General electro « And Also This

Archive for the ‘General electro’ Category

March 2nd, 2011

It’s been a long time.

Winter was a sort of interminable prison sentence this year, but spring is finally doing its slidy dance into the corners of the grass plots of Brooklyn. This month I don’t have any great back stories or epic inspirations, just an old cliché: the-best-of-something-or-other. So, this mix is the Best of White Gilt.

As a very few of you may know, my good friend Shay and I hold a sporadic dance party in Greenpoint called White Gilt, which was the name of our band, but then I turned 30 and we both got very career oriented. So, why not turn it into a DJ night, which is much more mature and serious-minded? This was, we both agreed, a Good Idea. Read the rest of this entry »

The Dalek’s Dream

July 30th, 2010

Being addicted to British television has its perks. In addition to off-color sitcoms and Welsh cartoons, the BBC has a very nice way with music documentaries. Synth Britannia is a well-researched, extremely interesting piece about how a once marginalized and underground genre of music came to be the defining style of a decade. It’s difficult to imagine PBS devoting the same kind of attention and care to these acts’ American counterparts, mainly (I suppose) because production costs would far outweigh interest in the subject. Read the rest of this entry »

The safety of objects

June 15th, 2010

Don DeLillo’s White Noise was published in 1985, went on to win the National Book Award, and thrust him into the forefront of a vague movement called ‘postmodern literature’. I have never truly understood what this label means. Postmodernism in literature and art, in architecture and criticism has certain elements in common, but nothing binding, nothing constant, and maybe that is the point. At its core, postmodernism highlights the recursive, fractured thoughts that plague us as members of advanced capitalist societies: truth is relative to the observer, we are alone in a crowd, and the devices we use to create a sense of community or identity only serve to drive us further apart. We buy things that in turn try to sell us a semblance of self parceled out in neat monthly payments of 19.95. Read the rest of this entry »

The lord of depths

May 7th, 2010

Change is never easy. Whether it is the yearly confusion surrounding seasonal shift or a major alteration in fortune, change takes us all by the scruff of the neck and wags its finger in our faces. Through its clumsy reminders we are forced to accept that we are finite, that we own nothing absolutely, and that we must make the best use of the time that we have. I believe that an approximation of personal peace can be attained by acceptance that flux is the only constant, and that in the end, the details are everything. That said, sometimes you just have to pull yourself up by your bootstraps and keep going. Read the rest of this entry »

Closing time

February 23rd, 2010

There is an end to everything. When I moved to New York City in 2003 I was 22 and mostly stupid. Having just graduated from art school, I was still laboring under the misapprehension that the world owed me a living, that my friends would always be my friends, and that I would be young for a long time. Those first six months were probably the hardest time I’ve ever had. I was seriously poor, working jobs that were detrimental to my health and my self-esteem, sometimes barely scraping up enough change to eat, and just wrapping my head around the fact that my previous four years’ experience in no way prepared me for life in the ‘real world’. Read the rest of this entry »

In a cold funk

January 29th, 2010

Deep winter is a tough time to live in New York. No one much feels like going out to brave the squalling wind and snow, especially for a drink in a hot, crowded bar with people so bundled up they resemble haystacks. February tends to be the month that we all burrow down into our skins and make a ream of plans that we have no real intention of carrying out, or research dream vacations that we will never be able to afford. Read the rest of this entry »

Highway Life

November 30th, 2009

Last week I was in southern California, driving around, trying to get a better idea of what constitutes American identity. It’s pretty amazing that this country is so incredibly diverse and yet manages to be cohesive enough to aspire to a national archetype. Landing in LA, the tall palms swaying against dry air, I felt as far away from New York as I did in Finland. Read the rest of this entry »

Lies About the Future

August 30th, 2009

I suppose we all have ideas about what the future entails. Whether our individual future, that of our friends or family, or the future of humanity in general, the weight of what might or might not happen down the road throws a shadow over our experience of life. Some say that this is one of the unique markers of man– we are the only animals capable of projecting our thoughts (and by extension, our wills) beyond the present moment. Read the rest of this entry »

The Blue of Distance

June 29th, 2009

This is a second, high summer mix, tailor made for rooftop barbecues, junkyard dancing, and sizzling down the strip. The recipe is simple, if seasonal, and comes from many years of experimentation. best followed to the letter:

Rad Summer:
(serves 1 well, but more better) Read the rest of this entry »

Fragments

May 10th, 2009

…another in an occasional series.

White Horses, 1984, directed by Vladimir Grammatikov

I’m sorry, you know, but I had no other options. I didn’t mean for you to come here. But now you are here, you must help us. We can’t last much longer. With these words, White Horses begins its odd, uneven adventure. Roundly panned in the mid-eighties as too incomprehensible for children and too idealistic for adults, this Swedish adaptation of an Italian children’s novel quickly fell into obscurity, though it deserves further notice at least for its incorporation of all the classic eighties fantasy film conceits. Read the rest of this entry »