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Welcome to the new look for my blog. I’ve had my eye on a more minimal look for a while now. Whether this new look is successful or not depends on how often I write new posts. To that end, this theme also supports a separate (or almost separate) stream of photos. Once I’ve got back in to the habit of putting photos up, that should be a nice additional stream of content.

Once upon a time, a cat named Nerys ripped into the bottom of our sofa to make herself a cozy burrow. This was all well and good, except for the times when she would do it when we were using the sofa too. On these occasions (and presumably on most others) she would proceed to sharpen her claws on what remained of the fabric. (A less charitable reason for this behaviour would be that she was simply widening the whole for her future self after eating more and more kibbles!)

One of the things that people tend to start around this time of year is a diary. They usually get filled for as long as your new year’s resolutions last.

There was an excellent article on The Verge yesterday about how Google is transforming the kinds of sites and blogs that are on the internet. I also read this slightly more personal take by Jason Velasquez, which is more about how social networks have gobbled up all the time and attention of people who might otherwise be making interesting web sites. This has made me think deeply about what this blog is for, and why I might continue to blog in Twenty Twenty Four.

When I wrote about Maara’s “The Ancient Truth” over Christmas as part of my albums of the year rundown, I mentioned at the end that I would love to find a copy on vinyl to listen to. Well dear reader I managed to! It arrived today from the Netherlands with minimal fuss. It sounds great and I’m not sure whether my review did it justice: that’s the problem with attempting to (re-)review ten albums in ten days with Christmas and New Year all happening at the same time!

The cats broke their new resolution not to knock stuff over in my office. Oh, who am I kidding? They never had such a resolution! If you can see a sheet of saturated paper, that was my to do list! Oh well.

Dear Future Matt,

Here are some reflections on 2023.

A quick list of ten other albums I considered to be among the best of last year. I either listened to these less, or in the cases of “Transmission Three” and “Be Opened By The Wonderful” considered them to be ineligible as they are compilations.

Sofia Kourtesis is a Berlin-based Peruvian dance producer, “Madres” is her debut album which follows on from a 2021 EP “Fresia Magdalena”. Cover of Madres by Sofia Kourtesis It was trailed by several singles, including the title track which caught my attention back in May. The album is dedicated to her parents and there are also songs dedicated to the surgeon who performed life-saving surgery on Kourtesis’s mother. The whole album is a heady mix of positivity and dedication to both music and to family.

For me, ten years on from my trip to South America, I think my response to this album has been to its fusion of European and South American dance music, perhaps reminding me that it is possible to incorporate the experiences one has in other places into our viewpoint on the world. It seems to be that we are in a point in history that rather than acknowledging that we are interconnected and responsible for and to one another, that we have instead lurched into a protectionist and selfish mode of thinking.

“Cool artwork! No, we don’t have it but it’s coming in next week.“ Cover of Imagine This is a High Dimensional Space of All Possibilities by James Holden

“Cool artwork! We haven’t had a copy in but I can order it for you.”

Me picking it up a week later: “Cool artwork!”

“Imagine This is a High Dimensional Space of All Possibilities” is definitely album title of the year, made all the more topical with the intrusion of Chat-GPT and the like into the cultural conversation. Large Language Models (LLMs) like Chat-GPT work by absorbing large amounts of textual data (i.e. this blog, helping to make all those instant album reviews you can write now just a tiny bit more shit) and breaking them down into tokens, with each token having a meaning and a grammatical role and so on. These meanings and roles form higher dimensional spaces in which the tokens are vectors, where the rules of the LLMs help determine which tokens live near to one another and which pairs are likely to sit together in ‘meaningful’ sentences etc etc.

Some albums you come to one way: a good review on a blog you respect, Cover of When Will We Land by Barry Can’t Swim a track appearing on a playlist by someone whose taste you trust, etc and so on. And sometimes you get directed to something multiple times. This is what happened to me this year with the irrepressible “When Will We Land?” by Barry Can’t Swim. Anyway, tracks by “Barry” appeared in mixes a lot this year and the album kept popping up in eagerly anticipated lists.

I’ve listened to this album a lot but I still have questions. Like is “can’t swim” his last name? Was he not made to learn in detention at lunchtime in the school’s outdoor pool in an English April like yours truly?!

The album starts with the title track, a nice minimalist piece that is nearly “not dance music” in the way that so many opening tracks on dance albums are. It puts me in mind of Steve Reich played by Bonobo. The next track “Deadbeat Gospel” is an impromptu rap by an old school friend while on a night out sampled and cut to fit the beat, it’s pretty cool but I’m glad it’s near the beginning so I can skip over it if I’m not feeling it.