Less than one day back in NY and already doing podcasts. Thanks @subinev @thejlm for having me. Music Digest available on all the things.

Gil :: David Szauder 

Newish - Uncle Skeleton - Sophisticuffs

"All Too Human", the third outing from Nashville's Ross Wariner's solo project, is the first to cross my ears. As an usual fogey when it comes to the likes of electronic music, it takes quite a bit to get me to listen to more than a track, let alone enjoy it enough to listen to the entirety of a record a couple of times. 

But this is a very easy record to listen to, and its clearly due to Wariner's ambition that makes it so marvelous. Designed to be a double EP, the album's 26 tracks are divided into four sides: the first six songs (this is the album's opening track) are "danceable electronic tracks", the second seven songs are "inspired by pop and bossa nove", the next eight are "lo-fi experimentation", and the final five "brings forth the ambient sounds".

Now here's where Uncle Skeleton's genius lays. While this platform has clearly set a trap for himself to commit musical self-flagellation, Wariner gracefully avoids the pratfalls of indulgence and wraps everything up in a tidy 68 minute package. Of the 26 tracks, only eight extend beyond the 2:20 of the opening track (the album version is a quarter minute briefer). For the most part Wariner will find a musical theme he wants to play with, go after it with the wide and diverse artillery of sounds and sequences he has at his disposal. He adheres to his themes very well, and will dip into some much more organic sounding horn and strings packages to give his music a humanism I find lacking all too often in the genre. 

In the midst of being creeped out by this list of Unexplained Sounds, Steve introduced me to the concept of Numbers stations:

a type of shortwave radio station characterized by their unusual broadcasts, which consist of spoken words, but mostly numbers, often created by artificially generated voices reading streams of numbers, words, letters, tunes or Morse code. They are transmitted in a wide variety of languages and the voices are usually female, although sometimes men's or children's voices are used.

Sadly, I haven't seen Looper yet. I fear spoilers any minute now but I'm trying my best to avoid them. However, it did come to my attention that director Rian Johnson is offering up this in-theater audio commentary meant to be played while you watch the movie for a second time in the theatre. He says of it:

It is totally different from the commentary track that will be on the Blu/DVD, a bit more technical and detailed. Needless to say, this is NOT to be listened to on a first viewing, or before you've seen the film. Also, please work it so that a glowing screening is never out of your pocket during the movie.