Category: Music

EARWORM GARDEN // STEVEN WILSON — 3 YEARS OLDER

Another Steven Wilson song from Hand. Cannot. Erase. that’s playing in my head. I played this one in my car a few days ago to friendly company and they seemed to agree that it wasn’t the right time to play it and that they “didn’t go crazy for Steven Wilson”. Something twitched inside of me as I blurted back something between “I didn’t expect you to” and “my car, my rules”, which I immediately regretted. It’s okay, though, because playing that song then and there was what made it become my new earworm of the week and what eventually led to this post.

3 years ago was my first day at my first youth exchange, I See Green at Olde Vechte. Sofia gave me a little cupcake with a candle on it after that first lunch in Zeesse. I felt far away from home, celebrating my birthday in the company of strangers, but that gesture warmed my heart.

Today, 3 years older, there’s little hope the strangers in the army camp will become the special people the strangers from that youth exchange in the Netherlands soon became. But the candle from back then is still burning. It’s one of those special trick candles that don’t go out when you blow them.

PS: Wilson’s coming to Athens on May 5th. You can tell I won’t let many things stop me from being there to see him play.

EARWORM GARDEN // FLIGHT OF THE CONCHORDS — INNER CITY PRESSURE

1. Finally, some music that speaks of the real problems in life!
2. Flight of the Conchords are an actual band that existed before the series did! I never knew!
3. Have you actually watched the series? It’s just the most brilliantly funny show I’ve watched this side of Spaced.
4. Nice cover art.
5. It just came back to me: I recall driving back from… Nafplio, wasn’t it, with Daphne. We had En Lefko on (right?) and suddenly this started playing. We had watched the episode mere days before. Quite a moment of joy, there. Actually, in retrospect, I should have figured out then and there that they were an actual band…

EARWORM GARDEN // KINGS — ΕΔΩ ΠΟΥ Μ’ ΑΦΗΣΕΣ

Έπαιζε συνέχεια στο γραφείο στον αγαπημένο μεσολογγίτικο ραδιοφωνικό σταθμό του κ. Αρχιλοχία του 3ου Λόχου στο 2/39.

5:55

A song discovered sifting through G-MuSiC, a copy of what Garret’s music collection looked like in 2011. It’s kind of sad that I have collected gigabytes and gigabytes of music from various people over the years that I’ve never actually listened to.

This song was written for when I more or less fall asleep these nights. Very soon it will be the exact time my alarm clock will be going off every morning.

Bonus: a happy and melancholy (bittersweet?) song written for crashed airliners.

EARWORM GARDEN // WOLFSHEIM — KEIN ZURÜCK

I tried to write something in German here; wasn’t sure if it was correct so I just ditched it. Schade.

Fact of the matter is I’m going through a kind of mini-“this is the first day of the rest of my life” feeling, as if the loose ends that had been hanging low were unexpectedly and simultaneously tied up—or rather, cut off.

Not “as if”, actually. One nagging little piece of emotional baggage in particular had been bothering me for absolutely yeeears (or did it  just feel long?), and I never expected internal resolution to come that easy, so suddenly, that it would smack me up the head so hard and definitively and completely in its obviousness when it did so just a couple of days ago, so… yeah. I’m proud and happy about it. Take that, Skalomann (like Skallamann only for skalomata).

Kein Weg Zurück now then, but in a good way, perfect for what’s coming up next, i.e. having to wake up super early, follow questionable orders, enjoy rations of even more questionable quality and so on and so forth.

FATE OF THE INTERNET

Two vids and two talks, all broadly on cryptography, freedom of information and mass surveillance, all excellent—and I don’t usually even like rap.

Especially the talks though, they’re on a different level completely, truly ground-breaking stuff. Haunted By Data you can either read or watch on Youtube, What Happens Next Will Amaze You is only in transcript form.

Juice Media vids

Talks by Maciej Cegłowski

Haunted By Data

Strata+Hadoop World, New York City, October 2015. [video] (20 mins)

Re-imagining data as radioactive waste we don’t know how to safely store. Nixon in your data center. Eroom’s Law as an example of how data-driven thinking can make things worse for an entire industry. A plea to stop gratuitously collecting data and start treating it as the trade-off it is.

What Happens Next Will Amaze You

FREMTIDENS INTERNET, Copenhagen, Denmark, September 2015.

A talk about the corporate side of our culture of total surveillance. The odd story of how advertisers destoyed our online privacy and then found themselves swindled by robots. Six fixes that I think could restore Internet privacy. Capitalists who act like central planners, and an industry that insists on changing the world without even being able to change San Francisco.

 

 

 

ENJOY THE NEW YEAR LIKE LIVING UNDERWATER

Happy new year! I wish this is your year’s soundtrack. May you swim with the seals all the way.

Found this awesome little song from Ran Prieur who had this to say:
Doctopus – Wobbegong is a garage rock masterpiece, and an example of the elusive raw and intense happy song that I mentioned a few weeks ago. This is their only great song.