Thursday, February 21, 2008

When we say "winter in Wisconsin," this is what we mean....

When I talk about living here in Madison, I almost always include some kind of caveat about having four card-carrying seasons, and mention that the middle of January can be brutally cold. This week has been what I'm talking about. Owing to the weekend's particular sequence of ice/warming/rain/cooling/snow/even more cooling, my shoveling blog would be about venturing outside to scrape confectioner's sugar out from around the slush tracks now rendered into dinosaur footprints. Although we are reportedly venturing into the "It might warm up as high as the freezing point of water...." range this coming weekend, the temp swing yesterday was more in the character-building 15 below to 5 above range. I could do with a bit less character.

I have some things to keep me warm, however - a pair of reissues from Carl Stone (his very first recording ever Woo Lae Oak, the arrival of the second revised edition of Brian Eno's 77 Million Paintings that includes a bunch of source images I haven't seen (Yes, I've actually run the thing for long enough the first time out that I actually recognize the new images) and some new audio source material (which will be familiar to people who are familiar with the processed voice material that shows up in installation recordings such as Music for Civic Recovery Centre or the soundtrack project Music for Onmyo-Ji). In case you missed it the first time, it's worth considering picking up a copy.

The other recent companion has been the new Autechre outing Quaristice, which hits the streets as a physical object the first week of March but is available as a FLAC download or MP3 download right now. There's a lot here to digest, but I really like the range and breadth of the work.