tecznotes

These are a few of the tracks I added to iTunes in 2009 and listened to the most. Not all of the music is new, but it's all got a date-added between 2009-01-01 and 2009-12-31 and a fairly high number of plays, so that's good enough for me. This post would be a one-line perl script if I used last.fm.

(Here are the MP3s below as an .m3u playlist)

1. Pet Shop Boys: Love Etc.

Shawn makes no apologies for hating the Pet Shop Boys, but this is the new track I listened to the most this year, so there you go. They've been a favorite band of mine for about ten years, mostly because I like pop music and I like their lyrics. This track is also a stand-in for Lady GaGa's Poker Face which I don't actually own, but find completely fascinating. Pop music!

2. Zomby: Where Were U In 92?

This track is an amazing signpost to the hardcore rave music of the early 1990's, but it's entirely modern and produced by someone too young to have had firsthand experience of that scene. I found it via k-punk, who has this to say:

That's why, whatever its intentions, whatever its official status as a side-project, Zomby's Where Were U In 92 amounts to a refreshingly honest libidinal confession, an admission that British dance music is still haunted by the hardcore continuum. Think about why it's impossible to have imagined a Jungle producer in 92 do Where Were U in 76: it isn't only that 92 had so broken with the whole frame of reference of sixteen years before, it's that the headlong rush into the future precluded such retrospection.

3. Moderat: A New Error

This is one of those tracks that Shawn brings to the office that makes me have to put down whatever it is I'm doing for about ten minutes. The bass here, heard over a good pair of speakers, is deep like the best of Sleeparchive.

4. Laurent Garnier: Wake Up

I include this because it's part of the two-disc Logic Trance 2 compilation, something from 1994 that I finally reacquired this year. Most of the collection is loaded with floating, detached trance music that hadn't in all cases found a dancefloor yet. It's all deeply nostalgic for me, found through my roommate Paul who helped form a lot of my musical tastes as I was hitting escape velocity from industrial music. The whole compilation is a classic, this track from Laurent Garnier is a taste.

5. Depeche Mode: Wrong

The video for Wrong is like a terrifying bad dream. The song is some of the darkest anything I've heard come out of Depeche Mode, incredibly abrasive and confrontational.

6. Venetian Snares: Sajtban

I saw Venetian Snares play perform in Oakland with Otto Von Schirach, and loved the performance. Again, abrasive and confrontational, but also fast and squiggly.

7. Slayer: Angel Of Death

Another one of those memories dredged up from my youth, this one from Brian, the slightly white-trashy headbanger dude who lived up the street from me in San Jose when I was 14. Other bands I got from Brian include Obituary, Death, Godflesh, and Entombed. He also owned all the Iron Maiden EPs that were just Nicko McBrain funny-talking apropos of nothing. I've started pulling out some of this old metal lately, fixating on some of the more experimental or weird bits that fit cleanly with my later electronic tastes. Angel Of Death pretty much just rocks the fuck out.

8. Sam Cooke: Chain Gang

On a completely different trajectory, Sam Cooke is amazing. The ooh-hah beat of Chain Gang is astonishing.

9. Birdy Nam Nam: The Parachute Ending

I don't recall where I found the video for this, but it's a lovely piece of very French-seeming animation that instantly reminded me of Spartakus and the Sun Beneath the Sea. It didn't even register that the "Birdy Nam Nam" in the video title was the name of a band or that this was a music video, and I wondered why the music wasn't included in the credits. Dur. Excellent techno track though.

10. Blaqstarr: Hustress (snippet) feat. Rye-Rye

I'm not sure why this is here. I got interested in Blaqstarr tangentially through bingeing on The Wire for a few months, and this short slice of omnious hip-hop sound collage is incredibly interesting.