his 1969 debut album, “U.F.O.,” he sang of beckoning highways, of aliens, of an Arizona ghost town, of a man who looked “so natural” in death it was clearly his time to go. Six years later, the 35-year-old Sullivan disappeared in Santa Rosa, N.M. On the front seat of his recovered gray VW bug were his ID, his beloved 12-string Guild guitar, and a box of his two albums, “U.F.O.” and the 1972 LP “Jim Sullivan.”.)
- Funkadelic - Standing on the Verge of Getting It On (1974)
- Duster - Stratosphere (1998)
- Albert King - Born Under a Bad Sign (1967)
- Roberta Flack - Chapter Two (1970)
- Roberta Flack - First Take (1969)
- (sidenote: Ainu folk music. I hadn’t listened to any before and it’s really nice.
)
Music on YouTube
(Small discursion) A musical sub-genre has emerged on YouTube of ‘evocative long-play soundscapes plus relevant visuals’.
Typically you get a descriptive title which sells the mood it plans to evoke; something like:
- nintendo relaxing music that calms your mind while it’s raining to relax & study to
- The sound of a river that melts your brain, the voice of a bird
You get some nice visuals, maybe subtly animated: a picture of the rainy cafe you’re supposed to imagine you’re in, an illustration of the video game the music is taking after, or most famously:
Then there’s the sound: music, often recycled songs, drawn out and processed. No vocals ever. And comforting sound effects like rain or static.
Think of this as a kind of multimodal heir to the role of much ambient music.
If you spend much time in the right corners of YouTube I expect you’ll notice this kind of video as a distinctive phenomenon, otherwise take my word for it. I expect it absorbs far more listening hours than virtually any ambient music labelled as such.
I also notice that so much of these videos are either aimed at evoking nostalgia, or otherwise are full of comments remarking on how nostalgic they feel. For example: 'minecraft music but the nostalgia literally hurts… '. This strikes me as a notable and somewhat new phenomenon: YouTube videos generating vast amounts of nostalgic feelings, especially among young people. What explains that?
Some other favourites:
- Space Song but you’re down the hall of the prom
- you’re in a bathroom at a 2013 party
- you’re in a bathroom at a summer night party (and pt.2)
Films and videos
Films
Didn’t watch many, nor venture beyond the already-widely-highly-regarded. Still:
- Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse
- The Handmaiden
- And a couple of the new Wes Anderson Roald Dahl adaptations: Poison, The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar, The Swan. I also have good memories of some of the source stories.
Special mention to Letterboxd, the website Goodreads could become if it grows up.
Videos
- Simulating a working film camera inside of Blender (!)
- Anti twisting mechanism with fischertechnik and this mesmerising multi-fiber anti-twister visualisation
- Universe timelapse: 4.5 Billion Years in 1 Hour
- Rethinking the reals #SoME3
- Why all solar panels are secretly LEDs (and all LEDs are secretly solar panels)
- (sidenote: Wirth’s Law means the fearsome speed of modern computing hides behind layers of software abstraction (“my computer can’t be that fast, it’s taking five seconds to figure out how to move a window across the screen”). So it pays to sometimes open the top and watch the engine roar.)
- The best country song on the US central banking system
- Nicer Trees Spend Fewer Bytes: compressing 12947 Wordle words into 12155 bytes
- On chess: mate-in-omega and hexagonal chess
- In memory of John H Conway, who could do impossible things
- On ‘not knots’ (knots and their complements) (supplement PDF)
- Hofstadter on AI
Words on the internet
Websites
- The Whole Earth Index
- A tool for drawing UML diagrams based on a simple syntax
- Animated Knots dot com
- Neural net algorithms, animated
- A map of publicly traded companies
- A collection of quant riddles with answers
Writing and speaking
- Samir secret sharing
- (sidenote: Mine and I expect many others’ podcast listening highlight of the year. Rights and permissions aside, I want to listen to so much more in this format.)
- The fascist state of Paw Patrol — Matthew Walther
- Strong evidence is common — Mark Xu
- Slime Mold Time Old on ‘Charter Houses’
- Where does my computer get the time from? — Tony Finch
- The Factorio Mindset
- Mutually Assured Recursion — Kyle Hovey
- Can’t send an email more than 500 miles
- Dear Duolingo: Are any words the same in all languages?
- We are all animals at night — Lana Hall
- (Partial self-promotion) Saloni Dattani on Malaria Vaccines and Missing Data in Global Health
- Davidson on takeoff speeds
- Alignment Implications of LLM Successes: a Debate in One Act
- Notes on Existential Risk from Artificial Superintelligence — Michael Nielsen
Please let me know if you picked something up from this list which you enjoyed!
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