1 |
Gameboi |
"Disappear" |
single |
If you don't know what that knob does, you have two obvious choices: |
2 |
Rave The Reqviem |
"Ofelia" |
Ofelia +1 |
don't touch it until you find out, |
3 |
Theicon |
"Nonexistent" |
single |
or turn it up. |
4 |
REXORIA |
"Set Me on Fire" |
single |
Obvious choices are rarely the only choices, of course, |
5 |
Delain |
"Beneath (Feat. Paolo Ribaldini)" |
Beneath 2 |
and I have loved songs that found others: |
6 |
Beyond The Black |
"Dancing In The Dark" |
Dancing In The Dark +3 |
tear the wires out of the back so the knob is useless; |
7 |
Asylum Pyre |
"Virtual Guns" |
single |
pull it off with your teeth; |
8 |
Flowerleaf |
"Fireflies" |
Fireflies +2 |
turn all the knobs to their zeros and see what is left; |
9 |
Deathless Legacy |
"Ora Pro Nobis" |
single |
find the person who invented that knob and let them show you why it's there; |
10 |
Upon These Scars |
"Manifestation" |
single |
unplug yourself from everything that knob is connected to |
11 |
Brothers of Metal |
"Berserkir" |
Berserkir +1 |
and start over. |
12 |
Wig Wam |
"Out of the Dark" |
single |
But all joyful solutions to the unknown |
13 |
Krilloan |
"Emperor Rising" |
single |
regard ignorance with bemused eagerness. |
14 |
Obituary |
"Dying of Everything" |
Dying of Everything +1 |
They do not begin with anonymous RFCs |
15 |
Atrocity |
"Faces From Beyond" |
Faces From Beyond +2 |
pasted into email bodies in awkward and inexplicable Caslon. |
16 |
Metallica |
"Lux Æterna" |
single |
They do not seek to use this knob to get 1.4% more of anything unprecious. |
17 |
Katatonia |
"Austerity" |
Austerity +1 |
They do not yearn to itemize grievances |
18 |
Jours Pâles |
"Tensions" |
Tensions |
or define themselves in indignant opposition to the inevitable. |
19 |
Imha Tarikat |
"Touch Of Mercy" |
Hearts Unchained - At War With A Passionless World |
They do not quietly accede. |
20 |
Revolution Saints |
"Eagle Flight" |
single |
So not only do I usually prefer the songs made by the curious and exuberant, |
21 |
LIV MOON |
"Never..." |
single |
but I consider it part of my responsibility as a listener to contribute to the curiosity and exuberance by how I hear. |
22 |
Little Lilith |
"Lullaby" |
single |
My most enduring obsessions always sound novel to me no matter how reverently they situate themselves in precedent. |
23 |
KAQRIYOTERROR |
"Reaper feeder" |
Reaper feeder +1 |
Formulae for creative escape are no more inherently ridiculous than rail lines that lead out of the city, |
24 |
UP UP GIRLS kakko KARI |
"キラキラミライ - 2022ver." |
キラキラミライ 2 |
or becoming yourself in purchased clothing, |
25 |
KISIDA KYODAN & THE AKEBOSI ROCKETS |
"TIME FLIES." |
転生したら剣でした 5 |
or loving something we share. |
26 |
SHINGEKI |
"EGO PARADISE" |
single |
All antithetical regimes fear these distributed resonances |
27 |
レッスントゥミー |
"今、咲け" |
single |
beyond their control, |
28 |
結束バンド |
"なにが悪い" |
single |
but resort to bureaucracies of suppression |
29 |
和氣あず未 |
"君と雷鳴の道を" |
STAY BEAUTIFUL STAY BEAUTIFUL |
more often out of self-distrust |
30 |
渕上 舞 |
"一期百会" |
一期百会 Meets 40mP 2 |
than certainty. |
31 |
Maki Ohguro |
"君に届け feat, doa, 川島だりあ" |
single |
Idol rock, metal, disco, hyperpop: |
32 |
Hakubi |
"Sanjunitosei no Yoru" |
single |
all of these are systems of resistance, |
33 |
POOLS |
"breaking" |
single |
first to inertia |
34 |
Mega Shinnosuke |
"Sarabauchuu, Kanatamirai" |
single |
and only incidentally to its beneficiaries, |
35 |
AprilBlue |
"Land of Words" |
single |
in search of media that amplify carelessness |
36 |
GRANRODEO |
"ゼロステップ (feat. 小野賢章)" |
single |
in order to reveal its detail. |
37 |
TK from Ling tosite sigure |
"first death" |
single |
The imitative simulation of joy is thus nihilistic, |
38 |
XAAXAA |
"Tsukuyomi" |
Tsukuyomi +2 |
detached from the production of human freedom. |
39 |
-真天地開闢集団-ジグザグ |
"ぽんぽこたぬき合戦" |
無料配布盤 2 |
When done for profit, this betrays the recipients of production |
40 |
Fraxriel |
"Damnation" |
single |
more than the nominal owners of its means, |
41 |
poptropicaslutz! |
"catastrophe" |
single |
and so highlights their disenfranchisement. |
42 |
Jay Kim |
"parachute" |
single |
When done for the satisfaction of accomplishment, |
43 |
snow ellet |
"Playing Dead" |
single |
it mistakes technology for a class of objects rather than a category of inspirations. |
44 |
Lil Xtra |
"Carried Away" |
single |
A generative AI to "make" art |
45 |
GARZI |
"SEE ME NOW" |
Careful What You Wish For 6 |
is the immediate and inevitable precursor to a corresponding artifice to consume it: |
46 |
Carlie Hanson |
"Pretender" |
single |
the optional attachment to your bread machine |
47 |
Bronnie |
"Back and Forth" |
single |
that eats the bread for you |
48 |
White Lung |
"Bird" |
Premonition |
at its moment of perfect useless freshness. |
49 |
Loviet |
"Star Treatment" |
single |
It isn't that we don't need more art, |
50 |
Cyan Kicks |
"Someone Like You" |
Someone Like You +3 |
it's that "art" is not a surface, |
51 |
As December Falls |
"Home" |
single |
it is a plane of perceptions that facilitates connection through it. |
52 |
Against The Current |
"blindfolded" |
single |
All these frequencies already exist. |
53 |
Sŵnami |
"Anghyfarwydd Haul" |
Sŵnamii |
Itemizing them is not a song. |
54 |
Cala Vento |
"Equilibrio" |
Equilibrio / Casa Linda 2 |
Itemizing them in a canonically melodic order is still not a song. |
55 |
Ministri |
"Da questo momento in poi" |
single |
Itemizing them in the style of Umberto Eco as a young boy suffering from poison ivy |
56 |
Aitana |
"Quiero" |
La Última |
is not reifying a desire, |
57 |
India Martinez |
"NUESTRO MUNDO" |
Nuestro Mundo |
it is misassigning theocracy to botany. |
58 |
Tenille Arts |
"Motel On the Moon" |
single |
Yes, sure, maybe the next language model could choose 35% more compelling apposites, |
59 |
Kususa |
"Ndineculo" |
Ubomi 4 |
superficially interchangeable with Tenille Arts sending loneliness into space on a rocket fueled by ruefully atavistic tradition |
60 |
Igeza LakwaMgube |
"Isimo" |
I Soft Life |
by specifying that it's a motel on a rock without roads, |
61 |
Ithwasa Lekhansela |
"Kuzokhala Abadlwane" |
Zehla |
but meta-algorithms have no culture to embrace with defiant ambivalence. |
62 |
Dawn Treader |
"The World Is Our ___" |
Solace // Grief 2 |
It costs the circuitry nothing to doubt itself, |
63 |
Harakiri for the Sky |
"Panoptycon" |
Panoptycon +2 |
which is to say not just that it cannot purchase self-awareness, |
64 |
Dwell in Doom |
"The Witch in Me" |
Songs from the Deadland |
but that it cannot even negotiate in that currency. |
65 |
Mono Inc. |
"At the End of the Rainbow" |
At the End of the Rainbow 5 |
Asking whether deep learning models can be sentient |
66 |
Life On Venus |
"Speak to the Moon" |
Homewards |
is the same kind of amoral category error that failed to recognize slavery as obviously inhuman, |
67 |
Krvna |
"Tithonus I" |
Long Forgotten Relic |
the same kind that seeks mortal guidance from an unquestionable immortal |
68 |
Lisieux |
"Révolution" |
Abide! |
that can definitionally be only one of relevant or real, |
69 |
Udånde |
"I’m Not a Pessimist, I’m a Realist" |
Slow Death - A Celebration of Self-Hatred |
the same kind that imagines the knob was put there by a committee of petty Norns, |
70 |
Sullen |
"Headspace" |
Nodus Tollens - Act 2: Ascension |
rather than a product designer with a parts catalog and a manufacturing deadline. |
71 |
Hourglass |
"Void Within" |
single |
Maybe when you turn it up, it turns three-minute glitchpop songs about our tenuous sense of self |
72 |
Riverside |
"Self-Aware - Single Edit" |
single |
into five- or twenty-five-minute prog-metal essays about our tenuous sense of self. |
73 |
Tnne |
"No Man's Land" |
single |
Maybe the knob lets in evil, |
74 |
Astral Experience |
"Abismo" |
Esclavos del Tiempo - Clepsidra, Pt. 1 4 |
maybe it was put there in anticipatory evil, |
75 |
E-An-Na |
"Fagure Negru" |
single |
maybe it does nothing to mitigate a machine that transmits evil |
76 |
Filip Lackovic |
"Warbringer" |
single |
no matter what its intent. |
77 |
forfedre |
"The World Tree" |
single |
My most debilitating fears always end up sounding miserably tragic to me when I try to imagine |
78 |
Budapest Symphony Orchestra |
"Anti-Hero" |
single |
what would beat a person into the requisite senselessness from which none of the innumerable better extrications are evident. |
79 |
Alex Melton |
"Anti-Hero" |
Happy Birthday 6 |
We have this thing where we get more instrumental but just not more vocal. |
80 |
The Talbott Brothers |
"Anti-Hero - Cover" |
single |
All the lessons we've forgotten stand there in the studio, |
81 |
The Mayries |
"Anti-Hero" |
single |
waiting to sing harmony in a song for which we have not yet picked words. |
82 |
Samantha Stone |
"Iris - Cover" |
Mess (Deluxe) 3 |
You cannot give up forever, cannot give it as a gift unless you are willing to live forever, too. |
83 |
COMETRON |
"From Paris To Berlin" |
single |
And I mean live, here among us in our cities and the spaces they define between them, |
84 |
The Present Moment |
"She Is Mine" |
single |
forever now. |
85 |
Feuerschwanz |
"Gimme! Gimme! Gimme!" |
Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! +1 |
It's not that there's no one to hear your prayers, |
86 |
Amberian Dawn |
"Super Trouper" |
Super Trouper +2 |
it's that we are all here, somewhere, in a crowd that is only ever us. Do you want to be heard, to hear? Maybe now you know what that knob must do. |