MUSIC FIRST
Hello, happy full moon and near autumnal equinox. Tuesday night I received a text describing the eclipse as looking like the moon was wearing a fuzzy black cap. Chic!
This month I have been doing most of my close listening on long train commutes and in the computer lab while I move through the tedium of GIS homework. Here are a few of the mixes and releases which have been on repeat for me, which now, upon looking at them together, all present a little bass/dub-forward…
- CCL @ Freerotation (July 2024)
Listened to this twice in a row when I first saw it posted. It feels like there’s a highly calculated plot happening in this set–things drop or shift at just the right time. I audibly gasped when I heard Pa Salieu come in and then realized I was not alone in the computer lab…
- Uu010 - various artists - Kassian (UK) (Aug 2024)
Continuing along the bassy depths… discovered this one through the Milan based artist Piezo, but all six tracks are worthwhile and synthesize nicely together.
- Tumbadora EP - Danny Daze / Jonny From Space / feat. Nick León (Aug 2024)
- Back Then I Didn’t But Now I Do - Jonny From Space (Feb 2024)
Miami based artists who I have really been digging lately. Got to glimpse Danny and Nick on Thursday night at Sustain Release. Was happily surprised that Nick León was willing to end his set with a little taste of Bikini, which has been the sexy little soundtrack for my late night bike rides home all through August.
- Mia Koden - “An Intersection of Deep, Percussive Dubstep & Dub 2004-2024 with Mia Koden” - MAJ (Aug 2024)
I have been a fan of Mia’s production for a while, but this is a cool glimpse into her dub influence.
- Satoshi Tomiie - Magic Hour (Sep 2024)
A little more minimalist, to be honest it’s been good reading and contemplation music.
And, last but not least, and the only one that isn’t new as of this year… but feels necessary to include: when I had to drive Identified Patient and his plus one to the airport after he played the most menacingly fierce set Saturday night (maybe I’ll write more on this and Sustain in general in the future who knows), and I had the pressure of being on aux in my own car… you might wonder what I put on. (I asked if they wanted to hear music and he was like “yes, go ahead, surprise me!” Promptly, all thoughts left the brain).
- Leftfield - Leftism (1995)
Shoutout to Ever for sending me this one recently, which I have truly been listening to at all hours of the day. Not sure if it impressed my passengers per se but from the looks of it we were all having a good time. I love the horizontality of the car aux cord, where a renowned DJ was at the mercy of whatever I had in the queue, and the lateral nature of music-shares in general, where there is a constant flow and reciprocity, where our edges are forever expanding and finding new nodes of fodder which we then send back into the circuit towards the ears of the people we love.
MEMORY IN NOUNS
It’s been a while since I have had a moment to sit down and write. I got sick (honestly still am getting over it), and also have been adjusting to the new semester, which has thrust me back into the sometimes-harrowing journey of trying To Do Both. Some days this feels like an act of total submission to the forward motion of clock-time: I am overwhelmed with the feeling of not-wanting-to, I guess they call it dread?, but I also find myself compelled towards the sensation at the end of the day when, somehow, I have made it through everything without it all going to shambles, and there’s some mixture of triumph and relief. Sometimes I think I am a little addicted to maxing out in this way, to the compact drama of slight over-complication. Then at the same time, I am haunted by the feeling that I am barely doing anything at all with my time and energy.
Why don’t I have more to show for it? Where is it all going?
Always, I hope, a little bit towards increasing the love (as my dear friend EL would say).
These days, there is no shortage of things to write about, and the more time that passes, the more I feel the funny pressure of chronology mounting, because I kind of want to document it all. And it takes time for me to develop things from a kernel of an idea to words in a legible structure. But in a recent car-ride conversation with a writer and DJ (who also played an amazing set at Sustain Release), we discussed the misguided inclination to write it all down.
In a process of near-daily journaling over a long span of time, she realized that in all the gigs she had experienced and written about, it was rarely the “important” events that she wrote down later, like what happened on the dance floor or behind the decks, and more often the journeys in between destinations that stuck with her–train rides, bus terminals, etc. The details and sensations which memory selects to hold onto are peculiar, but usually manage to bring into relief much more than what exists within their borders.
An exercise that EL’s mom gave to us before a trip we took one summer, was to write down a list of all the nouns we remembered in a day. The idea being, or at least what I got from it, that in sidestepping the verbs–the actions, events, what you did throughout the day–and honing in on the people, places, and things, the tactile minutiae that brought your activities to life, you would tap into rich and vivid materiality (from which all else flows).
I still think about this exercise all the time, because she was right that every day is a poem if you let it be. It also forced me to let go of the scarcity mindset that told me I needed to capture everything perfectly, and challenged me to honor ephemerality a little more. I also have that feeling now in response to my cell phone, which is a miniature smartphone with a pretty terrible microphone and camera, meaning that I often fail to capture a moment digitally (though I still do try, most often in vain). Sometimes I look back at these little inadequate parcels of pixels in my Photos app, or the accompanying videos with their overblown audio, and it jogs my memory of what’s not there, the intention to immortalize a moment instead bringing into view what’s just beyond it.
I was recently reading an excerpt from Pierre Nora, who in 1989 was already writing about the acceleration of history and the collapse of memory. Nora writes about the study of lieux de memoire, or sites of memory, which he believes emerged in France between the end of the tradition of memory and the inception of historiography. “These lieux de memoire are fundamentally remains… They make their appearance by virtue of the deritualization of our world–producing, manifesting, establishing, constructing, decreeing, and maintaining by artifice and by will a society deeply absorbed in its own transformation and renewal,” he wrote (12).
This society of History produces individuals possessed by a devout commitment to change (progress), and a duty to never forget. Without the rituals of the memory traditions which have been eclipsed by History, though, this remembering act is no longer imbued with collective meaning-making, but is rather atomized, turned into a private responsibility that one has in contract with the national or even universal narrative. The disintegration of popular memory has multiplied individual histories, “a decisive shift from the historical to the psychological,” (15).
Meanwhile, historicization is performed with a managerial calculus: archives, museums, memorials, and other institutions of proof treat events and their documentation as data that can be stored, cataloged, organized, and appraised with systematic efficiency. As we each upload everything we’ve ever generated into a Cloud which we do not see, which we perhaps imagine as a non-space (or a necessary evil), despite the copious water and energy it takes to maintain these precious, oversized hoards, are we not also embodying a (hostile) logic of information management?
But if not this, then what? What is a proper burial? Who would we be without these traces?
Today I am writing with all those killed and maimed by the deadly explosions of the IOF Pager Attack in Lebanon on my heart and mind. Likewise, I am thinking about those attacked by police gun violence at Sutter Ave. station in Brooklyn four days ago.
As mass media becomes a less reliable means of keeping track of things, we are tasked with finding creative ways to re-engage traditions of memory, of devising alternative infrastructures of communication. Before I even moved to New York City, when I was visiting one weekend, I remember an old lady slipping past the turnstile with the skill and ease of decades long repetition. When she saw me struggling to pay, she shook her head at me and opened the door, beckoning me through. This ethos of no-nonsense care and common-sense solidarity is what made me want to move here in the first place. This is a city of practical, skeptical people who look out for one another and refuse to tacitly accept the imposition of control. For the many of us who have transplanted here from elsewhere more recently, I think it’s the bare minimum requirement for us to match that culture of everyday agitation and neighborly love.
(The article I am referencing by Pierre Nora is called “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire.”)
Take care and talk soon xx
Flip