FACT's 20 albums for 2011

oh really, as in it samples erotic city?

awesome track btw

What do you call it when you're over-generous with your time on something you don't like, but you want to learn to 'appreciate'?

oh god, all the time with acts i love in the first place - is it worse when it doesn't pay off, and you feel like you've wasted all that time, or when it kind of pays off but, you suspect, only cuz you gave it those 940339 chances that you wouldn't have given to anyone else

Hackwork?

Yeah!

You have to be in a very very very dozy state of mind to truly appreciate that Actress album. Only then can the mindworms start weaving their magic. Or something.

Man, Splazsh should come w a how-to guide. I get told how to listen to it as often as I get people telling me I should try acupuncture

I like Actress because it's house music for dimensions with different physical parameters to our own. Or something...

'Hubble' is apparently a "study" of 'Erotic City'. I tried playing them back to back, and really there's little similarity, but at the same time I can kind of understand this. Something about the jitter - the groove in there.

the thread title The producer known as ACTRESS and his r&b concrète will put me off ever listening to that stuff at all

I'll listen to anything new by Actress and Cooly G tbh

the Martyn album is good, I think, but he is definitely down the (loosely dubby) techno rabbithole more than anything now

last time i spoke to someone IRL he started telling me about how to listen to actress as well - he even started talking about deleuze & fkn guattari as part of this stupid guide, at which point i tuned him out and may have actually wandered off mid-conversation. can't be doing with stupid people.

Some of these people make records I might be interested in, but have no real desire for there to be albums by any of them. I realize this is my issue but whenever i think of the word album, i think "track wasn't good enough to release by itself"

I have no real feelings about Herbert either way (in 2011), but why the smh, lex?

Actually I don't give a shit about the rest of the Actress album, but Hubble is great. It reminds me of this experimental track I made in Reason that's largely based on semi-generative ideas but comes off sounding like the world's most complex 8-bit video game.

the thread title The producer known as ACTRESS and his r&b concrète will put me off ever listening to that stuff at all

― lil dawg (some dude), Wednesday, 31 August 2011 15:53 (1 minute ago)

awes

I have no real feelings about Herbert either way (in 2011), but why the smh, lex?

oh because of the whole dumb killing a pig thing or whatever it was

oh because of the whole dumb killing a pig thing or whatever it was

oh because of the whole dumb killing a pig thing or whatever it was

― lex pretend, Wednesday, August 31

oh! I just googled and saw that. Didn't know about that. Don't really understand things like that (but then I don't even like records to have cover art so...)

actress seems to be one of those ppl destined to be resented forever by ppl who somehow feel obliged to take an interest

last time i spoke to someone IRL he started telling me about how to listen to actress as well - he even started talking about deleuze & fkn guattari as part of this stupid guide, at which point i tuned him out and may have actually wandered off mid-conversation. can't be doing with stupid people.

― lex pretend, Wednesday, 31 August 2011 15:54 (2 minutes ago) Bookmark

God forbid anyone try to explain why they like a record...?

rustie is great....the anti-actress

oh god, all the time with acts i love in the first place - is it worse when it doesn't pay off, and you feel like you've wasted all that time, or when it kind of pays off but, you suspect, only cuz you gave it those 940339 chances that you wouldn't have given to anyone else

The second scenario is worse, because at least with the first you can decisively say "NOPE" and move on. The second leads to this vortex of indecision combined with the dead dullness of a weak response to something you really want to like, which leads to overthinking your feelings about a record, which further damages your ability to truly respond to it... I've gotten better over the past year or so with differentiating between the "meh" of indecision and the "hmm" of indecision; the "meh" rarely results in me coming around to a record (so I'm less inclined to spend lots of time with it), but the "hmm" often means something will eventually click.

that is like academic or beard-stroking intellectual analysis

fwiw I like splazsh and to a lesser extent the first actress record and my greatest enjoyment of them comes from the times I think as little as possible and crank up the volume

God forbid anyone try to explain why they like a record...?

― Sonny Chevrotain (dog latin), Wednesday, August 31

i dunno i think if anyone tried to explain to me how to listen to a record i would think this record perhaps isn't for the likes of me

Might be different if i had asked them for their opinion though

I wonder what happened to the UNTOLD album.

i don't think i've ever heard anyone talk about actress in irl and would never presume to tell anyone how to listen to it, i just love his sound. it's very...tactile.

God forbid anyone try to explain why they like a record...?

if you have to mention deleuze & guattari to explain why, god should indeed forbid it

sub in any critical theorists really

^^ I am a philosophy/D&G stan and I think music fails a little, unless it's a conceptual art music, if you can't explain why you like it without delving into such talk

thread for random crit theory bloggers discussing pop music

fwiw I think most of the tracks on splazsh could go on for at least ten minutes but they're all so short

still kicking myself for missing a live actress set at a festival last year where I assume this happened

I've still never heard Actress! Will remedy shortly. I'm excited for the Oneohtrix record for sure, ditto Theo Parrish. Don't know a good pile of stuff on that list. I feel like I'm over The Weeknd already; the American Apparel cover art and font put me over the edge finally. It's just too obvious.

I don't think there's anything wrong with crit theory engaging with pop music, and I enjoy reading some crit theory sometimes and really digging into things, but anyone who lets crit theory override their own intuitive aesthetic responses is pretty misguided, I'd say, and I feel sorry for them and their vast chasm of intellectualized distance between themselves and their music.

Not to say that the intellectualization of a piece of music can't be a huge part of its appeal and enjoyment, nor to say that there's really any such things as "unmediated pure aesthetic experience" or whatever, but you can tell when someone's really reaching.

btw, going back to the top of the thread:
BURIAL vs MASSIVE ATTACK - TBA [HELIGOLAND REMIXED]

still worth lols

Crit Theory just makes me go "okay... wha?" - is that the idea? It may as well be in Russian for all I can understand it.

i'm still looking forward to the next forest swords record

So do you guys have a problem with people saying "this album's best heard on big speakers" or "this is dark-room headphone music"? Just asking. I agree if someone started using crit-theory to deconstruct an album, they'd need extremely good grounds to pass the bullshitometer.

no, those are perfectly acceptable

I don't resent Actress any more than I resent a sit-up fwiw

So do you guys have a problem with people saying "this album's best heard on big speakers" or "this is dark-room headphone music"?

I'd hope anyone would have some idea of how to talk to me about something, and can tell difference between talking to me and talking at me.

ie

f someone started using crit-theory to deconstruct an album, they'd need extremely good grounds to pass the bullshitometer.

it doesnt matter how good or bad their grounds are - if someone started down this track when talking to me about a record, then they're talking at me not to me

I think it's mostly "know your audience." Some of the best speakers/conversationalists I know are great at packing in information by giving a quick summary of salient points to the point where even if you're familiar, it's not annoying to hear again.

If you're immediately referencing a philosophical concept I may or may not know and are attempting to engage with me about an album on that standpoint, it's kind of a failure of communication, or you're a dick for implying I need to know these concepts to enjoy music.

ahh well no, you seem quite understanding xxp

thing is I picked up the Actress album less as a result of nakh's thread (although it was interesting), or anything else I read, but on the merch table after seeing him play live

which was just one unsmiley dude w/ his hood up doing raw semi-generative on-the-fly techno on a small table of kit - the more I think about that the more bringing crit theory on board seems like abject madness

this is where I reiterate for the 50th time that I want kodwo eshun to write more on music

Am I wrong in thinking that it misses the entire thrust and point of critical theory to employ it in the service of explaining *why* one enjoys a piece of art?

haha yeah, it seems like you are more explaining why you like critical theory than why you like music

Am I wrong in thinking that it misses the entire thrust and point of critical theory to employ it in the service of explaining *why* one enjoys a piece of art?

― Clarke B., Wednesday, 31 August 2011 16:46 (1 minute ago)

sure

actress is just particularly amenable to that post-grime theory blog tendency

'wack'

this rustie clip is pretty exciting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p8C1RmVJ1xE