What is coming in August

  • August 2, at 8pm at Silverfish in Portland, Maine, USA. I’ll be performing as part of Perfect Hair. We’ll be playing with a new band, Vervain, featuring some old friends of mine including Jonathan Downs with whom I made a record a couple years ago (that record was solstice).
  • At the end of August I’ll be spending a few days in the studio with Whozyerman? to record a set of new songs for an upcoming record.
  • I’ll start taking French Classes at Alliance Française in Dublin.
  • I believe that the first issue of Abundant Number, a new print zine/journal/publication/event from Éireann Lorsung, will be out. My review of Lankum’s album False Lankum will be included.

What I read

I read from several books this month but finished none, due to travelling and lots of stress and dread. So naturally, I spent more time looking at my phone and reading essays there.

  • Some music theory, “Relabi”: Patterns of the Self-Erasing Pulse, by John Berndt. Recommended by Ron Harrity. This essay gave me a name and a way for talking about something which I’ve always loved and have at times attempted to do with my own music without knowing precisely what it was that I was trying to do.

  • Generation Franchise: Why Writers Are Forced to Become Brands (and Why That’s Bad), by Jess Row. Sent to me by my partner, Éireann Lorsung. It touches on a lot of ongoing thinking of ours over the last few years. Here’s an extract that clarifies somewhat how the word “franchise” is being used here:

    I’ve been thinking about the word “franchise,” as a way of describing not just the extension of a given cultural property (or era) into a potentially infinite series of adaptations, revisions, reboots (the Star Wars franchise, the Marvel franchise, the Mattel franchise) but as a way of describing how contemporary culture wants us all to behave, that is, to franchise ourselves, to become an all-encompassing personal brand.

  • A Theology of The Book of the New Sun: God and Creation, C. W. Howell. I don’t read Gene Wolfe for the theology, but Wolfe’s concern with metaphysical questions, and the way in which he draws on a tradition of metaphysical inquiry going back to the neo-Platonists, is one of the big appeals. And, as this essay shows, those inquiries do dovetail with a particular theological tradition which I do find very fascinating.

  • Why a Sound?, by Whose Body Is This. The author has released a number of really useful and interesting Pure Data tools and patches. This article talks a little about their implementation of Pulsar Synthesis in Pure Data (PdPG), drawing on the work of Curtis Roads.

  • Affect Theory and the New Age of Anxiety, by Hua Hsu. Interesting essay from 2019, relevant to my proposed PhD project as well as more broadly.

    In Berlant and Stewart’s hands, affect theory provides a way of understanding the sensations and resignations of the present, the normalized exhaustion that comes with life in the new economy. It is a way of framing uniquely modern questions: Where did the seeming surplus of emotionality that we see on the Internet come from, and what might it become? What new political feelings were being produced by the rudderless drift of life in the gig economy? What if millennials were unintelligible to their parents simply because they have resigned themselves to precariousness as life’s defining feature?

  • Being-Sound: From Wandelweiser to Onkyô, by Jason Brogan. An essay from 2018 about a certain strand of minimal music that I can’t get enough of. Connections are made to theories of “affect” from Deleuze & Guattari:

    Percepts are no longer perceptions; they are independent of a state of those who experience them. Affects are no longer feelings or affections; they go beyond the strength of those who undergo them. Sensations, percepts, and affects are beings whose validity lies in themselves and exceeds any lived. […] The work of art is a being of sensation and nothing else: it exists in itself.

What I watched

I went to the theatre more times this month than any other month for the last 15ish years, I think.

  • What I saw on the big screen:
    • Slacker, Richard Linklater [1990]. Hilarious, absurd, fascinating. It is amazing how well everything hangs together. Seeing this on the big screen was a privilege.
    • Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom [1984] and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade [1989] (both dir. by Steven Spielberg). I saw these both on the big screen at the IFI as a sort of memorial to my father, who loved these movies and showed them to me when I was small. For years I maintained that Temple of Doom was the inferior movie while Last Crusade was the greatest. My opinion is changed. Temple of Doom is an intricate action film that ingeniously launches each new set piece out of the fall out from the previous one. The opening 20 minutes in Shanghai is glorious and perfectly encapsulates what adventure movies/stories can do and are about. George Lucas originally conceived of Indiana Jones as “the American James Bond” and this is exactly that. The whole movie feels like the Platonic Ideal of a D&D adventure module from the 1980’s. At the same time, the white saviour narrative, the racism, and the gross-out gags making fun of the cultures of India are all awful, and chalking it all up to being an homage to the legendary (and legendarily problematic) Gunga Din (dir. George Stevens, [1939]) is no excuse. Also, Ke Huy Quan is incredible in this movie, and I hate how the script tells us over and over again how important Jones is to Short Round, while making it clear that the relationship is not reciprocated. Last Crusade, meanwhile, is too sprawling and too overstuffed and too random. Too much backstory, too many locations, too many chases and escape sequences. Sean Connery is terrific, and having the original James Bond is a nice bit of metatext. But the whole thing just plods along. It doesn’t have the same relentless domino logic of Temple of Doom which makes that movie such a spellbinding example of adventure story-telling. Also, the sets and costumes in this movie have a distinct 1980s look and feel to them that just wasn’t present in Temple of Doom or the first film, Raiders of the Lost Ark (which I did not see on the big screen). I found the synthetic fibers distracting, and some of the sets (I’m thinking of the swanky hotel in Venice) looked like they could have been in an early episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation.
    • The Conversation, Francis Ford Coppola [1974]. Gene Hackman is astounding here. The movie is brilliant and captivating. I must also say that I love how much this film is about the technology of audio recording and listening. Everything hinges on listening, here, down to the subtle nuances of emphasis and intonation of a single syllable of speech. This movie really gets how listening can be an active, creative, and constructive activity.
    • Le Chêne (Heart of an Oak), dir. Laurent Charbonnier and Michel Seydoux [2022]. There is some incredible footage in this film, and I love the care and attention to a single tree and the myriad interacting lives in and around it. It is also a bit repetitive and the soundtrack is massively overbearing. It seemed that the filmmakers were worried that the visuals would not be sufficiently interesting so they tried to compensate by overcomposing the score and adding in some musical jokes (like playing a sexy Dean Martin song while some insects mated) which were distracting.
  • What I watched at home:
    • Dazed and Confused Richard Linklater [1993]. I had to re-watch Linklater’s second at home after seeing his debut on the big screen. I still love this movie. The way that all the various groups and cliques bounce off each other and intersect over the course of the movie really resonates with my own experience of growing up in a small town that had that one party every summer that everyone wound up at.
    • サマーウォーズ (Summer Wars), dir. by 細田 守 (Hosoda Mamoru) [2009]. I had heard good things about Hosoda as a director and about this movie in particular. The animation was lovely, the characters were generally interesting and the whole big ensemble family really did feel like a big complex multifaceted family. The whole thing was just a bit too ridiculous, though, and I think it comes down to over-relying on a cyberspace virtual reality world that just didn’t make much sense. I think the TV series Pantheon, based on some stories by Ken Liu, has set the standard for me as far as virtual reality depictions and subsequent dystopias go.
    • Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, dir. Leonard Nimoy [1984]. I think I wanted to watch this having seen another 1984 blockbuster this month. It had also been a long time since I had last watched Trek III. I have mixed feelings here. Nimoy is a good director, and as a whole this is a pretty good looking, well acted movie. But the logic of the plot is very Last Crusades-ey in how it has a lot of moving parts and a lot of stuff happening that just feels decoupled from the narrative logic. In the grand trilogy of Wrath of Khan, Search for Spock, and The Voyage Home, this is the weakest (but hey! Still better than Trek I: The Slow-Motion Picture).

What I listened to

  • Uniform, a heavy band recommended to me by my friend Alex, has really captured my interest.
  • Ruin Arm OST [1995] by (hard to find details on this) SWITCH-E, Studio M2, ST-Type M, Prince E & Chatru. I have an abiding love for 80’s and 90’s video game soundtracks. I love how clever composers had to be while working within the severe constraints of early computer software and hardware. I have a particular love for the music of the Super Nintendo System which is due in large part to the unique audio subsystem that Nintendo and Sony developed (for more details than you’ll ever want, I highly recommend Rodrigo Copetti’s in-depth analysis).
  • From my friend Niall, Keane Connolly McGorman [2023] by Pádraic Keane, Aidan Connolly, Fergus McGorman & Ruairí McGorman. Fantastic!
  • Gourdon . Gauthier . Féraud [2019] by Gourdon ı Gauthier ı Féraud. Beautiful accompaniment to the D’En Haut record. Long, long, long vocal and drone pieces.
  • D’En Haut [2024] by D’En Haut. I love this album.
  • Ar Ais Arís, Robert Curgenven [2020]. I really like this guy. Really really do. “Largo Affetuoso” is essentially perfect as far as I’m concerned when it comes to working with drones and field recordings.
  • 1995, Naoaki Miyamoto [2017]. Beautiful solo guitar music working mostly with feedback and… I’m not sure what else. One of the most interesting solo guitar records I’ve heard in a long time. I love this.
  • Squirdiller, Vatican II [2017]. Very cool and interesting post-hardcore from Dublin. “He Writes my Handwriting” is such a good track. I wish there were more records from this band.

New releases this past month

  • Inorganic Rites, Krallice. Thanks to my friend Dan who keeps me in the loop on the heavy stuff. This album is incredible.

  • When I’m Called, Jake Xerxes Fussell. Fantastic and idiosyncratic set of songs. Fussell is my favourite guitar+voice+songs musician these days.

  • Complete Works 05, Bernard Parmegiani. I love this bit of text about the third track, “Adagio”:

    The reference to a traditional form, with its illustrious antecedents, far from bothering me, rather reassures me, deliberately ruling out any metaphorical references that often seem anecdotal. In fact, I feel more strongly the desire to question myself through the music rather than respond by spelling out a few ideas around it.

  • Fixity 8, Fixity. Very interesting drum-forward music. Excellent beats and arrangements. I think the final track, though, with the acoustic guitar, was the one that was most compelling and exciting to me.

New releases this past June (still catching up!)

  • planets, by planets. A remastered reissue of a crucial masterpiece of drum’n’bass madness that made a big impression on me and my buddies when we were youngsters making complicated rock music.
  • 2024.05.31 Live at Prism Analog, by my friend Ron Harrity. I love how patient Ron is with this set, slowly developing ideas and giving them lots of space and time. It is so easy to pile on layers of sound, especially in a live setting where one might worry about keeping the interest and attention of the audience. But you can’t really control that–the best you can do is pull an Old English Hwæt at the top of a set and then trust that the continual revelations of the universes–the big one we live in and the little one we make–to our senses will be sufficient to keep a listener engaged.
  • ITLP19 - Resort, Skee Mask. Amazing. This producer has the sweetest pads and generally the most interesting and arresting techno music I’ve ever heard.
  • Hear The Children Sing The Evidence, Bonnie “Prince” Billy, Nathan Salsburg & Tyler Trotter. Technically released on the last day of May. Two Lungfish songs stretched out to fill one side of an LP each. That’s heaven.

What I did

  • I saw Fixity perform, along with Meabh McKenna and Black Coral, at the Bello Bar in Dublin.
  • I had an interview with the Philosophy PhD Program at UCD, and I was accepted.
  • I traveled to Maine to attend my father’s funeral.

What I made