Thursday Night Music

First of all, I attended the Animal Collective show at the Triple Rock. Ariel Pink doesn't even deserve a mention, because that was the most uninteresting set of music I've heard since last fall. Animal Collective was fun and very much worth seeing live. I thought they sounded different than on record, but maybe not. They had a lot of drumming which I didn't expect to be foregrounded, at least not to that extent, from Sung Tongs. I can't recall their third song from either album I've listened to, but it was the highlight of my week. It sounded kind of like a Brian Eno track that had been left to rot in the woods, and had somehow bled into an almost familiar yet not quite intelligible pop song. For however long that lasted, Animal Collective was my favorite band. I got a little tired toward the end of the show, so they got shuffled back into the larger category of "bands I like pretty well".

If you were expecting me to do a radio show on Sunday, well, I changed that and did one tonight at midnight instead.

[Note: exceptionally self-indulgent paragraph ahead.] I really enjoyed the Black Dice track Nick played just now on the radio (which upon further review I have). I'm trying to figure out what CDs I should order, because I want to order several at once to save on shipping costs, but it's so hard to make up my mind. I was going to get Early Pedro, but then Adam surprised me with a burned copy of both the Pedro LP and the Fear & Resilience EP, so I'm not so sure about that anymore. I'm thinking about getting a Greg Davis record, but which one? Keith Fullerton Whitman's got a new one coming out next month, but I'm thinking the record library might get it, so do I really want to order that? I kind of want the Run the Road compilation, but I'm not sure that I like grime as much as people who like grime are supposed to. I'd kind of like to get some more label samplers, like maybe one of the Pop Ambient collections from Kompakt, but I also don't enjoy sacrificing depth for breadth, so maybe I should get a single-artist album. Decisions!

I also realized, maybe even today, that the amount of time I spend reading about things cuts into the time I spend doing them (when I say realize, I don't mean like it's something new, it just became apparent for some reason). Like I spend hours per week reading Pitchfork, All Music Guide, etc., but not that much time actually paying attention to music while I listen to it. I have a few strategies for this, like checking my newsreader once every other day, or maybe putting all feeds that might require more than five minutes to read (Achewood would be okay, but The Morning News Headlines would not be) in another category that I only check when I have a lot of time, because otherwise I end up spending all my leisure time reading things on the internet. I like the internet, but think it might be taking over my life. Actually, it already has, but that's beside the point.