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Sunday, April 25, 2010

Flying Lotus - Cosmogramma (WARP195)

Usually this space is reserved for my silly things; however, the only thing > words is, for me, pop music.

Several record releases in my life have truly excited me. I love almost everything - really. Since I was 15 or so I've obsessed over obtaining every new album deemed worthwhile. And all of the worthwhile albums released before me, my existence. Whatever I enjoyed most typically ran analogous to my emotional state of being, whoever I was dating/trying to fuck, my location, more and more contextual data etc.

One begins to sense patterns after so much listening. Divorcing music from yourself, applying some tonal New-Critical lens and analyzing the sounds for themselves.

"There is nothing new under the sun." -Ecclesiastes 1:9

Accepting this as a personal aesthetic maxim, for music, for art, the only segway to originality is (counter-intuitively) bricolage. And not just mash-up-ed, mixed medium bullshit. Really weaving together existing product to create something completely unresembling its prototype. We are lucky to have computers and technology to lubricate this process. Nothing depresses me more than an unapologetically referential folk song released in 2010. Nothing.

Which is why Cosmogramma excites me. Because I don't know what it is, but I know what it could be. What parts of it could be. I want bitches grinding me to "Do the Astral Plane." I want MF Doom spitting rhymes over "Computer Face." I want "And the World Laughs with You" playing at coffeeshops and "Recoiled" to be Autechre's new single. But the thing isn't all disjointed; the cohesion suggests that, yeah, genre is becoming less indicative of physical content.



I wish instead of backlashing against the increasing reliance on internet/biochips/bleeps/beeps/emoticons people would just admit that efficiency in communication is as much of an artistic merit as anything else. A good expression of this is electronic music. The evolution of it is just astounding - the only audible medium really keeping up with the times.



I mean, Thom Yorke is on board. Come on. Radiohead has always succeeded in tapping the currents of the universal subconscious.



Keep workin it baby.


Album drops May 4th. Like cocaine though headphones.

1 footnotes:

Alyssa said...

love this post. streaming the album on npr right now.