I haven’t been to an old folks’ show in a minute, but it turns out they’re the best ones. The rush for seating aside (this was at the Denver Botanic Gardens, where you’re apparently allowed to line up as early as you please; for the average attendee, approximate age one hundred and seven, this was apparently 2pm, right after Ellen), they’re the ideal audience; shriveled enough to minimize their footprint and passed out off half a glass of that strong chablis, twenty minutes into the show you and the grandchildren might well be the only living audience members.

Hoo boy, y’all should see the sentimental garbage that I wrote during my first attempt at this (you shouldn’t actually, and you never will).

Hi everyone - I'd like to introduce an idea that's been bouncing around my head for a long time. As much as I enjoy vomiting my opinions onto the page unadulterated, the real galaxy-brain vision for this thing has always been about yielding the soapbox as often as I'm taking it. Going back to my love for ancient forums, I've always been fascinated with the idea of a publication for which no distinction is drawn between author and audience.

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Last year, Diddy donned the Puff Daddy moniker once more for the Bad Boy Family Reunion Tour, a mobile mega-concert looking back at the biggest hip-hop label ever. Of the 52-song setlist, Diddy performed the first seven and returned to feature on six more. Both New York City dates sold out within seven minutes.

All dub techno sounds the same, yes, but only some of it is good. It’s a curious scene; its origins and heydey alike were practically the exclusive domain of two dudes, Mark Ernestus and Moritz von Oswald. Across several aliases (Maurizio, Rhythm & Sound, and most centrally Basic Channel) they both invented and spearheaded the exploration of the genre, perhaps the purest representation of the utterly wild frontier available to electronic musicians in the 90’s.

Wallace Stegner’s All the Little Live Things would have you believe that people move to California solely because they’re paid as hell and need to distance themselves - spatially, and grip-on-reality-wise - from the human cost of their good fortune. He’s correct. San Francisco and LA, the two major destinations, offer opposite approaches: in the former, the outside world is an obsession, with no end of jackasses all too willing to reassure you that you’re making it a better place; the latter sprawls enough to be entirely self-contained, with vast expanses of natural beauty as a second line of defense.

2017 Albums.

I’ve done a lot of stupid shit on the radio. Incessant airhorns, excerpts of Vedic texts, a Microsoft Sam rendition of Wikipedia’s entry for stoner rock backed by sheets of grey noise; it was all useless, but likely never unprecedented. Despite the vast expanse of all music ever recorded plus the range of noises that you can make, radio’s a limiting medium - the output is defined rigidly enough that you end up with a monkeys-and-typewriter sort of situation where the unconventional becomes inevitable given sufficient time spent in the studio.

I was about 17 when I first heard Sade. The xx (real heads know them as The 20), extremely poppin’ at the time, had a habit of name-dropping her in every interview they did, and after three or four instances thereof I was finally moved to give Promise a spin. It was a soothing presence in a turbulent time, an outside source of calm when all internal reserves had been biologically de-commissioned.