Media highlights 2023 (July to December)
Reading and listening highlights from the second half of the year
Media I enjoyed from the second half of 2023. Previous lists:
Ordering remains arbitrary. Let me know if you find something from this list that you end up enjoying.
Books
I keep track of what I read on Goodreads (some written reviews also live here).
Infrastructure: The Book of Everything for the Industrial Landscape — Brian Hayes
Not quite finished but sure to be my favourite book of the year. It has a nice website here.
Bach and the High Baroque — Robert Greenberg
Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty and Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland — Patrick Radden Keefe
The Grasshopper: Games, Life and Utopia — Bernard Suits
Philosopher writes on the nature of games in Aesop/Carroll-style dialogues, plus whimsical illustrations:
Radical Compassion: Learning to Love Yourself and Your World with the Practice of RAIN — Tara Brach
The Son Also Rises: Surnames and the History of Social Mobility — Gregory Clark
Elon Musk — Walter Isaacson
I felt slightly sick reading the Twitter story, like being strapped into a ride I wanted to get off. Partly that might have been just how recent this story was — we are talking less than a year old — and much of it still unfolding. And partly it is some awareness, given what else of the picture we get of Musk, that all this money and energy might have been diverted to something great. Bottled mood of Uncut Gems.
Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly — Anthony Bourdain
The Imagineers of War: The Untold Story of DARPA, the Pentagon Agency That Changed the World — Sharon Weinberger
Parfit: A Philosopher and His Mission to Save Morality — David Edmonds
Excellent Advice for Living: Wisdom I Wish I’d Known Earlier — Kevin Kelly
Music
I log most things on rateyourmusic.com. I also have a Spotify with some playlists.
Albums I most recommend from the last year:
Jorge Ben - A Tábua de Esmeralda (1974)
Le Mystère des Voix Bulgares - Le mystère des voix bulgares : volume 1 (1975)
Bulgarian choral music: unexpectedly captivating!
Nicolas Jaar NYC boiler room and another in CDMX
Freddie Hubbard - Red Clay (1970)
[공중도덕 Gongjoong Doduk] - 공중도덕 (Gongjoong Doduk) (2015)
Alice Coltrane With Strings - World Galaxy (1972)
Favourite songs
Mammal Hands - Nightingale
Solange - Losing You
RXKNephew - American tterroristt
Yule - Apex twin flame
Bill Callahan - Riding for the feeling and Jim Cain
Jorge Ben Jor - Menina Mulher Da Pele Preta
New
Weils — Fugue State (2022)
DJ Sabrina the Teenage DJ - Destiny (2023)
4 hours of sample-heavy house with a kind of “endless neon-lit 90s pool party” vibe. DJSTTDJ mentioned in some kind of live chat that she took after Phil Spector’s ‘wall of sound’ technique, and ‘wall of sound’ is apt.
7038634357 - Neo Seven (2023)
Sissoko, Ségal, Parisien, Peirani - Les égarés (2023)
Patrick Shiroishi - Evergreen (2022)
André 3000 - New Blue Sun (2023)
“André 3000 pivoting to new age ambient music wasn’t on my 2023 bingo card” etc etc, but this is really nice by its own rights.
Jazz
Charlie Parker - Best of the Complete Savoy & Dial Studio Recordings (2000)
Louis Armstrong & Duke Ellington - The Great Summit: The Master Takes (1990)
Dizzy Gillespie, Sonny Stitt & Sonny Rollins - Sonny Side Up (1959)
Sonny Rollins - Saxophone Colossus (1957)
The Dave Brubeck Quartet - Time Out (1959)
Nujabes - Modal Soul (2005)
Chick Corea - Return to Forever (1972)
The Cannonball Adderley Quintet - [In San Francisco Keepnews Collection] (1959) and Cannonball in Japan (1966)
Cannonball Adderley - Somethin’ Else (1958)
Patrick Shiroishi - Hidemi (2021)
The Ahmad Jamal Trio - The Awakening (1970)
Gerry Mulligan - Night Lights (1963)
Electronic and ambient
Terry Riley - In C (1968)
Premise: “53 musical snippets are to be played in order with each snippet being repeated as many times as each musician sees fit for his or her instrument and, at least in theory, without regard to what any other musician in the ensemble is doing.”
… and You’re Nogood (2000)
Mind-bending ‘plunderphonics’ forerunner, a year before Disintegration Loops.
British Sea Power - Disco Elysium (2019)
Vangelis - Blade Runner (1994)
Space - The Best Of (2009)
Lamp - ランプ幻想 (Lamp Gensō) (2008)
[青葉市子 Ichiko Aoba] - 0 (2013)
death’s dynamic shroud.wmv - I’ll Try Living Like This (2015)
SkyTwoHigh - 歌舞伎町冒険 (2020)
猫 シ Corp. & t e l e p a t h - Building a Better World (2019)
I like ambient music that is modelled — per and the album art and title — around an imaginary place.
Classical / orchestral
Amanda Whiting - Lost in Abstraction (2022)
Le Mystère des Voix Bulgares - Le mystère des voix bulgares : volume 1 (1975)
Robert Ashley - Automatic Writing (1979), Perfect Lives (1992)
Nils Frahm - All Melody (2018)
The Moody Blues With The London Festival Orchestra - Days of Future Passed (1967)
Baroque proto-prog, reminds me of Yes.
Glenn Gould’s 1981 Goldberg Variations
Béla Fleck, Zakir Hussain, Edgar Meyer, Detroit Symphony Orchestra & Leonard Slatkin - The Melody of Rhythm (2009)
Pop / dance / hip hop
Pet Shop Boys - Introspective (1988)
Tears for Fears - Songs From the Big Chair (1985)
RXKNephew - Crack Therapy 3 (2020)
DJ Rozwell - None of This Is Real (2014)
Denzel Curry - Melt My Eyez See Your Future (2022)
Zuu and TA13OO were both great but I think this is his best.
Everything else
Rock / folk / punk / Latin adjacent / MPB / soul and such.(Yes, this is a mess.)
Jorge Ben - África Brasil (1976), Fôrça bruta (1970), A Tábua de Esmeralda (1974)
Gil e Jorge - Ogum Xangô (1975)
A reviewer: " If these two recorded a normal album together, it probably would’ve been a contender for the greatest MPB album of all time. But instead they took the much more interesting path of going utterly bonkers together."
Nara Leão - Dez anos depois (1971)
Novos Baianos - Acabou chorare (1972)
Wilco - Kicking Television: Live in Chicago (2005)
Patti Smith - Horses (1975)
Billy Bragg & Wilco - Mermaid Avenue (1998)
Leonard Cohen - You Want It Darker (2016)
Jim Sullivan - U.F.O. (1969)
Made timeless by its backstory: On his 1969 debut album, “U.F.O.,” he sang of beckoning highways, of aliens, of an Arizona ghost town, of a man who looked “so natural” in death it was clearly his time to go. Six years later, the 35-year-old Sullivan disappeared in Santa Rosa, N.M. On the front seat of his recovered gray VW bug were his ID, his beloved 12-string Guild guitar, and a box of his two albums, “U.F.O.” and the 1972 LP “Jim Sullivan.”.
Duster - Stratosphere (1998)
Albert King - Born Under a Bad Sign (1967)
Roberta Flack - Chapter Two (1970)
Roberta Flack - First Take (1969)
OKI - Tonkori in the Moonlight (2022)
Ainu folk music. I hadn’t listened to any before and it’s really nice!
Music on YouTube
(Small discursion) A musical sub-genre has emerged on YouTube of ‘evocative long-play soundscapes plus relevant visuals’.
Typically you get a descriptive title which sells the mood it plans to evoke; something like:
nintendo relaxing music that calms your mind while it’s raining to relax & study to
The sound of a river that melts your brain, the voice of a bird
You get some nice visuals, maybe subtly animated: a picture of the rainy cafe you’re supposed to imagine you’re in, an illustration of the video game the music is taking after, or most famously:
Then there’s the sound: music, often recycled songs, drawn out and processed. No vocals ever. And comforting sound effects like rain or static.
Think of this as a kind of multimodal heir to the role of much ambient music.
If you spend much time in the right corners of YouTube I expect you’ll notice this kind of video as a distinctive phenomenon, otherwise take my word for it. I expect it absorbs far more listening hours than virtually any ambient music labelled as such.
I also notice that so much of these videos are either aimed at evoking nostalgia, or otherwise are full of comments remarking on how nostalgic they feel. For example: 'minecraft music but the nostalgia literally hurts… '. This strikes me as a notable and somewhat new phenomenon: YouTube videos generating vast amounts of nostalgic feelings, especially among young people. What explains that?
Some other favourites:
Films and videos
Films
Didn’t watch many, nor venture beyond the already-widely-highly-regarded. Still:
And a couple of the new Wes Anderson Roald Dahl adaptations: Poison, The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar, The Swan. I also have good memories of some of the source stories.
Special mention to Letterboxd, the website Goodreads could become if it grows up.
Videos
Anti twisting mechanism with fischertechnik and this mesmerising multi-fiber anti-twister visualisation
Universe timelapse: 4.5 Billion Years in 1 Hour
Why all solar panels are secretly LEDs (and all LEDs are secretly solar panels)
Wirth’s Law means the fearsome speed of modern computing hides behind layers of software abstraction (“my computer can’t be that fast, it’s taking five seconds to figure out how to move a window across the screen”). So it pays to sometimes open the top and watch the engine roar.
Nicer Trees Spend Fewer Bytes: compressing 12947 Wordle words into 12155 bytes
On chess: mate-in-omega and hexagonal chess
On ‘not knots’ (knots and their complements) (supplement PDF)
Words on the internet
Websites
A tool for drawing UML diagrams based on a simple syntax
Neural net algorithms, animated
Writing and speaking
Music podcast of Tyler Cowen DJing for Rick Rubin
Mine and I expect many others’ podcast listening highlight of the year. Rights permissions aside, I want to listen to so much more in this format.
The fascist state of Paw Patrol — Matthew Walther
Strong evidence is common — Mark Xu
Slime Mold Time Old on ‘Charter Houses’
Where does my computer get the time from? — Tony Finch
Mutually Assured Recursion — Kyle Hovey
We are all animals at night — Lana Hall
(Partial self-promotion) Saloni Dattani on Malaria Vaccines and Missing Data in Global Health
Alignment Implications of LLM Successes: a Debate in One Act
Notes on Existential Risk from Artificial Superintelligence — Michael Nielsen
Please let me know if you picked something up from this list which you enjoyed!