My devastating Oneohtrix Point Never anecdote is that at the 2016 edition of Moogfest I briefly fell in with a crew of four tech bros who worked at LinkedIn and were really excited about the prospect of me getting their utterly garbage band, Rad Dads, onto the radio. The opportunity to make fun of other peoples' anglo-ass names is really rare for me, and so it's with great pleasure that I tell you that one of them was named Siegfried Bilstein (I am, alas, making none of this up). Anyway, these dunces left in the middle of an utterly incredible Dawn Richard set in order to get good seats for Oneohtrix Point Never.

I never got a chance to do a TMT review of this for a couple reasons, but I was gonna feel really bad if I let it go by entirely. Reviews overall were pretty positive, I think, but the album probably got a bit shortchanged by a general sense that people were afraid to criticize it rather than giving it deserved praise. I'd probably just stay quiet if I thought it sucked, but I listened to this for a month or so straight before other new discoveries started to creep in.

Lost Lake could be the title of a Mary Lattimore song, but it’s actually the name of the dive bar in which we met. It’s a sharp contrast to her music: more than a little dingy and situated right on Colfax Avenue, a one-time highway that Playboy allegedly called the longest, wickedest street in America. Not that you could tell once Mary started playing; her set, drawn in equal measure from the just-released Hundreds of Days and her back catalog, was utterly transportive.

Turns out that Julee Cruise, the woman on whose album the Twin Peaks theme appears, has other albums. They're massively overlooked, if not exactly instant classics. This one, released in 2002, is a compelling document of a particularly odd time, infusing that same dreamy vocal sensibility with the good-not-great jazzy drum and synth work of the electronic lounge music era.

This was recommended by the usually-reliable E. Fosl, but doesn't do a whole lot for me. The EP is a weird form for electronic music; it makes total sense for a genre in which standalone ten-minute tracks are the norm, but is just a tad too close to the appearance of an album to get away with sounding this disjointed from song to song (the ability to integrate a couple severely slammin' grooves into a totally coherent hour-long experience is exactly why I'm so high on Black Mahogani).

I found this album on a very good RateYourMusic list called † black culture ∞ - 2017; to the extent (none) that I am capable of certifying this sort of thing, it absolutely belongs. Sometime in the late 1990s (and echoing ever since, albeit in a somewhat less-inspired fashion), house people got a little tired of the whole pounding four-on-the-floor thing and decided that dance music need have no particular structure so long as it continued to draw from some sort of danceable musical tradition. There are kicks here, sure, but they're practically buried among samples from every conceivable era and expression of black music - it's one thing to try and track down an anonymous earworm from some song you heard a minute of in a mix, but another entirely to listen to a full album in which the samples feel more like in-jokes than closely-guarded secrets.

You ever listen to Fuckin' Todd Rundgren? Me either, until a week or two ago. The spitefully in-the-know point to Rundgren as the origin point for basically the whole dumb psych rock revival spectrum, from Whitney to Tame Impala to Mac DeMarco. They're right, but that was '70s Todd.

Whether he knew it or not, Bobby Womack was just about dead when he made this thing. Not a lot of artists get to make an album which Wikipedia calls their twenty-seventh and final, and fewer still do anything worthwhile with it; immediately preceding Bravest Man in the Womack catalog are 1994's Resurrection, an aspirationally-titled comeback that is unforgettable only in the sense that it was never remembered, and 1999's Traditions, Bobby's contribution to the horrifying genre of Christmas albums by penniless soul legends. Womack watched his career come to an unceremonious close almost entirely outside of his control, its last gasps coming in the form of albums like the above-named or the gospel pivot Back to My Roots, casting around desperately for any still-living audience.