First song played this year: "Here Comes the Sun", followed by "Because" which I have been repeating since then. I saw "Because" mentioned in a magazine and really wanted to hear it, and when I sat down at the CD player, hearing "Here Comes the Sun" sounded like a really good idea, too.

"Because" I wanted to hear mostly because I re-watched American Beauty last week and there's a beautiful remake of the song over the closing credits. The original doesn't have the same sacred feeling of that remake, but it's still doing it for me right now. It's a weird song - all intro.

I'm glad to see that Mel has started a music writing site, and even more glad that it's very good.

The first track on Not for Nothin' really sounds like it ends 5 minutes in, then starts again. I haven't yet paid enough attention to notice how they get around this interesting problem, if it even is one.

I wonder if Coltrane started using so many slow codas (often combined with slow entrances) because they acted as a cadencing device with all the modal or otherwise not-normally-resolving midsections.

Current megamix:

Mystikal, Tarantula. I think I heard him being sensitive in the midst of all the howling and grunting. Awww.

John Coltrane, Stellar Regions. The first time it came on, after the Holland, it kind of scared me, but only because it was loud. Really. I still can't get over how beautiful this is despite the way it sound.

Dave Holland, Not for Nothin'. I don't hear Billy Kilson doing as much direct drum-n-bass borrowing as on Prime Directive (not that that album was overrun with it), but it does pop up here and there during parts, which makes me think that he's just integrated those rhythmic ideas (ooh, what a five dollar phrase) into his playing more thoroughly.

Prefuse 73, Vocal Studies + Uprock Narratives. A Christmas gift from Dave! The CD here I am the least familiar with so far, and that doesn't help since it's been a curious listen so far. I was expecting more hip-hop, I guess, or at least hip-hop that sounds less like "downtempo" (ha, take that Ethan). I did catch myself enjoying what I took to be a boring track earlier though, so this one bears listening (as with most things I first hear).

Erik Truffaz, The Mask. A compliation, which means that there's more traditional trumpet-drums-piano-bass small group post-bop, as well as something in between with the pianist on Fender Rhodes (and tending toward very guitary sounds, so maybe he plays a Clavinet too or something, but I didn't think he did) and the band playing something more like early Miles proto-fusion. And also of course what Truffaz is known for, a live band playing drum-n-bass-meets-jazz. Based on Revisite I wasn't expecting to be that impressed, but so far I've liked it quite a bit. I think those who criticize Truffaz for apeing Miles too much, and also for just sort of blankly playing his long tones over the rhythm section without interacting, may have some point, but I'm not sure how much I'm supposed to care when the band is playing some really right drum-n-bass and Truffaz seems to be filling his role quite well in that respect. Maybe the band is open to criticisms of not putting enough jazz into things, I'm not sure. The music feels a lot more electric to me, probably because of the tiny variations perceptible that are due to the band playing live. I'll have to think about it some more.

One of my favorite records of the year was Since I Left You by the Avalanches. (Technically it's older, but it wasn't released in the States until 2001.)

Consider these notes for an essay I'll probably never finish.

I think that Tim got a lot right, especially about the sounds on the album, but his talk in the review and especially elsewhere, as well as that of plenty of other people, seems to make the album out to be an idyllic, sugary-sweet somethingorother, the kind of thing most appropriate for soundtracking endless fun-filled summer nights. I think Tim has even said something about how he listened to it every day in the summer (Australia's summer) and hasn't picked it up since.

Maybe it's that I got the album this fall, then, but I doubt that; it's more likely that my reaction has more to do with me than the season. I get a much more wistful, mournful feeling from the album than a lot of the people whose reactions I've read have seemed to.

It has a lot to do with memories. Not my memories specifically, but memories in general. Of course, because of my interest in memories (sorry to link to that again and again but it's my favorite example of this sort of thing), I'm more than a little prone to find them everywhere. This doesn't make what I've heard any less potentially interesting.

Partly it's the samples. Not just these samples. I get the impression of age, something from the past, from lots of music that involves sampling. Some of this is obviously due to the vinyl sources, sometimes deliberately grainy or scratchy; not always, though. I think more often it just has to do with the way the sample is marked off as being from somewhere else: through its repeating, or the musical cues that indicate it comes from a larger context which has a different musical logic than the song where the sample is used.

The way samples often repeat when they form the backbone of a song makes them reminiscent of memories for me because of the way they seem cut off, fragmentary - just the one little bit that I can get hold of, coming back over and over again, because that's all that comes; the rest doesn't follow once the fragment enters my mind. Sometimes I rehearse a memory, re-play it, and sometimes I can't help its coming back. This kind of sample is all over Since I Left You - they form its foundation, even.

A lot is made of how the record's songs segue into one another, in a more or less continuous mix. Sometimes this is because the adjacent tracks have a lot to do with one another, and sometimes it seems more like the gaps are filled in by some more stuff, if you will. Either way, this makes the music drift. Lots of music drifts, and maybe the connections I'm drawing work for that music too, but because of all the connections to memories that I hear here, the drift makes the music resemble the kind of logic of memories (or dreams!) where one memory leads to another, lazily, by association, with whatever it takes to connect the two.

All this doesn't yet sound as down in mood as maybe I originally indicated. I'm not totally sure how it all adds up. Obviously just the associations with memory are, for me, sort of sad. I think this has something to do, in a way I'm not prepared to go into at the moment, with loss. This makes the album as a whole even more appropriate to me because the drift is a quick one. Most of my favorite parts go by too fast. The intoxicating, heady bursts of dirty funk or stomping house are short, and then replaced by something else. While it's true that there's something to be had in that something else, there's always a sense of privation when the best parts fly by. The reasons for this sense of loss, and that coming from remembered memories, are probably different. But the feeling is similar enough.

Dave Holland's band is so good I kind of wish they would screw up more.

Besides the uniquely propulsive effect of the 3/4 time, "How to Disappear Completely" also has a great sense of inertia to it because of the way it seems to continuously rise throughout the song. So the part near the end where the dissonant strings and other atmospheric noises threaten to overwhelm the motion is especially interesting. Radiohead are too consummately pop to let that happen, though, so a hint of the foregoing pulse can still always be heard, even when the threat is at its strongest.

I didn't want to say "atmospheric" because I read the word used elsewhere tonight and found myself grumbling, but you get what I mean.

I think the most interesting point made in this "group" review of Kid A is made by Andy Battaglia, when he notes that any debate about the album is asymmetrical because the detractors get to take advantage of the dominant, well-established vocabulary and arsenel of critical tools, whereas the proponents have recourse mostly to less definite and less-established language.

Relation to debates between objectivists and subjectivists, realists and anti-realists. Ramifications for any experimental or hybridized music.