Runaway (Live at Sydney 2014, Yeezus Tour) – Kanye West

I never thought I’d be this moved by a song by Kanye before, but this is probably the most beautiful thing I’ve heard in all of October! After years of resistance, I don’t know why (probably because when his Yeezy sneakers came out in 2015, at the time my understanding of streetwear culture was pretty misinformed), I’ve been getting into Kanye’s discography this week after seeing him and Kim on the new Letterman show on Netflix, and I wish I could’ve brought my ego down a few notches and given his work a listen back then. Even if he is a divisive figure in contemporary culture, there’s no doubt as to why is continually lauded as the musical genius of our generation. I admire him not only for his innovative music, but also for debunking some aspects of bipolar disorder, being open with his personal struggles with mental health, and lastly, being authentically himself despite living in the unforgiving, scorching spotlight of public scrutiny.

Friendly Fire by Sean Lennon (and my personal theory on making shared playlists)

I’ve had this album on replay these past few weeks –
Growing up on the Beatles, I therefore was a miniature fan of neither Justin Bieber, Demi Lovato or Selena Gomez, but of Paul McCartney, John Lennon, George Harrison, Ringo Starr, and their own separate projects post-breakup. This is not in any way intended as shade towards the aforementioned pop artists, but I was always a little ruefully behind on what was “in”, in terms of what was on the Billboard pop charts. I was always fascinated with the diversity and output that the individual bandmates had beyond the Beatles’ group legacy as the legendary reckoning force that they were. On hot afternoons, we would go to the public library to borrow Beatles CDs, but the one album I distinctly remember having actually purchased was The Very Best of John Lennon, and I towed this “John Lemon” disc around constantly.

Apart from being fascinated with John’s seeming oddity (the sixties was an interesting time to comprehend when I was younger), I was also deeply intrigued by Yoko Ono despite all the controversies surrounding their union. I guess it was subconsciously because it was the first time that I had ever seen a woman representing a similar ethnicity to mine in the media. With her long, flowing hair, I would wonder what it might be like forty years ago to be wearing a wide brim hat, short white skirt, and long socks, standing while your picture was being taken and standing next to John Lemon. I visited the Beatles museum and an exhibition of Ono’s work in Liverpool two years ago when time permitted, and despite my initial reservations was intrigued by her artistic output, though that’s perhaps a separate conversation for another time. The most striking memory, though, was an interactive exhibit; a plain glass fishbowl containing a scattering of white pins with the word “breathe” on it. I took one back home to keep with me.

Anyway, I digress. I think I used to be a little bit of a music snob once I hit high school and a friend at the time revealed that there was more than two genres of music (my knowledge at the time was limited purely to pop music and classical music), and there was such a thing as indie music! And what I’d been listening to in cafés was called Bossa Nova! And that actually what I thought was pop, was actually Jazz/R&B. With the onslaught of new tracks and my newfound discoveries, I got increasingly into gatekeeping my taste in music not because I didn’t want people to discover the underground artists that I liked, but because they might think it was weird noise and equate that to something akin to ‘poor taste’.

As I’ve grown up, I realized nobody cares as much as you think they would. They might think you’re a little strange, but it doesn’t bother me too much anymore. I think it’s okay to have Marilyn Manson, Mitski, The Weeknd, Joji, Daniel Johnston, Sufjan Stevens, Ricky Eat Acid, Miley Cyrus, Riff Cohen, Gabriel Fauré, Kate Bush, and Ben Platt all on the same playlist. To me, my playlists are a bit like pieces of my soul. Weird, maybe, but if someone rejects my taste in music, I can’t help but feel personally slighted pained so I got into the emotionally-preserving habit of making a separate playlist of socially-acceptable songs which toe the border between self-aware pop hits and socially-acceptable indie tracks. I’ll probably throw in a wild track here and there to help assess the temperature of the situation, and whether I can make it go even stranger. Even though I’ve tried to ease back these days, that feeling of unease at being judged on what I listen to still haunts me from time to time.

A long point to make, but coming back to this album; I found out about Parachute (one of the songs on Sean Lennon’s album which I think is one of the catchiest) when I was in high school, but wondered if any of my friends would like it too. I stashed it away because I wasn’t sure if it would lend me any social credibility (a strange invisible currency, that one) and promptly forgot about it. Coming back to it and approaching the whole album several years later has been a wonderful experience though. I do feel that maybe Sean gets the short end of the stick with all the mean comparisons and comments he gets about his singing voice or his dad. He seems like a talented and wonderful musician in his own right, and if anything can help to combat his detractors, this is probably the most Beatles-sounding album by a Beatle-child/non-Beatle, that I’ve heard yet.

*NOTE: I think that the music has been pitched up slightly in the film. The real pitched music is available on Spotify and other music streaming services though.

7G by A. G. Cook

I love Caroline Polachek’s music, so when I saw this post on her instagram earlier this month which she did in collaboration with music producer A. G. Cook – she records herself vocalizing directly through her earphones as she walks through London, producing these incredible vocals which sound as if they’ve been autotuned (but they’re not; apparently she’s trained her voice to do that live), landscape-inspired vocals which are run through a synthesizer to produce melodies – I pretty much fell down the rabbit hole and into the wonderful world of PC Music.

Granted that this only scratches the surface and bearing in mind that I haven’t even properly finished listening to the whole album yet, here are some of my favourite tracks so far from A. G. Cook’s new 49-track long album. The tracks are grouped into 7 disks, each with 7 tracks split based on the instrumental focus or process, as well as a few covers thrown into the mix featuring other artists including Caroline Polachek, Tommy Cash, Hannah Diamond, to name a few. Some of the experimental synth stuff, like the track ‘H2O’, reminds me a lot of Death Grips or like on ‘Behind Glass’, being pulled out of the soundtrack to Undertale. I’m really surprised by how much I loved so many songs on this album knowing that if I’d come across this a few years prior I probably wouldn’t have been able to appreciate this monolithic project. Though it might not be for everyone, hopefully when you give his work a listen you might find something that you enjoy!

TRACKLIST

runtime approx. 27 minutes

  1. Silver – A. G. Cook
  2. Beetlebum (Blur cover) – A. G. Cook
  3. Alright ft. Tommy Cash, Caroline Polachek, Hannah Diamond – A. G. Cook
  4. Crimson and Clover (Tommy James & the Shondells cover) – A. G. Cook
  5. Crimson ft. Timothy Luke – A. G. Cook
  6. The End Has No End (Strokes cover) – A. G. Cook
  7. Illuminated Biker Gang – A. G. Cook
  8. Today – A. G. Cook

On Play #8

TRACKLIST

Runtime: 26 minutes (approx.)

  1. Door Caroline Polachek
  2. Class of 2013 Mitski
  3. Crimson and Clover A. G. Cook
  4. Bruises Chairlift
  5. Nana Polo & Pan
  6. Susie Save Your Love ft. Mitski Allie X
  7. Golden Brown The Stranglers

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking lately since I came back home from university to Hong Kong. I’m taking a gap year – a difficult but important choice for a multitude of reasons, which hopefully I’ll be able to share with you in the future when I allocate more time to sit down and write about everything that has happened in the past few months properly! I have only told a handful of people closest to me and a few of my classmates. It’s a little ironic that the next channel I’ve chosen to share this on is my blog, given the fact that I don’t think many of my friends actually read what I write and because I don’t advertise it much. Even so, my mind is more loquacious than my mouth and I think that my strength lies more in my writing abilities, so I find that I can articulate my thoughts and feelings much better this way.

Anyway, I’ve been thinking a lot about memory, which in itself is a little paradoxical because so much of our memories are distorted through time. Even if we don’t think that our memories have changed, we tend to overestimate our ability to recall events as perfectly and accurately they happened and this is particularly affected by strong emotion. I’m no expert on the mechanisms of the mind, but we have a strong window between the ages of 16 to 25 which means that as we experience major life changes and develop new skills, these inevitably construct new memories which are some of the most vivid of our lives. I don’t have a conclusion for this meandering train of pondering, except for the strange notion that my “real” memories – many of which I seem to be able to recall snippets of vivid moments with such clarity and precision, like what music was playing, how the sunlight hit the stairs, or what book was on the table – might not be as real as they seem after all. Though it’s clear that experiences and potential traumas have a big hand in shaping and turning us into the individuals that we grow to become, the waters of memory and recall are murky and unclear to me in the sense that I wonder what we can rely on, if not our blighted memories.

Memory and song go hand in hand. Since the dawn of mankind, humans have loved to record things in different ways, fashioning mediums and creating new channels to communicate information, and it’s a wonderful thing to be able to experience. I write all of this because I have so many songs that I connect with different places, experiences, or people. For example, the last track on this playlist makes me think of the day I was sitting outside in the biting wind as it rushed through the open-air market in Kings Cross outside my university on a Friday afternoon. My friend had bought doughnuts for the both of us to cheer me up that day. We sat there in the wintery cold with some of our other classmates after a particularly hard session in the studio and dissected each doughnut, giving each one a rating based on taste combination and texture. As we ate our food, Golden Brown by The Stranglers played from the record stall, where the gangly boy sporting a shaggy haircut wearing sunglasses and with his boot-clad feet perched on the table was responsible for blasting out music for the market. I was pleasantly surprised when it turned up in the second series of the Umbrella Academy as well; it’s always very cool when a song fits in with the montage it’s paired with. The closest thing I can think of at the moment is Led Zeppelin’s Immigrant Song in the Thor Ragnarok trailer that Taika Waititi pitched to Marvel. Anyway, it’s a nice memory, completely accurate or not. Without further ado, I hope you like the playlist I’ve compiled here! and if you have any similar experiences with song and memory feel free to share them below.

– C

Heartfelt Animated Music Videos

These are just some of the many wonderful music videos out there which I’ve loved in the past, and still do to this day.

They don’t feature the artist in the animation or video per se but are still beautiful nevertheless.

I hope you enjoy this small selection!

C

A very gorgeous black and white short film, which has a wonderfully moody, sketchy texture and ephemeral quality.
A lovely transformative storyline in a mossy, gravity-defying universe.
I went to Polly Nor’s exhibition in London last year (the fantastic artist behind the style and illustrations in the video) and was blown away at how everything tied together and was brought to life in this brief clip.
This was one of my favourite music videos when I was in high school, full of brilliant colours and malleable shapes.
A heartfelt tale of crisis and emotion apposite in our current age, told from the perspective of one man’s battle against the world and his journey to self-discovery and realisation.
How to live life making sure you don’t let gluttony and the perils of adulthood take over your innocence. Mika was a big part of my childhood and I still listen to his songs occasionally for a bit of pop-magpie shine and lighthearted fun.