It certainly doesn’t hurt that the local internet service provider’s name doubles as an alert, heavy with municipal infrastructure vibes, regarding what happens to be my particular mode of sensory focus.
I had the great pleasure of reviewing All Life Long, the new album from Kali Malone, for Pitchfork, and when the editing was complete, I was informed the album would be part of the latest Best New Music lineup, which was fantastic news. It’s a great record, especially if you like organ music, early polyphony, and David Byrne’s The Knee Plays. The album marks a major step forward for Malone. Much of her catalog to date has consisted of exploratory drones. As I say in the review, “Malone’s latest work challenges today’s drone musicians to retain the delectable, psychedelic whir of drones while using them in the service of something melodically engaging.”
Here are the first three paragraphs:
A held chord on a pipe organ can signal a looming arrival—of a Boris Karloff character or, in a brighter register, the bride-to-be. Such a stately chord encapsulates anticipation. It makes its listener cognizant of waiting, because the instrument can sustain such a chord forever. That is how pipe organs function, and it is one reason they are perfect for churchly representations of heavenly—that is, eternal—choruses.
By contrast, if you hear a sustained note on a piano or saxophone, let alone sung by a singer, you know it has a finite lifespan: until the instrument—or lungs—give way. The limitless sustain of an organ is an innate superpower. Since you sense the organ’s stamina is inexhaustible, you know the player has complete discretion as to when whatever happens next will … actually … occur.
When that musician is Kali Malone, be prepared to wait—and, following momentary activity, to wait again. Malone is a poet of attenuation. The compositions on All Life Long proceed at the considered pace of a chess-by-mail match. Each step is a marker of choices made. As a listener, you pay attention not just to those steps but to the overtones that fill the air in between. Each chord is a burr of wonderment. To listen closely is to find compositions within, as waveforms meld, tones circle, and patterns shift with a dynamism initially belied by the seeming stasis.
Read the full piece at Pitchfork. And check out the record on Bandcamp.
I do this manually at the end of each week: collating (and sometimes lightly editing) most of the recent little comments I’ve made on social media, which I think of as my public scratch pad. Some end up on Disquiet.com earlier, sometimes in expanded form. These days I mostly hang out on Mastodon (at post.lurk.org/@disquiet), and I’m also trying out a few others. I take weekends and evenings off social media.
▰ Nothing like the sonic combination of skateboards and seagulls
▰ Whew, trying to sync Reeder with iCloud alone was not a successful experiment. Well, it was successful, in that it yielded a clear outcome, which was to go back to syncing Reeder with Feedly.
▰ Criminal Record is so-so. Like a lot of TV, it’s better filmed and acted than written. But give a raise to whoever did the sound in episode six when Peter Capaldi’s detective stands in a forest so lost in a petrified daze that the ringing of his phone must emerge from the birds’ incessant cawing.
▰ Two days left until TinyLetter shuts down. It began as a simple web-enabled exercise to encourage one-to-many communication and was soon acquired by MailChimp, which has finally given up on it a decade-plus later. We’ll see where letter-writers land: Substack, Buttondown, Beehiiv — heck, even blogs.
▰ Pretty fantastic the sort of programming our two neighborhood movie theaters do. This is at the 4 Star in San Francisco’s Richmond District.
▰ Future historians looking back at journal entries: is this when his brain started to go, or did he just stop using autocorrect?
▰ The blandly surreal AI cover image on your album does not express particular confidence in the music contained therein
▰ This fantastic “Lighthouse #429” track from the new Brian Eno documentary is like if Jon Hassell had recorded something for Ninja Tune
▰ Some tools are like, “Here, this works.” Others are like, “Hi, welcome to this club, let’s chat, let’s get you onboarded, here’s some helpful lingo, let’s personalize the heck out of your experience.” And you’re like, “I just wanted a slightly more dependable [X] that, I dunno, syncs with my phone.”
▰ Turned off the music to listen to the storm
Later: Whew, this storm is intense and sounds weird.
Later still: Oh, that’s Max Richter’s score for Spaceman playing quietly in living room. (But yes, the storm is intense.)
▰ I finished reading three graphic novels this week: Simon Birks and Willi Roberts’ Antarctica (Counterpart-style multiverse thriller hijinks, choppy at times), Andy Diggle and Rubine’s The Expanse: Dragon Tooth (which stretches the story out after the end of the TV series — which is to say, before the time jump to the final three books), and Simon Spurrier and Charlie Adlard’s Damn Them All (which is very Hellblazer, though with less of a present charismatic main character — Adlard’s page layouts are the best part). It may seem like I’m reading less in the way of novels, but I’m about 650 pages into a pair of very long ones — so, I’m reading, just not finishing (yet). I’m also into several non-fiction books, mostly about music, but it’s unclear which I’ll finish first. Often my non-fiction reading is more piecemeal and “researchy” than straight-forward reading.
Some buildings downtown in San Francisco remain deeply noir.
Bonus: the building has a 13th floor.
When you’re about to take an elevator but you’re not entirely sure which dimension is your destination
