trent reznor : internet superhero. the amount of blogging done about the new ghosts album is difficult to even comprehend, so i'm going to keep it simple with yet another strong endorsement of the distribution model. i'll be revisiting ghosts I-IV from a critical standpoint once i've had a bit more time with it, of course, but it's definitely a piece of work that takes some serious time and dedication to fully absorb. i will say that it reminds me very much of the new autechre - speaking of which, let's follow up on my previous post.so the autechre broadcast last week turned out to be one of their marathon mixes, this one clocking in at just over twelve hours long (almost digestible compared to their 36 hour mix for xltronic), hence my providing a link to a torrent of the mix rather than hosting it myself...free up some hard drive space and give it a listen though, it's fantastic!
loads of obscure old school hip hop is the MO this time around, though there's a fair amount of captain beefheart and the hafler trio and all the usual suspects. you can find an increasingly more complete playlist for the mix here, if you're looking to be totally fucking overwhelmed.back to NIN's new ghosts project reminding me of quaristice: one of my favorite aspects of the release is that we can finally hear the influences NIN and AE share (80s industrial, early hip-hop, eno, etc), and the different if finally reconcilable directions both artists take those influences towards - playing both releases back to back makes for one of the most engrossing "ambient" music experiences i've ever heard, and serves to highlight their similarities. add this to my first experience with both LPs being FLAC copies provided by surprise internet-only pre-releases in which i had to wait precariously for the servers hosting the files to get their shit together (i find it a little unfair that reznor's been lambasted for not having his servers prepared for the onslaught of customers that flocked to the new release when the well oiled machine that is bleep.com almost entirely collapsed when quaristice came online, and they've been one of the most successful internet record shops in the business), not to mention the fact that both albums are long playing collections of short, instrumental sound experiments leaning toward the ambient (each one tied to specific images sent with digital copies of the album), and things start moving towards the uncanny. the weird, even [hauntology is the new goth!]
speaking of das unheimliche, i wonder if the general population will be subconsciously rejecting the effects of the 24th sunspot cycle as big-shot astronomer sten f. odenwald rather vehemently suggests we may have done with sun storms in past via his book "The 23rd Cycle". i wonder this as key space weather experts converge on san fransisco for a panel on the coming cycle - one particularly well written article on the upcoming sunspot surge casually drops that "while some scientists are predicting a weak cycle, others are predicting a cycle that would be the most intense solar activity yet recorded". in fact, there seems to be a great deal of debate between the two dominant schools of thought presented at the panel on nearly everything about this cycle, which is predicted to start warming up this month and rage on to a peak at the tail end of 2011 (all you freaks obsessed with the end of the world might note the proximity of this sunspot peak to the
year 2012), mostly due to the lack of data we have regarding the sun's habits and it's effect on humanity and the planet as a whole. while i, for one, find this lack of data to be both terrifying and massively exciting, i think the data we do have is even more so. satellites falling out of the sky, entire power grids backfiring and shutting down, the earth's magnetic field being jerked around like a leaf in a hurricane, auroras in texas...keep in mind these are all things that happened last time the full 22 year cycle peaked in 1989 (the sun's magnetic field reverses in polarity every 11 years), and even then, they're only the things we can directly attribute to the sun - the butterfly effect these events could have is of course impossible to determine, but can provide many many hours of contemplation and speculation, at least to me, and we'll be visiting more on the subject in the weeks to come, i think.but for now, there are more important things to think about, like the SEASON FINALE OF PROJECT RUNWAY OMG!!! I swear, Jillian better win this shit because I do NOT want to see Christian win by default (it really bothers me when people are rewarded for being total fucking assholes), and Rami just does not cut the mustard.
