360 records from the year 2000: 290 - 281

290. Toru Takemitsu: I hear the water dreaming

It’s a great soundworld, but someone forgot to turn on the light.

289. Los lobos: Run away with you

A bootleg of a December 1999 show. I quite like Los Lobos, but they were very right not to release live stuff like this – an unremarkable set of amped up Mexican r&b played too fast and blustering blues guitar solos.

At its best: Angel dance, This time

288. Thievery corporation: The mirror conspiracy

What’s wrong with the tail end of trip hop in 2000 is that it’s all so impersonal, more like a creation of etiquette circles than of artists. All the fancy middle eastern flavors and bossa nova influences are just window dressing on a stale slate.

At its best: So com voce

287. Ten Benson: Hiss

Sub-ZZ Top garage rock. Could’ve been entertaining, but oh, they forgot the songs.

At its best: I don’t buy it

286. Januaries: Januaries

A bid for post-modern Blondie?

At its best: Love has flown, a great pop song in the midst of overly self-aware retro’kitsch’.

285. Six by seven: The closer you get

Shoegazer throwback, in the heavy rocking 2000 vein (rather than the ethereal revival these days). A couple of good tracks, but overall, a little too light.

Edit: Forget about those good tracks – on closer inspection I couldn’t find ‘em anymore.

At its best: 100 and something Foxhall road

284. Mojave 3: Excuses for travellers

Today's special is British indie slowcore
We sell so much of this people wonder what we put in it
We're going to tell you right now
Give me about a half a teacup - of Neil Young acoustic guitar strum
Now I need a pound of preciously literate lyrics about writing letters from the frontlines of love
Now give me four tablespoons of boiling overblown arrangements without rhyme or reason
This is going to taste all right
Now just a little pinch of painfully white gospel backing vocals
Place on the burner
And bring to a simmer
That's it, that's it, don’t let it boil
Let it simmer
Let it simmer
Now simmer
Simmer some more

At its best: She broke you so softly, Prayer for the paranoid

283. U2: Million dollar hotel OST

‘Million dollar hotel’ was a Bono vanity movie project that went nowhere. The soundtrack has vanity written all over it. A high quality cast of players, of course, but in service of what? A couple of nice enough U2-by-numbers, ‘Falling at your feet’ and ‘The first time’. A number of drifting vague compositions that exploit mood for all their worth but end up sounding like the middle of nowhere (one has Bono crooning ‘weightless…stateless…’ for a long time, another begins with a movie dialogue ‘It was just when I jumped that I realized life is perfect. It’s filled with magic, beauty, opportunity…and television’). At that point it hits me that Bono may be semi-talented, he’s not half as talented as he wishes he was. After that it’s further downhill with Milla Jovovich purring and screeching through ‘Satellite of love’ like a real movie star acting like a singer, and a Spanish cover of ‘Anarchy in the UK’.

At its best: Falling at your feet, The first time
At its worst: Milla Jovovich does awful things to the last minute of ‘Satellite of love’.

282. Jill Scott: Who is Jill Scott?

It’s my belief more people than you think go to psychologists not to have better relations, but to have relations – but more about that later.

We’re quick to point out impoverished musicianship in rock, but it’s just the same in black music. This record’s self-aggrandizing intro finds Jill explicating her inspirations (I mean, really, why tell us on your own record? I’m listening to it already - I can hear it):‘listening to jazz’, while the whole set up of the ‘Jilltro’ is to make us buy into the notion of Jill Scott as a jazz poet, orating her sharp thoughts and declamations in an underground club. Don’t believe it, jazz has been narrowed down to a couple of electric piano thrills, the jazz poet is reciting Carly Simon. 

I don’t know many records so completely obsessed with the artist’s vision of him/herself as a lover (except for one song about the familiar underground jazz poet staple ‘are we watching tv, or is the tv watching us’, titled… ‘Watching me’). All of this is about relations, and with relations she means sex, and boy, sex changes her life all the time. It’s so intense and meaningful and sexy. I have a normal relationship and I don’t need to hear about this stuff. This record might just as easily be called ‘The 18 orgasms that changed my life’ or even ’18 orgasms that changed my life’ (cause who knows how many outtakes there are). But don’t expect to hear anything about the orgasms, right, just about how her life was changed – cause that’s what you should be interested in, you pervert, her life!

One thing Jill has in common with Carly and other early 70s soft singer-songwriters, is a complete immersion in contemporary psychology gobbledygook. So you get heavy breathing and whispering in some guys ear to release his inner warrior and stuff like that (it’s on there, I’m not looking up the song title, I’ve suffered enough – Edit: oh alright, it’s ‘Show me’). Another track (edit: ‘Honey molasses’, just so you know) contains an answer machine message from Jill: ‘Hey… last night was… (heavy breathing again)…it was (god, this woman is getting off on just remembering her orgasms)…look, just don’t…be scared’. Run, brother, run and never set foot in an underground jazz poetry club again! I understand, we all want to eat strawberries after sex once, but you can’t trust anyone who buys ‘em wholesale.

At its best: ‘Do you remember’, I guess

281. Tangerine dream: The seven letters from Tibet

Pretty, but I won’t miss it. Wallpaper.

360 records from the year 2000: 340-331

340. Joe Satriani: Engines of creation 

I thought I could handle, enjoy even, a lot of guitar, but Satriani has called my bluff. I think it’s really terrible. The only thing that got me through a couple of re-listens (I took this project very seriously!), including liberal use of the forward button, was trying to imagine this as a Disney soundtrack. It’s the sort of hopeless game you make up to bear these unspeakable tasks you set yourself up for. So I thought of ‘Flavor crystal 7’ playing over the scene where Snow White panics in the woods at night, or ‘Until we say goodbye’ in the Lion King. I haven’t found a home for ‘Borg sex’ or ‘Champagne?’ yet though. Really, those tracks sound exactly like their titles. One is called ‘Devil’s slide’ – I don’t know about that, but it’s sure the devil’s set of guitar pedals.

339. Eagle-eye Cherry: Living in the present future 

Sometimes you get these records, and you have to wonder, would anyone like this? It’s just 50 minutes of amiable strumming, where the line ‘we’re going on a roadtrip’ is always followed by ‘easy rider’ for no reason whatsoever, and nothing means anything. Eagle-eye blankly sings through it all. 

At its best: Been here once before (even though the title says it)
At its worst: Burning up – the obligatory ‘Save tonight’ rewrite

338. Tangerine dream: Tang-go. The best of 1990-2000

With successes like these, who needs failure?

337. Fishbone: Psychotic friends nuttwerx

To find out that the Red Hot Chili Peppers are really at the top of a particular food chain, is dispiriting. These guys are at best utterly forgettable, at worst they do awful things to the final minute of Sly’s ‘Everybody is a star’. In between their songs are called ‘Where’d you get those pants?’ and ‘Karma tsunami’. 

At its worst: the final minute trash-fest of ‘Everybody is a star’

336. Black eyed peas: Bridging the gap 

Before they were really annoying and successful, they were unsuccessful and boring. It’s slightly preferable, which doesn’t say much. It is very amusing to hear them pontificate against MC’s seduced by money and the pop charts (‘Get original’, ‘Bringing it back’) though. Original sell-outs.

335. John Tavener: Fall and resurrection

A millennial cantata referencing the history of mankind and the universe, as told in the bible, or an epically boring experience for this listener? There’s no need to choose.
Edit: I’ve not grown to like it, but I’ve softened a little. There’s a lot of brain in the bombast.

334. Einsturzende neubauten: Silence is sexy

Differential Topology and Homology
Unbeknownst to most outsiders, theoretical physics underwent a significant transformation -- albeit not yet a true Kuhnian paradigm shift -- in the 1970's and 80's: the traditional tools of mathematical physics (real and complex analysis), which deal with the space-time manifold only locally, were supplemented by topological approaches (more precisely, methods from differential topology) that account for the global (holistic) structure of the universe. This trend was seen in the analysis of anomalies in gauge theories; in the theory of vortex-mediated phase transitions; and in string and superstring theories. Numerous books and review articles on ``topology for physicists'' were published during these years.
At about the same time, in the social and psychological sciences Jacques Lacan pointed out the key role played by differential topology:
This diagram [the Möbius strip] can be considered the basis of a sort of essential inscription at the origin, in the knot which constitutes the subject. This goes much further than you may think at first, because you can search for the sort of surface able to receive such inscriptions. You can perhaps see that the sphere, that old symbol for totality, is unsuitable. A torus, a Klein bottle, a cross-cut surface, are able to receive such a cut. And this diversity is very important as it explains many things about the structure of mental disease. If one can symbolize the subject by this fundamental cut, in the same way one can show that a cut on a torus corresponds to the neurotic subject, and on a cross-cut surface to another sort of mental disease.
As Althusser rightly commented, ``Lacan finally gives Freud's thinking the scientific concepts that it requires''. More recently, Lacan's topologie du sujet has been applied fruitfully to cinema criticism and to the psychoanalysis of AIDS. In mathematical terms, Lacan is here pointing out that the first homology group of the sphere is trivial, while those of the other surfaces are profound; and this homology is linked with the connectedness or disconnectedness of the surface after one or more cuts. Furthermore, as Lacan suspected, there is an intimate connection between the external structure of the physical world and its inner psychological representation qua knot theory: this hypothesis has recently been confirmed by Witten's derivation of knot invariants (in particular the Jones polynomial) from three-dimensional Chern-Simons quantum field theory.
Analogous topological structures arise in quantum gravity, but inasmuch as the manifolds involved are multidimensional rather than two-dimensional, higher homology groups play a role as well. These multidimensional manifolds are no longer amenable to visualization in conventional three-dimensional Cartesian space: for example, the projective space , which arises from the ordinary 3-sphere by identification of antipodes, would require a Euclidean embedding space of dimension at least 5. Nevertheless, the higher homology groups can be perceived, at least approximately, via a suitable multidimensional (nonlinear) logic.

If you read all that and enjoyed it, congratulations, you’ll love Blixa’s band of music theorists. Everyone else would be better served by anything other than this mind sapping boring non-conformity.

At its best: Sabrina
At its worst: Silence is sexy, Zampano

333. Kenneth Plon: Simplicity

‘Beautiful relaxing instrumental music to enrich your daily life’, says the artist. Zzz.
Btw, I gave this record and the earlier Raha Shah record to my mother in law, and she loves them!

332. Chicago underground trio: Flamethrower

You get a real feeling for how melodic, structured and memorable Tortoise is, by listening to their jazz side projects which generally aren’t. This session including Jeff Parker and Rob Mazurek sets up some engaging moods, but generally fails to deliver anything really…uhm…good.

I wonder if ‘Number 19’ is an instrumental interpretation of ‘Revolution 9’.

At its worst: Flamethrower

331. AC acoustics: Understanding music

To think this was recently reissued. I suppose it’s some precursor to an unbearable strain of artsy/populist indierock with stadium ambitions in the 2000s.