Here in the Middle West, we’ve already enjoyed two excellent snowstorms, which augurs well for a proper winter. Although the year is winding down, the future is still coming fast and dumb. The people in charge are hellbent on giving us artificially intelligent colleagues and companions, and they’re banking on a heavy assumption: that we value the sense of a relationship more than a living person. That we will privilege the feeling over the fact. They might not be wrong. For the past year, C. and I have been playing with a scenario that gives this fork some teeth. Read it here.

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The first seven songs are table-setting for Me-Sheen’s “Sonic Lullaby,” one of the most beautiful songs in my canon. I came across it in 1997 on one of those ponderous “Excursions in Ambience” CDs with hellacious cover art and it’s been living in my head ever since. But first we kick off with Julianna Barwick’s “Prizewinning”, a song that’s somehow lulling and thrilling at once. It never fails to leave me cheering and C. plays it all the time, so it’s definitely a winner. There’s also a spiritualized vocoder workout from Matchess, a nugget of AM radio gold, and a powerful burst of dub techno from Vril—I hope to be reincarnated as the low-end whir on “Infinitum Eternis Anime” and join the rings of Saturn.

And tonight there’s plenty of reverb to carry us into the holidays, along with fragments of some 1950s Welsh miners singing carols because I’m feeling festive.

1. Julianna Barwick - Prizewinning
   The Magic Place | Asthmatic Kitty, 2011 | Bandcamp
2. Matchess - Bellum Omnium Contra Omnes
   Sacracorpa | Trouble in Mind, 2018 | Bandcamp
3. Vril - Infinitum Eternis Anime
   Anima Mundi | Delsin, 2018 | Bandcamp
4. Air - Le Soleil Est Près de Moi (28% slower)
   Premiers Symptômes | Parlophone, 1997
5. Eagles - I Can't Tell You Why (20% slower)
   The Long Point | Asylum Records, 1979
6. Voices From the Lake - Max
   Live at MAXXI, 2015 | Bandcamp
7. Me-Sheen - Sonic Lullaby
   Electronic Membrain | Reflective, 1995
8. Rhos Male Voice Choir: Psalm 23 / Holy Night + Vril loop
   Carols From The Welsh Mines, 1958 | More

For upbeat holiday music, please attend last year’s Professional Holiday Party.

Thank you for listening.

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