2012 // lists

Music

 

The Caretaker – Patience (After Sebald)

Laurel Halo – Quarantine

Alexander Tucker – Third Mouth

Dean Blunt & Inga Copeland – Black is Beautiful

Bass Clef – Reeling Skullwards

Gary War – Jared’s Lot

Burial – ‘Kindred’ 12″

Raime – Quarter Turns Over A Living Line

Actress – R.I.P.

Killer Mike – R.A.P. Music

 

Others: 

Lee Ranaldo – Between the Times and the Tides; Helm – Impossible Symmetry; Lone – ‘Crystal Caverns 1991′ 12”; Jam City – Classical Curves; Traxman – Da Mind of Traxman; Blawan – ‘His He She and She’ 12”; Oren Ambarchi – Audience of One; Tuff Sherm – Canal Cloaking CS; Champion – ‘Crystal Meth/Speed’ 12”; Trim – ‘Confidence Boost (Harmonimix)’ 12”; Pelt – Effigy; Godspeed You! Black Emperor – Allelujah! Don’t Bend! Ascend!; Kinlaw – CHORUS+MYSTICUS CS; Ital – Dream On; Lee Gamble – Dutch Tvashar Plumes/’Diversions 1994-1996′ 12″; Holly Herndon – Movement; Oneohtrix Point Never/Rene Hell – Music For Reliquary House/In 1980 I Was A Blue Square; DJ Spinn - Teklife Volume 2: What You Need; Heatsick – ‘Déviation’ 12″; Various - Touch. 30 And Counting; Atom TM - Wintereisse; Carter Tutti Void - Transverse; Pete Swanson – ‘Pro Style’ 12″; Kyle Bobby Dunn - Bring Me The Head Of Kyle Bobby Dunn; Gate - Damned Revolutions; Madteo - Noi No; Richard Youngs - Core To The Brave; Kuedo’s FACT mix

 

Oldies:

Gareth Williams & Marie Currie – Flaming Tunes; Rolf Julius – Raining – Small Music No. 3 / Small Music Vol. 1: White – Yellow – Black; A.R. Kane – The Complete Singles Collection; Various Artists – Time To Go: The Southern Psychedelic Moment 1981-1986; Various Artists – This Ain’t Chicago: The Underground Sound Of UK House & Acid 1987-1991; Black Rain – Now I’m Just A Number: Soundtracks 1994-5; Marvin Gaye – I Want You; Leroy Hutson – ‘All Because Of You’; Outkast - Speakerboxxx/The Love Below; Various - Pennies From Heaven OST; Roxy Music – For Your Pleasure; Adam & The Ants – ‘Stand & Deliver’; Camera Obscura - Let’s Get Out of This Country; Gregg Wagstaff - ’The Sound of Lewis & Harris’; Talking Heads - The Name of this Band is Talking Heads (side 4); David Bowie - Station to Station; Sandy Denny - Sandy

 

Writing

I didn’t much enjoy reading this year. Read lots of film writing/theory, very little of it from this year, not a lot of it very good. Frances Morgan’s Sight & Sound columns have been consistently good; Pauline Kael’s collected reviews from the 60s & 70s have been invigorating & make clear (as do David Thomson’s later books – there seems to be almost nothing in terms of volumes collecting his journalistic work, before his transformation into the sententious Ruskin of film history – for different reasons) just how impoverished cultural journalism is at present, a condition that has a lot to do w/ its domination by those who can afford to do internships/get parachuted in from Oxbridge & UCL; Laura Mulvey’s short 1992 book on Citizen Kane sparked off a lot of fevered trains of thought; Thom Andersen’s BFI piece on Ozu helped me think about a filmmaker I’m just starting to get acquainted w/. T.J. Clark’s pieces for the LRB (to wh/ I have subscribed & unsubscribed twice in the course of the year) have made wonderful reading & something to aspire to & Adam Mars-Jones is maybe the best writer to start working for them regularly in a while, his work deliciously uneven. David Toop’s Wire pieces are increasingly looking like the best writing of his whole career, & maybe the best music writing being done in the British press at the moment full stop. I got most pleasure & frustration – ah, the twin states of academia! – from reading a lot of Benjamin & Adorno: the former’s memoirs, writings on photography & film, on Proust, the ‘image-thought’ pieces of the 1930s & bits of The Arcades Project; re-reading, from the latter, quite a bit of Minima Moralia & finally getting round to Aesthetic Theory. Lorna Sage’s Bad Blood. This year: Douglas Murphy’s The Architecture of Failure, Phil Jourdan’s Praise of Motherhood, Carol Watts’ 3rd installment of When blue light falls.

 

Misc.

I seem to have spent most of the year going to bed early. The paucity of memories I have – apart from those I mentioned in my Wire round-up – has a lot to do w/ that (by wh/ I mean my now-finished degree, as well as my general sense of inertia), but also the encroaching sense of political (&, ergo, personal) despair. But what’s evaded the net of discourse, of funnelling into thinkpieces? Lying down listening to Chris Watson’s soundscapes & sitting up to watch Philip Jeck at the Market Hall, Kingston w/ E. & N. Seeing M. down from Newcastle. The Ashmolean’s room of Dutch still-lives; wandering round the Pitt-Rivers after-hours, trying & failing to work up the nerve to talk to David Toop. Eating lunch in St. James’ Park in summer & then walking to The Robinson Institute at Tate Britain. Walking through the Isle of Dogs – vast office buildings translucent in the fog & dusk, barely discernible as squares of light, streetlamps catching the undersides of the browning leaves – to see The Master (& leaving just as baffled as I went in). ‘Since I Had You’ on loop. Seeing Vertigo at the BFI w/ J., a week before I started writing about Sans Soleil. Tea, curry, stuffed animals & glassy sunlight in Glasgow. Eating some pretty memorable quiches. Weeks in fug of loneliness & mental exhaustion. The inferno of watching Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me for the first time.