there are a lots of little things that have added up into this taking longer than the rest: doubts on if set-time-release projects are really even possible for me in this setting where it's purely for the fun of it (see music).. and the fact that i've just begun by summer semester (second last) this monday certainly adds to it. but i know i'd never do these again if i skip it. and i like having a casual space on the 'professional' part of my online project portfolio. so i think i do want to just recap. i've yet to see if just posting blurbs on syndicated platforms without a mention here makes the most sense for me, but i think it's worth trying. it keeps me from marking off art that i would otherwise review in depth because 'oh, i already wrote this little thing about how i feel about it', and i do want to fill this space better and more effectively with meaningful writing for as much as it makes sense to.
so i'll change this one, a little back and a little forward, at the very minimum :)
while i'm cutting down the things i have for some vague sense of minimal maximalism, of quality, meaningful art instead of just things i have a lean towards, i did buy early in june a used cd of we're new here by gil-scott heron & jamie xx for the beautifully harsh color scheme (pink and green appreciation posting), and it's at the front of my cd collection 'display'. it's pretty!
i also bought two jazz / jazz-rock cds for a friend, birds of fire by mahavishnu orchestra & my favorite things by john coltrane; one i've heard good things about, one i know is one of coltrane's best albums :) loved listening to those on the way to their dj set in dayton~
and i ended up getting a $7ish old copy of paradise lost w/ tons of little annotations and personal commentary from one of the previous owners. i really love things like that, seeing what stuck out most, what connected and how someone else interpreted, felt connection (or the opposite) to writing that is so complex and brilliantly elaborate. will read it through.. eventually.
middlemarch (maybe two chapters?) and i started the weird and the eerie by mark fisher. even though for the latter i like the interpretations, despite a lack of knowledge on lots of the source material bar david lynch so far, it's a collection of tiny essays that show something strangely familiar and foreign, things that pop out without my having even thought of thresholds, barriers, and the ways they're broken or embraced. but i still want to read k-punk more now. not sure if i'll make it to the end before i have to renew at the library.
a truly inordinate amount of picture cross as has become typical of me.. but also i completed half-life!! not perfect by any means, and the difficulty is.. too much by the mid-to-late game. but i still found so much sci-fi brilliance in it all. lots of gta v too, about 50% through (unprecedented), and it's.. what i expected. also some dirt rally 2.0 for light achievement hunting, and some cs2 now that my friend finally has a knife <.< they've all been fun in vastly different ways :)
right after what i should've expected would be an untenable amount of movies to maintain pace on from may, i did see some interesting little projects. bring her back (in theatres :3), companion, and t blockers were all passably good without seeming like they offered lots to come back to, and the phoenician scheme (also in theatres :p) and alice in wonderland (the disney animated) were progressively just a bit better each, in order. lots of odd dynamic fun and psychedelic beauty in them respectively, and certainly recommend them both ^^;
this is the section i don't want to oversaturate anymore; i know my reviews will trickle in, but they're mostly music anyways, so i want to give myself more leeway. i will of course still be linking them on the ratings pages though :>
there were a lot of albums this past month that felt intensely singular, projects that came my way and felt astounding in their own unique way, yet without a lot in the way of my wanting to return to them. there is a better way to describe that, i'm sure of it, but they were the important listens that nonetheless i likely will not return to—whether for genre, emotional weight, or something else—anytime in the near future. plastic death by glass beach, heavy metal by cameron winter, the dresden dolls, grouper's a i a 'double album', wflytd by six impala, suicidal tendencies, my tek lintowe, los ángeles by rosalía, and 11100011 by asian glow all fall under that definition. they all do one thing very well—or in the case of tek lintowe's album, countless things—but they all just won't be in my mind's zeitgeist very long. they all have stellar tracks peppered in though (particularly those that i added to my song_recs list).
and, whether by accident or indirectly on purpose, by going through by aoty watchlist in order now, there weren't many that i didn't enjoy.. and only one i outright disliked (hi twenty one pilots). louder, please was the other; i tried to come back to the moments i liked (which were all near the start), but even then, the production feels so.. lifeless sometimes. there just isn't much that qualifies itself, even if it's kinda nice at the start. and unfortunately i'm already kind of forgetting stomach book; it was fine, but i wish it was more emo. keep stretching, keep molding to nothing, and just explode in whatever feels right. yet it never did to me.
the few that stick out in slightly mixed ways, or for a different album-personality reason than the first set, are helplessness blues by fleet foxes, glimmer of god by jean dawson, masterpiece by big thief, el mal querer by rosalía, and debí tirar más fotos by bad bunny. i think they all fit here because i almost wanted them to do more, reach even further into the bag of tricks that i know they had. or maybe they just fell a tiny bit too short for me, despite the cutting highs they sometimes have in their own way(s). london zoo by the bug, heis by rema, earwax by six impala, and who let the dogs out by lambrini girls are similar, but they just landed a tiny bit flatter. ratings be damned, i'm just fitting their personalities in my head here.. the lambrini girls one was a blast though, i just think i listened to it on a really good (bad?) day and returned to it for a minute on the opposite.
but the highlights were certainly midtown 120 blues by dj sprinkles, slitherman activated by rxknephew, we got it 4 cheap vol. 2 by clipse, and chaos now* by jean dawson. the last of those was especially a shock to me, and it made me rethink retrospectively if i had been too hard on pixel bath. it had its good moments on my first re-listen of it since 2022, but chaos really just blew me away; incredible switch-up. the other three though are almost self-explanatory, even if i wonder if that clipse mixtape will stay that high of a rating for me in the future. the first is, in the vein of burial's tunes and tim hecker's virgins, a largely instrumental work that nonetheless has a cyclopean message behind why it exists, why it needs to exist; the second is a jaw-dropping set of instrumentals that lace together uncountable narratives, so many disparate stories that make it seem autobiographical, a loose way to characterize so many cutting feelings and euphoric nausea. i love those both very dearly.
and then the only other three i wanted to mention were t4t by claire rousay, to-the-core_153bpm by xaev, and strawberry switchblade. in order: an excursion in asmr / ambient / sound collage / field recordings that made my bed at 3:30am its personal, sinking oasis; a sort of spiritual marker of growth à la grave robbing that, while arranged slightly similarly nonetheless shows a shocking amount of daw wizardry; and a synthpop piece of heaven that, even if it didn't constantly blow me away, had more than enough packed together in the prettiest little presents i could have asked for.
and while it's become almost typical as of recent, for these albums to be in near-constant rotation, i re-listened to grave robbing, f*ck u skrillex, and tidal memory exo this past month. i have little to say, they're just all frighteningly catchy, evidently imaginative electronic music (though the skrillex one less so for the latter point). must listens for all three :>
i also had a kinda long break compared to how much i was listening to mid-month that felt strange and out of place, but in writing this after i've started to feel very comfortable just letting it wash through a bit, i think that that was worth it. it's also hard to ignore moving out soon as something that sort of clouds how much i can relax. anyways~
none..:,( skip..
but i did download a lot more (bad faith, chapo trap house, in bed with the right, lore, planet money, and the yard) to hear if i'll ever care about podcasts ever again. they all also seem potentially fun, interesting, or politically sufferable.
new section!!! :D
the two (of three ;) leroy singles were wonderful little treats, even if (i fear like with all of their work under this name) it takes me a little bit to adjust to them. same goes even more for the two clipse 'singles', the latter of which in so be it is one of their best ever; impressively menacing, and the wordsmithing between the siblings is something else entirely.
nettles by ethel cain and music by underscores are tied with so be it for best single i heard this month; they're all take such different paths, and their palettes are so different, but they all tap into something wondrous and huge in ways that only their artists can achieve that effectively.
i wasn't drawn much towards puta / sola by arca, or plastic surgery by bladee & ecco2k, in part surely because i already have an artistic understanding of them; these just didn't measure to what i know they can do, or maybe because they just aren't in the style i 'go to' from them.. the amount of neoperreo and cloud rap is tiring to sort through sometimes.
the little fun ones to get thru were the first two lorde singles, ig reels by ivvys and about ten other people, and the three most recent ninajirachi singles. i still haven't listened to virgin, but i hope that altogether the album helps them have contextual walls; man of the year was definitely a shock though. super excited for the nina album, because fuck my computer is exactly what i needed, an upbeat thrill ride that encapsulates well an effervescent, digital joyousness in spite of what it has come to mean~ and hopefully the other two singles grow more in my mind. ig reels is silly, but the pitchfork article(!) really neatly adds its context for what makes it.. like that.: very fun :o
very happy those sophie tracks received official releases, especially get higher~
and i fear dj sprinkles was right about vogue.
okayy i technically didn't watch it in june, but episode 30 of nana (finally continued consistently, at least by my standards) is the show's best episode so far.. lovely n affecting balancing act, with the perspective / narration shifts. it feels like it's finally, seriously capturing something of its own now, that the early-to-middle episodes kept subtly lacking.
oh also i finished the last three seasons of dexter.
pass. seven had some good moments, and eight is not the worst season.
that's rly all. i hope this semester goes well for me, and that the motivation stranglehold i've been stuck in releases just a little bit. but either way, i've collected a few more ideas for fun things to do, and i'm glad i saw / heard a lot of good art in june.
ily! ttyl <3
written 3 jul 2025
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