New musical obsession

from my new favorite genre of music: isolated, anonymous sad bastard making melancholy lo-fi songs in a genre more typically suited to almost cartoonish extremes.
The previous title holder in this weight class was Xasthur, who, despite being from California, was the perfect soundtrack for my November trip to the Arctic:


Currently holding the belt is Burial, some anonymous person from South London or something. I don't know anything about dubstep, so, yeah. But i know good, sad music when I hear it:

This snippet of an interview with the musician felt familiar and appropriate:

9: And the drawing on the front of the new album.
Burial: I've been drawing that same one since I was little. Just some moody kid with a cup of tea sitting at the 24 hour stand in the rain in the middle of the night when you are coming back from somewhere.

Thanks to my friends who introduced me to this last weekend.

your first summer jam

to put it mildly, I haven't been blown away by much commercial R&B lately, but this track features:

-what sounds like a Slick Rick sample

-a sweet steppers' groove mid-to-uptempo beat with nice housey synth and electric piano

-male falsetto (is all falsetto male falsetto? is it called something else for women? someone please enlighten me.)

-a Lil' Wayne verse. (This song is way too smooth and "normal" to allow for him to draw from his dank moldy well of psychologically twisted genius, but, whatever. Actually, his verse is, verbally, pretty blah, but I don't care, it fits the track and is catchy, and reminded me to make a copy of one of his 400 mixtapes from 2007 for a friend of mine.)

Nothing special, just some nice Chicago and Bronx via New Orleans ear candy to enjoy for a couple months, throw on a mixtape or two, and feel nostalgic over when you hear it in a couple years, when it takes you back to whatever pleasant silly shit is going on in your life right now.

decollecting

As money is tight, had to sell a lot of records today. Some pretty good stuff (a lot of semi- to fairly-obscure European and Japanese hardcore, some dance music [Liaisons Dangereuses, Giorgio Moroder]), some of which had some sentimental value. Did not sell the above record.

I'm definitely of the opinion that for young-ish Americans, consumption is one of the major means through which we develop or enact our identity. (Romance, work, and education are also pretty major.) I'm not thinking of that as a good or bad thing, though it certainly has both positive and negative effects. (or Negative FX, if you're drawn to that record in the above collage.) I also think that by selling these records, I'm making some comment about where I'm at in life, and what sort of objects I choose to keep around me. I felt an odd sense of comfort that everything I brought in would be sold, that I got a pretty decent amount of money for it, and that a couple of the clerks at the store had already earmarked some of the records. Kind of like I found a nice farm family for them.

I want to explore the notion of resale and identity further at some point, but if anyone has any thoughts about consumerism or resale and identity (particularly consumerism of countercultural objects), please feel free to share.