My current frontrunners for top 100s

blissblogger

Well-known member
the big question when you read these lists from people is always, will they go the autobiographical route, include and try to justify everything they’ve ever liked through sheer autobiographical pathos—or try to establish themselves as tastemakers with their own singular and eternal aesthetic vision.

The first always underlies the second, doesn't it? The second masks the first. The contingent and particular (perhaps even somatic) attempting to universalize itself and root in purportedly objective conditions and rules...
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
I think only third could pull off the singular vision thing, but maybe I'll be surprised. Craner's was certainly idiosyncratic (and brilliant), but was it about defining an aesthetic? Version's was interesting, too, could only have come from Version. But only Third's seemed ideological.
 

woops

is not like other people
I think only third could pull off the singular vision thing, but maybe I'll be surprised. Craner's was certainly idiosyncratic (and brilliant), but was it about defining an aesthetic? Version's was interesting, too, could only have come from Version. But only Third's seemed ideological.
:/
 

version

Well-known member
Luka did some sort of 1000 song list in tribute to London but somehow it came and went and nobody not even he cared

It was a big YouTube playlist, but it's gone now.

 

WashYourHands

Cat Malogen
I think only third could pull off the singular vision thing, but maybe I'll be surprised. Craner's was certainly idiosyncratic (and brilliant), but was it about defining an aesthetic? Version's was interesting, too, could only have come from Version. But only Third's seemed ideological.

try doing 23 pages during a pandemic
 

woops

is not like other people
What is the current status of the @john eden list?
View attachment 1695

6. Philip Glass ‎– Akhnaten (1987)

800,000 people visited the British Museum in 1972 to see the gold death mask of 18th Dynasty ancient Egyptian Pharaoh Tutankhamun. I was not one of them, being 3 years old, but I believe my parents went. Certainly they had a fabric print of the mask hanging above the toilet in our semi detached home in St Albans.

That print had a profound and enduring effect on me. This mainly manifested itself in a recurring nightmare in which my friends and I were chased around a graveyard and similar locations by a floating version of the death mask, emitting a sinister green gas. Gradually my friends would disappear until I was the only one being chased. And then I would wake up. It's a dream I still have occasionally now when stressed or ill.

There are lines from Egyptology to Sun Ra and afro-futurism - and also to Aleister Crowley's victorian enthusiasm for exotica. But those are for another time.

On Sunday January 18 1987 an edition of London Weekend Television's The Southbank Show aired on Philip Glass. I vaguely recall this being about minimalist music generally and also featuring dire new age nonsense from the Windham Hill label, which I hated. I was gripped by the Philip Glass stuff though. I'd probably read about him in the NME and Bergman and Horn's Experimental Pop: Frontiers of the Rock Era which I had got out of the library because it had Laurie Anderson on the cover and included a photo of Einsturzende Neubauten looking deranged whilst burning something. I was transfixed by the Glass section of the show and the commentary about minimalism and what it did. My parents walked past the living room and nagged me about sitting too close to the screen. We didn't have a VCR so that was it - focus intently on the moment or lose it forever.

I later discovered that my Dad has a cassette boxset of Glass' Einstein on the Beach, so I would play that on his fancy stereo when everyone was out. It was too long, but I liked the repetition, the riffs, the spoken word interludes. I found the overlap with the New York experimental art punk scene incredibly exciting. And later on the resonances with techno and ambient.

In recent years my Dad and I have been to a few gigs together including a few performances of Philip Glass material. We were due to see the man himself at the Barbican last week but Phil was ill. The Philip Glass Ensemble still did us proud though.

Akhnaten is about a Pharaoh who isn't Tutankhamun, but close enough. It has a bunch of readings from the Egyptian Book of The Dead and is cosmically massive in the way that you would want a 14 part 3 hour long Philip Glass opera about ancient Egypt to be.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
And to yours

I'll collect them all like butterflies, pinned through the thorax, to admire through thick glass
 

WashYourHands

Cat Malogen
Anyone game? Concurrent is no bad thing now it’s a thing, @william_kent watcha sayin, saw a request in another thread think for @maxi , @linebaugh can you show your cursed friend Gus how it’s done to draw him into yet more appalling notations of crying himself to sleep because he only had twelves video game consoles? Epic/10 throw downs

Spring has sprung and the nights are getting longer at last, @martin might be a cousin so I have to vote in here, anyone not mentioned no slight it’s only a tag for anyone to smash it, WG Grace’s rocked, who wants it?
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
the big question when you read these lists from people is always, will they go the autobiographical route, include and try to justify everything they’ve ever liked through sheer autobiographical pathos—or try to establish themselves as tastemakers with their own singular and eternal aesthetic vision.

I detest autobiographies. they are sort of fascist if you think about it hard enough. unending boredom inducing repetitions
of the cult of personality.
 
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