Best of 2007=my friends Part 4

All this blog was ever supposed to be was my favorite records. A bad habit I have is promising to make a tape for someone that I never do. Most of the songs I've written about have appeared on a mixtape, some of them have appeared on nearly ever one I've ever made. Anyway, what that means is that it's sort of superfluous for me to make any sort of year-end list. You already know what it's going to be. But! There are many reasons to have year-end lists and my favorite have always been the ones written by people that didn't spend the whole year writing about music already. So! Here are seven different lists written by people that I love. I hope you have fun reading them.



Liz Harris
Liz, as Grouper, made one of my favorite records of the 2000s: "Way Their Crept." She also made me a mixed CD for a housewarming present that had DJ Assault's "Asses Jigglin'", Soulja Slim's "If I Really Want It" and a picture of a daschund in a party hat on the cover. We saw Descent together and she's braver than me.

2007 top tens

Fuyuki Yamakawa at TBA festival in Portland—He manipulates his breathing and heart rate to affect light and sound. A visually romantic display of control. It felt like a magician’s performance. Some gothic and demonic things happening.

Sud. Grenze ---DEREVO. Someone in Bristol who worked on this film showed it at their house. Super beautiful, hard to describe. Strange metaphors and breathtaking cinematography. By the performance/art group DEREVO from Russia. Its not from this year but I saw it this year. From their website:

“One time you find yourself in a park, on a bench, looking into space, and for a second you forget which country you are in, whether it's morning or evening; you are pierced by a pang of loneliness, your heart becomes light and sad, what is important separates out from all the noise of the world, and the slipping, sliding shadows fill with meaning profound...

Words come to mind...

‘South. Border’ is my present to myself, a little window to the house I will never be able to build, a house of silver and light.”

Valet @ Rotture, in Portland.

Inca Ore—Churpa Champurrado. 18 minutes or so of new recordings by Eva Saelens of Inca Ore. A return to something dark and private. Really nice, and haunting.

Pink Reason, “By a Thread”–It’s the By a Thread side that we listen to a lot in my house. It has a dusty and scratched-up catchiness, dark and suffocated.

Yo Majesty @Holocene, Portland. This show was amazing. I went mostly expecting a raucous show, which it was, but their raw lyrical talent caught me off-guard. Weird intertwining rhythmic stuff not on the recordings that I’d heard, and at the end one of the MC’s sort of broke down in a way that made a lot of the audience cry. Not that crying or making other people cry automatically makes your show good, but sometimes it does, and this time it did, because it was all about this humble feeling of still appreciating your audience, even though you have the same amount of talent as a lot of folks that could easily at that point choose to just be super cocky and forget about anyone but themselves.

DJ Yo-Yo Dieting: Nonexistences of the Eyes Mixx/Unborn Faces Withering Mixx. When I think about Glamorous Pat I think about the time he disappeared into the bathroom for half an hour a couple years ago at a gallery party in Portland, and how when he emerged he told me that he’d taken so long because he was lost in the mirror. I like his remixes because it keeps all the good parts of the song, or just condenses and amplifies them. Everything else is fuzzed or just not there.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=aUgcFiLA0_o