Absent Erratum: DJ Hold Me Close I’m Floating Now – Liquid Flowing Crystal

Liquid Flowing Crystal is the 51st release on Absent Erratum. This submission features one track at a total of 30 minutes and 00 seconds. It was released on 18 August 2022.

Absent Erratum ebbs and flows, the surface of the water still then restless, the line separating the sky and sea blurred, the horizon an ambiguity, far-off and uncertain and undefined. The water carresses her and urges her – she, no more than a sparkle amidst the waves, a recollection of a moment of light in the darkness of the depths – upward and onward; it conspires with the currents to rush her into an unstable existence. For a moment, she rises to the surface; for a moment, she tastes the sky and smells the salt and sees the rays of the sun, unmediated and sublime; then she dives forever back under, to her home of crystalline liquid – an endless, soundless, lightless place.

You can listen to Liquid Flowing Crystal here.

🌊🐙 Between the Water and the Waves 🦀🦈 Aquatic Mixtape 🦪💧

🌊🐙 Between the Water and the Waves 🦀🦈 is an hour-long aquatic mixtape featuring tracks by, among many others, Sawako, dj))water)) and Tyler G. Holst. You can listen to this mixtape on YouTube. For more convenient listening you can also play or download the mixtape as an MP3 file below.

absent erratum: crush – what a heart feels like when it’s weightless

what a heart feels like when it’s weightless is the 50th release on absent erratum. this submission features one track at a total of 30 minutes and 05 seconds. it was released on 7 july 2023.

every night i think of you.

you can listen to what a heart feels like when it’s weightless here.

Jacob Thomas & Sven Kay – Statica

It’s easy to underestimate the continued efforts that certain people sink into not only their own art but everyone’s art; what they do to keep their scene alive, what influence their championing and curating have, what wouldn’t happen if it wasn’t for them. Scott Kindberg is certainly one of them. Not only has he steadily been working on an impressive oeuvre of his own work, he has also invested endless amounts of finite resources (time, money, energy) into empowering and spotlighting others. One of his recent endeavours was a variation on the popular HNW tape swap, for which he teamed up two artists each for every month – one from Europe, one from the US. They would collaborate on a tape, of which they would each distribute 11 copies to the other participating artists from their side of the ocean.

For this tape swap, I was paired up with Jacob Thomas, who these last few years has been chiefly active as the excellent Tyrant Flycatcher. In March 2022, we got off onto a start that was more than exciting when we began exchanging ideas and concepts through e-mail. It quickly became apparent that we’d have no trouble finding common ground to explore. We were both keen and excited to dive into the conceptual side of our prospective tape, finding inspiration in esoterics, philosophy and mathematics, among many other things. There was evidently infinite potential and it was a major challenge to not get too carried away. When life started to intervene on my side, our project began to run into some delays. Amidst everything, with definite efforts from my side but most certainly sustained efforts on Jacob’s side, we did manage to record our walls and find the time to remix and reassemble our recordings to meet our joint expectations.

It ended up being an endlessly interesting project, even if we (and I must certainly take the blame here, for the delays were pretty much entirely my fault) did not realise all of the ideas we had for it. Somehow, however, that fits this tape, which ended up being called Statica, an intersectional exploration of physical, spiritual and mathematical interprations of static interactions: homophony, cacophony, polyphony and antiphony. It is, without meaning to be pretentious, wildly ambitious, of course: a tape that attempts to connect a truly wild array of concepts by its approach to sound, by equating ((re)interpretations of) (literally) audio engineering (acoustics, physical effects, etc.) to Lacanian psychoanalysis, mathematical concepts of infinity and a myriad of pathways into and out of spirituality. It seeks to redefine or recast terms such as homophony and antiphony in the context of explorations of static. I think we (meaning, perhaps again, I – I wish to give Jacob all the credit in the world for his lucidity and intelligence) almost got lost in the endless meanings we could instill our work with. That it ended up, against all initial plans, a simple tape in a simple case with a simple J-card, is, then, probably apt. More than that might only destract from all it tries to say.

Collaborations are always challenging, especially those in which a true meeting of minds is pursued. In the past few years, I’ve successfully begun a handful of such ambitious collaborations, some of which most certainly managed to get to advanced stages of progress, but which, as of yet, have not been completed. (Splits, of course, are usually a lot easier.) Two of the these projects that progressed furthest and will hopefully see the light of day at some point I undertook with, respectively, Paul Kervegan and James Shearman. For now, they remain somewhere in that ambiguous area of semi-existence, in flux, indefinite and full of potential. It will be interesting to see whether they, if they are someday realized, will fullfill that potential. Statica, I think, certainly does.

Best of 2022

While 2022 was fraught with enough challenges and changes in my personal life to rival 2021, they were far more welcome – while most of 2021 was clouded over by illness, 2022 was the year of major health improvement and a long-desired move, among plenty of other things. Of course, being couch and/or bedridden for much of 2021 meant a lot of time for reading and listening to things – as 2022 picked up steam, much of that time disappeared, to be spent on the move itself, commuting and other pursuits that I simply could not manage in 2021, such as running. A such, the massive 100 books I read in 2021 was not going to be rivalled, for instance, though the final 52 I did manage I consider a valiant effort nonetheless.

Sonically, 2022 was as refreshing and interesting as any year before. Of course, I speak to this from my personal vantage point where whatever I discovered in 2022 shaped my musical year and thus is fair game for my end-of-year lists.

Somewhat surprisingly, Bad Gyal – who, last year, I honoured with two spots in my top 25 songs – is absent from this year’s list of my favourite songs. Slightly frustratingly (but her back catalogue is impeccable, so it’s fine), the few singles she did release this year did very little for me. Other neoperreo artists – such as Mantriss Nikita and Six Sex – released excellent material however. And where 2021 was a personally weak year for Kpop, I definitely found a few gems this year (although I technically already first heard aespa’s first mini album at the tail end of last year). Overall, 2022 was mostly just intensely diverse and exciting; however, most of all, it was the year of Ayumi Hamasaki. While I have been listening to this Jpop superstar for nearly two decades by now, I had long lost interest in new material already and continued listening only to what I considered her absolute classics (basically anything pre-2005). However, this year I discovered that, actually, many newer releases were as good as if not better than my old-time favourites. (miss)understood and NEXT LEVEL now rank easily among my favourite Ayu albums of all time.

In any case, some of my absolute favourites this year:

Aespa – Yeppi Yeppi
Akira Kosemura – Osmanthus
Ayumi Hamasaki – You were…
DAVICHI – Sunset
Deathprod – Dead People’s Things
Earth – Crooked Axis For String Quartet
Girls’ Generation – Villain
Mantris Nikkita – Reggaeton Pa’ Sadear

MUTSUMI – U Look Good And They Don’t
Poppy – Voicemail
Six Sex – Sunshine
STAiNY – 恋餃子
The Garden – Make A Wish
underscores – Spoiled Little Brat
WEDNESDAY CAMPANELLA – Buckingham
Yerin Baek – Here I am Again

The 52 books I read this year pale in comparison to last year’s effort, but due to my health issues I had a lot more time to read then (and when Covid struck in December I spent three weeks in bed reading a book a day). Additionally, a fair few tomes were included (Ducks, Newburyport; Antkind; Coin Locker Babies; 2666; Congo) – though last year, too, included two long Pynchons and Infinite Jest, among many others.

Regardless, a good year for reading again with a few clear highlights: the insanely great Ducks, Newburyport by Lucy Ellman was, no contest, the best thing I read in fiction all year. In non-fiction, David van Reybrouck’s Congo, Audre Lorde’s Zami: A New Spelling of My Name and Rebecca Solnit’s Whose Story Is This stood out in particular, but there were many great others – unlike other years, there was very little I did not much enjoy at all. Max Tegmark’s Life 3.0 certainly dragged near the end; Cathy O’Neil’s The Shame Machine had nothing on her previous work; Guilia Enders’ Gut was written in prose I found utterly unlikeable; however, I left nothing unfinished and found myself struggling through very little.

Some quick statistics: out of 52 books, 32 were non-fiction, 19 fiction and 1 poetry; at a little over 17.000 pages read total, the average book was about 330 pages long; the longest book was Ducks, Newburyport (1032 pages), the shortest Els Schijf’s Hoera, Een Mensje! (Hooray, A Small Human!, 80 pages).

As per usual, I did not document my engagement with film sufficiently; nonetheless, I saw some great works, such as Edward Yang’s A Brighter Summer Day and Yi Yi; I further explored Tsai Ming Liang’s oeuvre (and 2022 saw the handsome BluRay release of Vive L’Amour); I saw three films at the first physical (mini-)edition of IFFR in ages, including David Easteal’s excellent The Plains.

Finally, 2022 was, as a result of factors mentioned before, also not my most productive, but despite that, it saw the release of some of my personal favourite creative works. Below is my full 2022 output in alphabetical order.

  • Mysticist on the Left-Hand Path – The Seeker of the Perishing (digital; YouTube-only release with static artwork; Santuario De Sangre)
  • N×GHTC×R×
  • Opaque – Black Moncler Hudson (digital; 7” vinyl forthcoming in 2023; Summer Interlude)
  • Opaque – Chouette (digital and 2CDr; Perpetual Abjection)
  • Opaque – Cropped Shiny Black Prada Puffer (digital; YouTube-only release with animated artwork; self-released)
  • Opaque – Total Hudson Worship (digital; self-released)
  • 💊 Sven Kay ⚡ “POST-PERREO 4” 💫 NEOPERREO MIXTAPE 🌡️ LIVE!!! 🥵 (digital; YouTube-only release with full video; self-released)
  • TEMP𝒪RAL W𝒪RLDZ©® – TEMP𝒪RAL W𝒪RLDZ©® (digital; Absent Erratum)
  • Where’s Waller?

New Opaque: Black Moncler Hudson 7″ (Summer Interlude)

In my post announcing the release of the Black Moncler Hudson II C40 tape last year, I mentioned that I would provide further details on why exactly it was called Black Moncler Hudson II at some later point when the time was right. Indeed, that time has come: the Black Moncler Hudson 7″, recorded prior to its follow-up but released after, is available for pre-order from the Summer Interlude Bandcamp. This is the first time Opaque is appearing on vinyl, and what could indeed be more appropriate for this format than the spectacular Hudson and two crunchy, crackly tracks that pay tribute to it. The tracks were released onto Bandcamp on 13 November.

Of course, vinyl production is notoriously slow at the moment, so do not expect these physicals to become available until well into 2023. Until that time, both tracks are freely streamable already. Due to a move, primarily, these past few months have been intensely busy – hence, the prolonged radio silence. Hopefully the next few months will enable me to return in a somewhat more regular fashion again to my creative endeavours.

Absent Erratum: Escape Hatch – Trapped Underground

Trapped Underground is the 49th release on Absent Erratum. This submission features two tracks at a total of 23 minutes and 00 seconds. It was released on 26 July 2022.

A darkness clings to Absent Erratum, an impenetrable, empty obscurity in which everything is silent. It rests on her, holds her in place and time, in the company of weightless infinity. Seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, years, centuries, millenia – they are indistinguishable here, where permanence equals transience, presence equals absence, existence equals death. An eternal vision of light lives inside her, unreal and intangible; a narrow sliver of hope that remains, that comforts her: I am permanent, I am present, I exist – I am transient, I am absent, I am death.

You can listen to Trapped Underground here.