Record #972: The Knife – Silent Shout (2006)

Music is very tied to memory for me. Records dot my memories like snapshots of specific times and places. However, since I do most of my listening through physical media—which costs money—I can’t memorialize all of those snapshots. Invariably, some of the stuff I’m listening to at any given point ends up slipping through the cracks of my limited record budget.

But occasionally, a forgotten record will rear its head years after the fact. In this case, that record is Silent Shout by Swedish brother-sister duo The Knife, a record that was included in the deluge of new music I was exposed to by my roommates in Chicago. While I loved the record from first listen, it was crowded out of my to-buy list by bands like Neutral Milk Hotel, Kraftwerk, New Order, Deerhunter, Grizzly Bear, and so much more.

Then this past year, my dear friend Bryan ordered me a copy for my birthday, rectifying its absence on my shelf.

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Record #812: Aphex Twin – Selected Ambient Works 85-92 (1992)

Years ago, I purchased Selected Ambient Works, Vol 2. My attempts at listening to the monstrous triple-disc collection of untitled tracks proved fruitless. I eventually sold it, and when I transferred the blog from Tumblr to a standalone site, the original post didn’t even make it over.

As it turns out, I thought I was buying this one. 

I had always meant to fix that in the back of my mind, but never got around to it. But when my podcast cohost brought this album up in a conversation about avant-garde and experimental music, I decided to correct my error.

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Record #811: Autechre – Tri Repetae (1995)

Last week, while recording an episode on experimental music for my new podcast (oh yeah, I have a podcast now), I remarked that part of what makes Radiohead great is that they take the harsh weirdness of far more inaccessible bands and mold it into pop structures. “Radiohead would be the first ones to tell you, ‘just listen to Autechre,'” I said, and then I realized two things.

One: I didn’t know how to pronounce Autechre.

Two: I had never listened to them.

I promptly sought to correct that, and within half an hour of listening to their pioneering opus Tri Repetae, I ordered a copy. And now, I’m not sure which is harder to believe: that this record came out in 1995, or that humans had anything to do with its creation.

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Record #224: James Blake – James Blake (2011)

It is my understanding that the term “dubstep” means different things depending on what side of the Atlantic you’re on. Stateside, it means the sort of bro-friendly, attention deficient, robot-sex music that’s made its way into car commercials and cheap summer movie soundtracks. In Britian, however, dubstep is a little more subtle–shifting textures over time, setting grooves and resting in them, forming a subset of electronic music much more suited for a late night drive than a trailer for the new Transformers movie.

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