lend me ur eyes 077
The first of the fellas got married this weekend. A lovely and sunny day, it was soundtracked by Sophie Ellis Bextor, 5ive, Sugababes, and Kylie Minogue. More than ever I am grateful for my friends, and for the easy, effortless sort of union we now have where the only expectation is presence, and where love and support for one another is assumed and unspoken, expressed in looks, jokes, digs, hugs, and shoulder pats. It’s important for men to have friends who understand them innately, because men need desperately to be understood. It is also great to have friends who have a shared history rooted in culture, food, sport, media, place, and time, but also a friendship in which commonalities are supplemented by differences that strengthen and stretch us. We are just six men who went to school together, but time, commitment, and communal experience have made us much more than that. The most beautiful thing about this is that as more years pass that which together makes us more will only slowly and surely flower and grow.
LISTENING
I haven’t kept up too much with new music so far this year, and, as such, haven’t shared any albums yet here. But now that I have sat with a few things for a couple of months, it is time for a little roundup. Early on, I liked Rafael Toral’s Spectral Evolution. From what I understand, Toral was active as a guitarist mostly in the 1990s, after which he stepped away for the instrument for a long period to try other types of music-making. This album, released on Jim O’Rourke’s label, is his return to warbly, droney guitar music. I’ve written before about albums that perfectly dilate between nice sounding, old fashioned good instrument playing and more interesting, edge-lying experimentation, and this is one of those. It is constantly moving between airy and dense, loud and quiet, noisy and nice, making something varied, unique, and continually interesting to come back to. I also liked Sultan, by Palestinian rappers Shabjdeed and Al Nather. They had an album a few years back that was very good. I don’t have much to say about them, but they’re back, and the new album is great. For me it is headphones on, walking about music. Something new to me was Laundry, an ambient album by Kevin, a collaboration between musicians Ben Bondy and Mister Water Wet. It isn’t much new, but for some reason its warm, comforting atmospherics have been really hitting for me and I keep returning to it. The bandcamp copy says that “this project is a hand reaching through the void and out of your speakers responding to moments of isolation and pining with resounding gratitude,” which is perfectly put. “It makes space for warmth in slow-healing wounds; the gift of reset that is born from the call and response between friends.” Also on the lesser known end, here, this is happening, an album by archie, a Korean indie artist. As with most music nowadays, I learnt about it via Joshua Minsoo Kim. Describing it as “bedroom shoegaze, fluttery Ulla-ish synths, songs that feel like a continuation of 2000s Korean dream-pop, indie balladry,” he called it as “hella Korean.” It’s a lovely album, and has such a great opening song that pulls you in. It sounds first like one thing, but, over its half-hour length, shifts in different directions, all of them very pleasant. Something else good and weird is Bong Boat from NUG, a collaborative project by PVAS and Florian T M Zeisig. It is strange, thick, off-kilter ambient music, full of humidity and distortion but also kind of soft and background-ey. This is on Huerco S’s label West Mineral Ltd. and they put out lots of woozy ambient music, much of which I find tends to blend together, but, for whatever reason, this one stuck out for me. Lastly, over the last few days I have not been able to get enough of Almighty So 2, the new album by Chief Keef, a rapper I first listened to more than ten years ago. This album is just really good. There is also something I find oddly touching about listening to albums by rappers who were teenagers when I first heard them, and who are now, a decade and a half later, reaching, or moving through, their thirties more or less as I have. With this and the Lil Durk album last year, there is the sound of boys not exactly becoming men, but instead something else adjacent to that, more grown boy-men maybe.
PLAYING
I caved and bought a Playdate. Made by Panic, who published Untitled Goose Game a few years back, it is a handheld video game machine with design by Teenage Engineering. The Playdate, which is more toy than fully fledged console, comes with a “season” of games, wherein two small games are delivered to the unit each week until you hit twenty four in total, and you can buy lots of others at a few pounds a pop from the digital storefront. The screen is an e-ink type display, unbacklit and made of black-and-white pixels. As impractical as it is, it does look good and have a fair amount of detail. It has a gimmick in the form of a small crank on the side, which you rotate to interact with certain games, making for quite a unique and tactile mechanic. Most games are more like mini- or micro- games, arcade-like diversions that you fiddle with for a minute or two before flicking onto the next thing. But some are more involved, and some are actually fairly fleshed out and elaborate. I’ve only had the thing for a few days but my favourites so far are Mars After Midnight, a daft game made by Lucas Pope (Papers Please, Return of the Obra Dinn) in which you act as an administrator at a help centre on a space colony, completing various little tasks in order to bring solace to struggling aliens; SatOlite, a tower defence game where you attach little guns to planets in order to strategically keep away waves of attacking ships; Root Bear, a silly mini game in which you spin the crank to try and pull the perfect pint of root beer; MDMA, a cute grid-based mini city builder; and Bloom, a sort of play-it-daily but just for a minute or two, story-led social sim game about a girl who runs a flower shop. I’ve always loved handheld games consoles. There is something miraculous about the small-scale engineering of them, all the little chips, electronic displays, and the mesh of intricate wirework, soldering, and plastic that together makes up a tiny computer that you can hold in your hands. The Playdate is one of the most frivolous purchases I’ve made in my life and I can’t really recommend that anyone else spend their money on such an item, and yet I also can. A yellow machine that brings pockets of joy and distraction, it is a nice thing for those who can afford it.
lend me ur eyes is a linkdump of what i'm into month by month: music, books, games, movies, and other internet detritus, with misc editorial misgivings in the intro. lend me ur eyes friends, so that i can see.