Every time I think about Yo La Tengo’s There’s a Riot Going On, I come back to the same essential question: whether I find this album more beautiful than boring, or whether I find it more boring than beautiful. Historically, much of Yo La Tengo’s prettiest music flirts with simplicity, but what makes it great are the sparks of sonic ingenuity and sheer electric vigor it carries within. The band’s most compelling songs beat with a captivating lifeline that steers them clear of banality, regardless of whether the music is noisy or reserved.

More about: Yo La Tengo

I imagine I was a lot like Phil Elverum as a kid: unsatisfied, ambitious, and squirming. I didn’t long for answers as much as I longed for affirmation (from teachers and mothers and priests and neighbors and Godfathers) that “do unto others as you would have them do unto you” was absolute, that Heaven was real and that those poor in spirit would inherit it, that those of us who are constantly overcome with anxiety would eventually be comforted.

More about: Geneviève Castrée, Mount Eerie, Phil Elverum, The Microphones

In physical medicine, “trauma” is simply a wound. But the phenomenological experience of psychological trauma is the echo: the feedback loop of transgressive agony that the mind perpetuates through psychocannibalistic consumption by recalling (ingesting), reviving (digesting), and rearticulating (defecating) emotional and physical injury.

01. Faith Has No Character
02. Believe In Me 2016
03. Bai Ze
04. No Answer
05. Here And There
06. The Wurm
07. I Refuse Breathing
08. Figure It Out

More about: Dizayga

“It isn’t necessary that you leave home. Sit at your desk and listen. Don’t even listen, just wait. Don’t wait, be still and alone. The whole world will offer itself to you to be unmasked, it can do no other, it will writhe before you in ecstasy.”
– Franz Kafka, Zürau aphorism 109

More about: Drowse

Thoughts Of A Dot As It Travels A Surface is Christina Vantzou and John Also Bennett’s interpretation of wall drawings by the artist Zin Taylor, made for his show “Creative Writing” at Westfälischer Kunstverein in Münster.

More about: Christina Vantzou, John Also Bennett, Zin Taylor