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Music 2007+08

My winter and spring have been so busy that I never made the time for any year-in-review posts here. Six months late, here’s a midyear update on music.

Last year, I finished a major music project: listening to every album in an mp3 library I had access to, whether I liked it or not. Overall, it broadened my taste and music history knowledge quite a bit, particularly in 1970s and 1990s rock that I would otherwise have missed entirely. Many thanks to those who added shoegazer and prog. rock to my vocabulary! Most of the new albums I discovered in 2007/early 2008 were from that library.

The exceptions were new purchases, mostly after seeing concerts. Kieran Hebden (a.k.a. Four Tet) put on a fantastic show at the free Beats, Breaks and Culture festival in July, doing the best take on improvised jazz with electronic equipment that I’ve seen to date; his album with Steve Reid doesn’t fully capture that experience, but check out the videos:

  • Shows the energy of the performance, but you can’t really see what Kieran’s doing unfortunately.
  • More closeups of Kieran’s hands, although it’s still confusing
  • Mostly talking, but a few good music clips.

The other show that blew me away was Caribou. Eric has been pushing this guy for some time, but I didn’t really get it until I finally listened to Andorra in its entirety. Beautiful, weird rock/pop with at least one track that pushes the Boards of Canada sound in new directions.

And there have been other shows, mostly excellent: Michael Brook, Kid Koala, the Foals, We are Wolves, Monolake, Royal Wood, Odessa/Havana, Cinematic Orchestra, The Most Serene Republic and Fuck Buttons.

At any rate, here is the list of the best albums I listened to in the last eighteen months.

Great Albums (8/10)

  • caribou. andorra. rock, ambient.
  • cat power. the greatest. rock.
  • radiohead. in rainbows. rock.
  • various artists. matador – everything is nice. rock, hip hop, ambient.
  • various artists. matador – matador at fifteen. rock, hip hop, ambient.
  • various artists. mo’wax – headz 2a. trip hop, downtempo.
  • xploding plastix. amateur girlfriends go proskirt agents. acid jazz.

Good Albums (7/10)

  • angelo badalamenti. twin peaks soundtrack. soundtrack, jazz.
  • feist. the reminder. rock, pop.
  • four tet. dj kicks. rock, pop, folk, ambient.
  • funky lowlives, the. inside ep. downtempo.
  • jerry bonham. interpretations ii. house, trance.
  • justice. t. house.
  • kevin drew. spirit if… rock.
  • kieran hebden & steve reid. tongues. acid jazz.
  • king cobb steelie. junior relaxer. downtempo, rock.
  • kruder & dorfmeister. conversions: a k&d selection. downtempo, drum & bass.
  • sander kleinenberg. everybody. tech-house, trance.
  • two lone swordsmen. stay down. downtempo, ambient.
  • underworld. a hundred days off. techno, downtempo.
  • underworld. dubnobasswithmyheadman. techno, downtempo.
  • various artists. blue note plays jobim. latin, jazz.
  • various artists. chains and black exhaust. funk, rock.
  • various artists. colette no. 5. electro, synthpop.
  • various artists. eighteenth street lounge music – easy tempo. jazz, latin.
  • various artists. eighteenth street lounge music – modular systems. downtempo.
  • various artists. hip bop ‘n’ funk. funk, jazz.
  • various artists. matador – what’s up matador. rock, pop, folk, ambient.
  • various artists. music for tv dinners: the ’60s. jazz, downtempo.
  • various artists. rephlex – the braindance coincidence. drum & bass, techno.
  • various artists. stage diving to the oldies. punk.
  • various artists. sweet relief ii: the gravity of the situation. rock, pop, folk.
  • various artists. the best of blaxploitation. funk, soul.
  • various artists. the tarantino connection. rock, pop.
  • various artists. warp – artificial intelligence. ambient.
  • various artists. warp – routine. ambient, minimal techno.
  • velvet underground. the velvet underground and nico. rock.
  • vikter duplaix. dj kicks. downtempo, acid jazz.
  • violent femmes. violent femmes. punk, rock.
  • vive la fête. nuit blanche. synthpop.
  • v.l.a.d.. d’. electro, techno.
  • waldeck. the night garden. downtempo, trip hop, dub.
  • way out west. intensify. trance.
  • we are scientists. with love and squalor. rock.
  • wilco. yankee hotel foxtrot. rock.
  • wiseguys, the. the antidote. big beat, hip hop, downtempo.
  • yann perreau. western romance. pop, français.
  • yeah yeah yeahs. show your bones. rock.
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Christmas in BC

I spent the holidays this year in the West Coast, visiting many people. J and I stayed with her family in the Kootenays, an area of BC I’d never really seen before. It was truly spectacular: a wet valley between the Okanagan and Calgary, with a coastal climate, mountainous terrain, and a deep lake that doesn’t freeze in the winter. The photo above gives a bit of a sense of the place: steely grey, with big conifers and lots of snow. We also had a day of perfect skiing in Whitewater, a small hill south of Nelson with great tree skiing and lots of fresh, dry snow. I highly recommend the Kootenays for any BC visitor, if you can find a way to get there—it’s 8-10 hours drive from both Vancouver and Calgary, and flights to nearby cities can be pricy and unreliable.

New Years was in Vancouver, revisiting my good friends at the Kommune, my former home in Vancouver. It was great to catch up with everyone, and I hope some of you can make it out to Toronto in the near future.

I’ve uploaded many photos to Flickr. Be sure to log in to Flickr and make sure I’ve added you as a friend; many photos are not visible to the anonymous public.

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Award Winning

At last weekend’s conference for the Canadian Regional Science Association, I presented a paper on Understanding Iterative Proportional Fitting Using Log-Linear Models. At day’s end, I received the Best Student Paper award (in a tie with Marianne Hatzopolous, a Ph.D. student in my lab). Sure, it’s just a small regional conference… but I’m still happy with that outcome.

In other news, we had an interesting tour of Mississauga with former geography professor Gunter Gad. Some of my photos are on Flickr. I’ve visited Mississauga twice on bike in the past year, both times hitting up Port Credit on the waterfront and Square One, the nominal city centre. This conference was at U of T’s Mississauga campus, and I used a combination of GO Transit and cycling to attend. After seeing a broader spectrum of the streets, I’m considerably more pessimistic about the potential for change in travel behaviour or urban form in this city. It’s extremely segregated into residential and non-residential areas, and the pedestrian realm on almost all arterials is utterly bleak. Not bleak in the sense that it’s dangerous or dirty – just extremely monotonous. Given a choice, no one would walk a kilometer along a street like this – and I saw many streets in exactly this style.

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TIFF 2007 Picks

So after much delibration, let me present our Toronto International Film Festival picks (a collaborative effort between J. and I). This is by no means a list of the “best” films; it’s more of a strategic list of films that might be hard to see later, and that we have a reasonable chance of getting in to, or that we just felt like including.

First choices:

  • The Exodus. Pang Ho-Cheung, Hong Kong. Because we don’t seen enough Asian movies.
  • I’m Not There. Todd Haynes, USA. Bob Dylan’s life, as defined by the characters he invented.
  • Persepolis. Vincent Paronnaud & Marjane Satrapi, France. A bleak recent history of life in Iran interjected with humour and dreams, animated in stark black & white from the original graphic novels.
  • Short Cuts Canada programme 2. A set of shorts leaning a bit more towards the animated end of the spectrum, with Boar Attack, Madam Tutli-Putli and Dada Dum looking particularly appealing.
  • Silent Light. Carlos Reygadas, Mexico. Mexican Mennonites including Miriam Toews, speaking in Low German? Indeed.

Second choices:

  • Encounters at the End of the World. Werner Herzog, USA. The legendary director does Antarctica.
  • Jellyfish. Shira Geffen & Edgar Keret, Israel. Unsettling Israelis on the brink of emotional chaos, and winner of a Camera d’Or at Cannes.
  • M. Lee Myung-Se, South Korea.
  • The Mourning Forest. Naomi Kawase, France/Japan. An elderly man and young woman contemplating grief amidst stunning nature. Winner of the Grand Prix at Cannes this year.
  • With Your Permission. Paprika Steen, Denmark/Sweden. Extreme discomfort, all stiff back and flailing arms. And thankfully not dogme.

Not chosen, but looking forward to:

  • L’âge des ténèbres (Days of Darkness). Denys Arcand, Canada. Following up on the great Barbarian Invasions.
  • Eastern Promises. David Cronenberg, UK/Canada. The History of Violence team are back again, with Mortensen accompanied this time by Naomi Watt in a Russian mobster flick.
  • Elizabeth: The Golden Age. Shekhar Kapur, UK. Not at the top of my list, but probably worth seeing.
  • My Kid Could Paint That. Amir Bar-Lev, USA. Documentary about a 4 year old whose abstract artworks have sold for over $300,000.
  • My Winnipeg. Guy Maddin, Canada. Back with another weird one, I imagine.
  • No Country for Old Men. Joel & Ethan Coen, USA. Highly anticipated, based on its trailer.
  • Paranoid Park. Gus Van Sant, France. With Christopher Doyle as cinematographer.
  • Useless. Jia Zhang-Ke, China. About an artist who criticises consumerism’s effects on China; sounds thematically similar to Manufactured Landscapes, even if the art is completely different.

Reviews will show up in the sidebar of this site over the next few weeks, once we see which picks we get in the draw. It won’t be in the RSS feed, so check back at my site periodically.