sangsara.net

Tag: Music

  • Week 7.24

    Week 7.24

    We landed in Auckland, New Zealand Monday morning and immediately flew down to Wellington, and we’ve been driving our way back north for the past few days. I’m currently writing this while sitting beside a Buddha’s head in a poolside garden, in a small new hotel outside of Rotorua.

    Four hours ago, I was parasailing above Lake Taupō in my usual urban uniform of jeans and a t-shirt — if you know me, you’ll know that I don’t sign up for even remotely dangerous things, especially over large bodies of water; in the cringey words of Below Deck repeat charter guest, Dean Slover, I said “homie don’t play that!” But Kim convinced me to, and we survived. They played Maroon 5 songs on the boat going out, and so by the time we were lifted some 50 meters in the air to float in blissful silence high above the town, I was having a good time. Lake Taupō is a volcanic caldera that’s nearly the same size as Singapore, but because it’s all flat you can just about see from one end to the other from up there. New Zealand challenges the city dweller’s sense of scale like all good nature vacations.

    Since leaving Wellington, the road trip portion of the trip so far has been mostly measured in burgers, fish and chips, and winery stops, specifically in the Martinborough and Hawke’s Bay areas where the tastings have been revealing of each company’s nature: some overly commercial and strictly scripted, versus others more informal, just going on vibes the only way they know. I think the difference shows up in the wine, with wineries in the latter category being more playful with flavor, more likely to put better stuff in a low-priced lineup. But I would say that, as someone who’s now had a crash course in holding up his glass against the light to observe the color.

    I’m now lying in bed on Sunday evening having just finished the last leg of our driving tour, which took us to the famous Whangamata Beach bordering the Bay of Plenty, and Hunua Falls, where we did another little nature walk and met a nice dog and helped its owners get a photo together with their iPad. Old people really carry full-sized iPads around on hikes to use as large-screened cameras. Mind blown.

    A couple of observations on this road trip. So much roadkill! Easily a hundred little bundles of fur spotted spread across tarmac just today alone. Some decayed and washed away, little more than stains. Some still fresh, bloating, bleeding. We avoided making contact with all but a couple. A ritual evolved, mainly to stay alert but also out of pity for these bunnies or squirrels(?): upon spotting one, I would put my palms together and say “rest in peace”, and Kim would follow with “in all your pieces”.

    FM radio is still not a great experience; it’s a wonder how people survived on it for so long. Fortunately I had a lot of downloaded music on my iPhone, which also navigated us with offline maps. CarPlay is excellent, and Apple Maps was good enough for nearly every leg of the journey. We listened to Lorde’s albums, of course, as well as the Sunkissed Summer playlist she compiled on Apple Music, and other New Zealand legends like Bic Runga and Crowded House. At one point I put on some J Dilla but learnt that rhythmic music you can sort of nod and zone out to is NOT what a driver wants over long winding roads.

    As I mentioned last week, this itinerary was drawn up with ChatGPT and my custom GPT, AI-tinerary, but we had to fact-check everything and plot the route on a map before making bookings. It’s held up well so far, with a couple of impromptu detours and chance discoveries along the way. For one, we did not realize that while passing through Napier for one night that we’d be there for the Art Deco-obsessed city’s annual Art Deco Festival, the first one they’ve been able to hold since 2020. Vintage cars were out in force, there was a Warbirds air show, and a free concert on the beach. It was packed, every restaurant was booked out. We ended up eating dinner out of a food truck by the sea. I asked ChatGPT “what’s happening in Napier tonight?” and it confidently replied, “I couldn’t find any events tonight.” At the risk of sounding like a broken record, these tools truly are starting points and aids right now, and you must resist the idea that they are final answers.

    I’ll post the final version of our itinerary next week when we’re done, in case it helps anyone looking to do the same.

    All photos were taken by either a Ricoh GR III or iPhone 15 Pro Max. The extra 120mm equivalent reach of the iPhone came in very handy, but there’s no beating the image quality of the GR when it comes to landscapes. The light was so good that some photos taken with the Standard color profile, straight to JPEG, were surprisingly “finished” out of the camera. This year’s iPhone still wants to make everything bright and sharp, which fails to capture atmosphere and preserve highlights. I edited photos daily as quickly and lazily as possible, using RNI Films for most of it — at some point they added the ability to save edits on top of original files (non-destructively), which is a key consideration I look for in photo apps. I’ve also started using RAW Power again late in the trip, which is making me want to go back and redo some edits. Maybe on the flight home.

  • Week 5.24

    Week 5.24

    Vision Pro and AirPods Max hypotheses

    Apple Vision Pro is out in the wild, and I’ve gone on the expected rollercoaster — from “of course I’ll get one, but only when it’s officially released here”, to “nah I think I’ll wait till the second iteration”, to the usual FOMO and wanting one as soon as possible.

    But it might not be such a terrible idea to wait for the second iteration, if one believes that it’ll come some time in the middle of 2025. Why then? I looked at how quickly second-generation products were released in Apple’s recent history, and it ranged from 11 months (iPad) to a year and five months (Apple Watch). I think a 12-month release cycle is plausible, and putting out new ones at WWDC makes sense as they’ll want to emphasize the visionOS platform for developers.

    Which might then suggest the global Vision Pro rollout this year will start in June. So international early adopters will be putting down at least $3,500 to use it for a year before they need to upgrade. And we know that selling a first generation AVP on the pre-owned market is 1) a tough job, if the second generation irons out obvious wrinkles, and 2) not something early adopters want to do anyway, given the sentimental value of keeping your ‘first spatial computing device’.

    While we’re out here predicting future releases, I think I’ve cracked why the supply chain analysts believe an AirPods Max update is coming this year with USB-C and new colors, but without an upgrade to the H2 chips (currently only found in the AirPods Pro) which enable Conversation Awareness and Adaptive Audio modes. The reaction to this rumor has generally been: “that would be a lame update to the AirPods Max after four years”, but okay what if it’s not an update? What if it’s a new variant model?

    Specifically, it could be the lower-cost, lower-weight “sport” model with different materials and/or a swappable headband that was rumored to be “coming soon” back when the AirPods Max first released. Everyone assumed it would be released a year after, but because it’s been so long, we’ve forgotten that was even supposed to be a product. A cheaper non-Max/Pro headphone model without the latest features would make the same sort of sense as the iPhone 5c, which had all the features of its premium predecessor — but funner. Then the real AirPods Max update can come in 2025, and honestly, if you’re making them well, five years between headphones is the right cadence.

    Electric toothbrushes

    It’s been about two weeks since I started using an electric toothbrush again, and the difference in efficacy and convenience is so notable that I don’t know why I stopped when my last one broke during Covid. There are so many essentially disposable models on the market now in the S$20–30 price range that I didn’t see how the S$200+ models justified themselves. Bluetooth app connectivity? It seemed ludicrous.

    To my untrained eyes, there were two basic designs: an elongated brush head that vibrates (this is the dominant kind), and a small circular head that rotates back and forth. I used an Oral-B one of the latter sort for a little while once but it hurt my gums and I ended up throwing it out. I decided to give it another go with an Oral-B Pro 2 model, but with an “ultrathin” head with gentler bristles this time, and haven’t had any problems. It cost me about S$75, presumably on account of having a rechargeable battery and dock, and I was beginning to think I should have just gone for the Pro 1 model that runs on AA batteries and costs S$30.

    But of course it’s not that simple. After more research, I discovered there are actually three categories of motorized tooth cleaning devices: electric, sonic, and ultrasonic. The Pro 1 has fewer vibrations per second than the Pro 2, but both probably still fall into the electric class, which is to say they clean with brush movements only, and don’t produce sonic vibrations that interact with fluids and help to knock plaque right off your teeth. Oral-B now has a range of toothbrushes called iO that combine an oscillating head with sonic vibrations, 3D teeth tracking AI (no, really), and you guessed it, they cost S$300–400.

    ===

    Media updates

    • I’ve never been into Grimes’s music because the few songs/videos I’ve encountered were awful, and of course her association with Elon Musk is a major turnoff. But I saw a tweet saying her breakthrough album “Visions” was turning 10 years old, with words to the effect of it being so great that the rest of her career was doomed to never top it — so of course I had to check it out. I’m pleased to report that it’s actually pretty good, maybe even great. For an electronic album, I didn’t expect it to sound so influenced by R&B? This whole separating the art from the artist thing is pretty wild.
    • That whole album was recorded in Garageband, and while I’m no musical talent, I wrangled it this weekend to finally clean up and join up the bootleg recording I made with my iPhone’s Voice Memos app back in Chiang Mai in December. It was 50 mins out of an hour-long solo piano set played by Joshua Lebofsky, amidst cafe noises of steam wands, fridges slamming shut, and people chatting. It starts super strong, with him singing an uncommon medley of Tears For Fears’ Everybody Wants to Rule the World and Lionel Richie’s Easy. I’m very happy to finally have it in my music library, ready to be revisited at any time.
    • I had a cab driver one night this week who sang along to songs on the radio. He was no great singer, but I loved the joy of it. The station miraculously queued up three great songs in a row — the aforementioned Tears For Fears song, followed by Sheryl Crow’s cover of The First Cut is the Deepest, and Phil Collins’s In the Air Tonight — which I remarked upon, and we got to talking. He told me he was really into Tears For Fears back in the day, and that they asked Phil Collins to play drums on their song Woman in Chains, wanting some of that magic touch. I promised him I’d listen to it again over the weekend, and I did.
    • It was decided (in my brain) that Easy might be my favorite song, and so I programmed our HomePods to play it throughout the entire apartment every Sunday morning at 10:00 AM as long as someone is home.
    • I was glad to hear from Michael that he loved the Slow Horses TV show, and binged three years’ worth (just 18 episodes, really) in a week. He also discovered that the theme song isn’t some Rolling Stones deep cut they licensed, but an actual new Mick Jagger song commissioned for the series!? I finally finished reading the first book but found the experience such a close retreading of the first season that I’ve decided not to read any more of them. It would just be like rewatching the existing seasons and spoiling the ones to come.
    • We got a chance to go and see the new Apple TV+ film Argylle at its local premiere. It’s an action-comedy about spies directed by Matthew Vaughn, who also directed other action-comedies about spies such as the Kingsmen series. This one primarily stars Bryce Dallas Howard, Sam Rockwell, and Henry Cavill, and is a fun enough time that I can recommend it. One thing that surprised me: the “new” Beatles song Now and Then features heavily throughout the film, with its melody forming a major recurring theme. I looked it up and they had the song for over a year before it came out and had to keep it a secret. Check out the symphonic version with a choir on the soundtrack.
    • Amazon Prime Video has put out all eight episodes of their new action-comedy series about spies, Mr. and Mrs. Smith, with Donald Glover and Maya Erskine playing reimagined Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie roles. We’ve seen two so far and it’s going very well.
  • Week 4.24

    Week 4.24

    A little while ago, I learnt that an ex-colleague of mine has received a stage 4 cancer diagnosis, and he’s only a few years older than me. Despite the fact that more “young” people seem to be getting cancer, it was still a deep shock because Tony was always incredibly fit and dedicated to his health. He’s been writing openly about his thoughts and experience on his Medium account, which I read before meeting him for lunch with some other former colleagues this week. It was tough seeing him in poorer shape, but true to his personal brand, he seemed extremely pragmatic and matter-of-fact about it all.

    We worked on the same team for about a year back in 2018, but were only on one project together as peers, leading design activities and client workshops together over a few months. I count myself fortunate to have had that experience, and learnt a lot from his confidence and wealth of technical knowledge when it came to UX matters — which was not my area of focus. Even then it was clear he had a knack for facing reality, and a passion for making sure the younger generation had their eyes open to the inequities of working life. Not always a popular topic, but life sucks. He mentioned that whenever he finds the strength these days, he works on his own design education materials that prepare students for non-ideal situations, and I thought that made perfect sense for him.

    Many of the things we talked about over lunch echoed other conversations I’ve been having with other friends. Maybe it’s the return of tech layoffs in the news, but negative sentiments seem as high as they were during Covid, with the questioning of boundaries and priorities taking place again. Tony understandably tried to impress upon us that some things aren’t worth having as regrets, and that we should make better choices while we still can. When I asked him what else he does now on days that aren’t lost to medical interventions, the answer was surprisingly similar to how I spent most of my year off work: reading, writing, and drawing.

    Peishan shared this Guardian article about people with cancer who’ve found the clarity to spend their remaining time meaningfully, and I thought Mark Edmondson landed the point that some people have trouble getting: the work that gives you purpose today isn’t the only purpose you’ll have.

    People (usually millennials) also mention the difficulty they have switching off from work. On a daily basis, but also when they go on vacation — taking half the holiday to get into holiday mode is a terrible inefficiency. I recall it took me months to unwind from a state of nearly burning out and to stop worrying about my “sabbatical ROI”. We should be like newer hybrid vehicles that can shut their engines down when idling at traffic lights and spring back to life quickly when needed, but instead us older cars only know how to burn gas all the time. I want to be a disused school bus just rusting in a field, bright yellow and unbothered.

    ===

    • I visited the Prix Pictet photo exhibition that’s part of Singapore Art Week (maybe it’ll be the only event I attend from this year’s edition) and found it beautiful but gosh it was mostly depressing. The theme was “Human” but it may as well have been “Human Suffering” — from communities devastated by the effects of mining and metal poisoning, to the plight of illegal refugees trekking 66 miles through jungle in search of better opportunities, they seemed to comment that there’s not much joy in being human these days. I joked halfway through that I hoped there would be a series of mundane birthday party photos at the end. There wasn’t.
    • Kim spent most of her week preparing an elaborate, successful Indian dinner from the Dishoom cookbook, but that’s really a story for her own weeknotes if they ever happen. The takeaway for me has been that, after seeing how the proverbial samosa is made, the Indian takeaways we usually get are probably quite unhealthy and we need to cut down.
    • Nintendo is having a January sale on the Switch eShop and I considered getting the remake of an apparent classic time loop visual novel, YU-NO: A girl who chants love at the bound of this world, yes, that is its title. It’s apparently the spiritual forebear of games such as Steins;gate, but after watching a short gameplay video on YouTube, I decided that since life is too short, I really didn’t want to punish myself. An anime adaptation was made a few years ago, so I will simply watch that instead.
    • We are enjoying the new British police drama Criminal Record on Apple TV+. Peter Capaldi is really good in it, although all the police work and cornering of baddies with their secrets is carried out really incompetently.
    • Can you believe that The Smile dropped a new album a couple of days ago and I had to find out from YouTube instead of Apple Music? Seriously, I’m looking at my For You page and it’s not mentioned under New Releases. This music video, where the band plays a new song for an auditorium full of young children — most of them bewildered or bored out of their minds, but with a couple really into it — is such a simple and charming concept I can’t believe I can’t name another time it’s been done.
  • Week 3.24

    Week 3.24

    I have come down from last week’s AI overpositivity and retaken control of this week’s update. I don’t know what came over me, especially when it’s so easy to see the issues that this current gen AI fever,this onslaught of enshittification, has yet to unleash. We’re poisoning a well, or maybe an orchard, that many people have spent decades building and many more depend on even if they don’t know it. I had two conversations on Monday, one about the disadvantageous state of jobs for 20-somethings and another about the Apple Vision Pro, and found myself in both of them articulating a deep pessimism that I haven’t been able to shake. Even if you buy into accelerationism, there’s clearly a risk of multi-decade spoilage here that future generations will hate us for.

    On Apple Vision (which is what I think the overall product family is called), I mentioned to Brian that I’ve been seeing a lot of Meta’s Quest 3 TV advertising whenever I tune into programs on the UK’s Channel 4, and how they’ve gone from selling immersive VR experiences with the Quest 2 to AR use cases like learning to play the piano — the same territory that Apple’s staking out. And how it won’t be very long before the Android equivalents of the Vision Pro will gain market share, on account of being several times more affordable, but hoovering up eye movement data revealing customers’ intents, attention, and probably physiological info because none of these other manufacturers will take pains to deny developers access like Apple does. We’ve seen these playbooks before.

    Brian and I have also previously discussed the ability of conversational AI products to deeply profile their users, not just by knowing what you want to know about, but how you think, react, speak, and write — what kind of person you are. A conversational interface with generative AI, trained on large amounts of data, is nothing short of a profiling machine that sees you at a behavioral and psychological level. Combine that with knowledge about what draws your eyes and sets your heart racing, and an ad-supported AR headset with built-in AI assistant is a nightmare product that will inevitably be a hit at $499.

    Thinking of the battles that ethically minded designers will have to fight and probably lose, deep in organizations intent on deploying AR/VR dopamine and AI-powered enterprise doodads without question, is what makes me tired these days.

    Later in the week, Jose shared this update on the Fujitsu postal service software debacle in the UK, a case of irresponsibly deployed technology that literally ruined and ended human lives. And that’s just the legacy stuff without any newfangled AI.

    ===

    • I’m finding the first Slow Horses book to be less enjoyable than I expected, mostly because it feels like I’m just rewatching the first season of the Apple TV+ show, nothing less and nothing more. I sort of expected more side story or entertainment than was possible to film, but it’s a rather straightforward procedural. The TV series might be the rare adaptation that’s on par with its source material, in which case I won’t read the rest after this one and will wait to watch Gary Oldman fart his way through them instead.
    • The second season of Reacher fell into the sequel trap, going for more action, more teamwork, more humor, more repeated catchphrases (this did NOT work), and losing something of its charm in the process. They decided to portray him as a sort of humorless Arnie-type killing machine who doesn’t understand normal people’s thoughts, and that doesn’t seem right to me based on his characterization as an astute detective/observer of human nature in the books. I was also hoping they’d go the Slow Horses route and just make the books in order, but they instead jumped to the 11th novel, Bad Blood and Trouble, for this season. Reading this interview with showrunner Nick Santora though, I got the feeling that making Reacher indefinitely is not something anyone on the team takes for granted, so why not go for broke while the Amazon money is flowing? Still, the thrill of seeing Reacher with his team is a payoff that has to be earned, and it’s not the same if you haven’t seen him wandering America solo for ten seasons beforehand.
    • We’ve started season 3 of True Detective, and I’m really liking some of the things they do with blending the recollections of an old man fighting a fading mind, with the disorientation and terror of his present life; they are literally blended and linked with match cuts and unifying objects — in one flashback a full moon disappears above the detective, and we come back to the present to see a fill light has gone out during the interview, and he’s shaken out of his memories.
    • I’m new to the music of Claud, but their superb album Supermodel would have made one of my lists in 2023.
    • I fired up Lightroom to see what new features they’ve added, and there was a new Denoise tool that seems to use AI to generate missing detail — fine, it’s unavoidable — and AI-powered preset recommendations. With one click, I applied a dramatic preset to an old RAW file which made it extremely noisy, and with another click removed all of it and landed on an incredibly sharp and clean image. I’m a little sad about how hard it is for small indies to compete with Adobe on this stuff. Photomator has an ML-based auto enhance feature that really doesn’t work well, often overexposing and making white balance look worse, whereas the Auto button in Lightroom makes improvements 90% of the time.
  • Week 1.24

    Week 1.24

    Happy new year to observers of the Gregorian calendar. We watched the clock tick over on the banks of the Ping River in Chiang Mai, where an insane amount of fireworks were let off for easily 10 minutes. Only the noise cancellation of my AirPods Pro saved my hearing.

    I spent the next morning eating a massive buffet breakfast at the hotel (if I’m being honest, that’s one of my favorite kinds of breakfast setup, something I’ll probably mention again when I get around to making my second Breakfast zine — check out the first one here), where they had both the local signature curry noodle dish, khao soi, and an automated tangerine juicer that makes a fresh glass from at least six whole fruit with the push of a button.

    I never get to drink both OJ and coffee in the same morning unless on holiday, but the Thais have got it figured out. When we went out later to the Old Town area to visit a cafe, I tried a coffee recipe that’s apparently all the rage there now: an iced orange juice and Americano mashup which shouldn’t work but does.

    When it was finally time for lunch, I had a Japanese-style curry rice at a place called “Dirty Curry” inside of a stylish little hotel called Hotel Noir that we might consider next time. The curry played hard to get, taking its sweet time to arrive but was pretty great. Even my iPhone camera ate, because the photo came out looking incredible without any help.

    Returning to reality on Tuesday night, we avoided thinking about work by starting to make plans for our next trip (in February, and before you say anything, this is the closest together I’ve ever had two holidays, and the idea of two holidays a year is already a historical anomaly for me). We had the flights booked awhile back but nothing more, so now we’re really running late with the hotels and other tickets.

    Sitting in front of the TV that night, we watched in disbelief as live images of JAL flight 516 almost crash landing at Haneda airport came in. Everyone’s been mentioning how Japan has not had much luck with 2024 so far; as if the New Year’s Day earthquake on the west coast wasn’t enough, the week’s headlines have mentioned a slashing incident on a train in Akihabara and another rail-related attempted murder just yesterday.

    I returned to work after two weeks away and was amazed at the diversity of human experience when a colleague mentioned how they had gotten bored of having time to themselves over the Christmas break. It boggles the leisurely creative mind. I had free time for a year and would take a hundred more if possible.

    But you know who else has had some time off recently and a lot to show for it? Why, the canceled and almost-forgotten singer-songwriter Ryan Adams who just dropped FIVE albums at once on streaming services! Longtime readers will know that I’ve been a huge fan of his work, for over two decades now if I do the math, and the data will probably show that I subconsciously listened to him a lot less over the last four years after he was accused of sexual misconduct and emotional abuse and retreated from view, occasionally dropping albums of half-hearted new material and experimental covers with little promotion.

    I haven’t really sorted out my stance on situations like this. Another blogger, Christopher Bradley, makes a case for reevaluating Adams here. He hasn’t committed any crimes — apparently the FBI looked into allegations of sexting with a minor and cleared him — apart from being a poor partner and maybe an awful human being in some aspects of his life. But who among us hasn’t? I still listen to Michael Jackson anyway, and anybody who says they can keep still when Billie Jean comes on is a damn liar.

    Anyway, two of Adams’s new albums are esoteric 80s punk rock-ish joints, one of them is a live version of his Prisoners album, and the last two are more his usual speed. I’ve read that Star Sign is the better one, so if you only check one out, I guess that should be it. I plan to work through all of them in the next few days, but on a first pass, Star Sign is quite alright. Because I don’t think any mature musician ever recaptures the energy and raw brilliance of their first few albums — a fact that’s probably best not to think about as a young artist — we tend to grade most on a curve over the years. Just keep the tunes catchy and the words not utterly trite, and we’ll still show up. Unless they get really shitty, like U2.

  • Week 52.23

    Week 52.23

    Greetings from beautiful Chiang Mai on this last day of the year. It’s my first time here, and I’m sure it won’t be my last. If anything, I’m kicking myself for not coming sooner — it’s currently a very cool and walkable 25°C at 11am, and temperatures go below 20°C in the evenings; Microsoft Copilot with Bing tells me it’s the safest city in SE Asia (wha?); and the food and coffee have been top notch so far.

    We’ve also been to a cool cocktail bar with live jazz in a basement speakeasy-like space, and another “live house” with a mix of bands playing each night. Coming from Singapore where jazz clubs are a rarity, and almost exclusively the domain of old people, it’s been surprising to see many young people in attendance, although I can’t be sure they enjoy the bands. They seem to pay more attention and clap louder for the pop cover bands.

    One amazing performer I heard was Joshua Lebofsky, originally from Canada, who sang and played a straight hour of jazz standards and pop interpretations on piano at The A Ter (theater). They were fantastically musical and soulful variations, and I was glad to be able to tell him so afterwards; sadly he hasn’t got a social media presence, but there’s an album from 2006 on Apple Music: Play A Little Prayer.

    If we lived here, I would be a regular patron at these places for sure (especially at prices roughly half those back home). The non-existence of a vibrant jazz scene is such a shame for Singapore, because we have quite a few talented jazz players who end up being session musicians for mandopop performers most of the time, probably due to the economics of the music scene. I guess these are the third-order consequences of necessarily narrow education policies in our early years.

    We also went on a walking street food tour and a cooking class at a small organic farm and school (where I was snapped in a farmer’s hat looking glum at having been dragged along, but ultimately it was a good time and the food was, like all of it, quite excellent). An intriguing culinary detail here is how Hainanese immigrants created their own localized chicken rice combining the steamed chicken with deep fried chicken cutlets and an entirely different chilli that’s dark and savory, with fermented soybeans and fish sauce?

    Here are some photos, all from my iPhone 15 Pro Max. I made a new Darkroom preset to handle the light and scenery here, and I think it’s a versatile look I’ll probably be using for a long while. I’ll probably share it here next year after some fine tuning!

    Anyway, Chiang Mai. Come by, it’s lovely enough to consider buying an apartment in, but I’ve only been here a couple of days.

    ===

    On the 45-minute minibus ride back from the farm last night, I managed to throw together my end-of-year playlist with some not-too-shabby transitions (I recommend turning crossfading on; 3 seconds). This is partly a diary of associated memories and partly what I’ll remember as the year’s best songs. This process usually takes much longer but everything came together on a stomach full of coconut curries and fresh herbs and spices they had us pound in a mortar ourselves.

    Here’s Listening Remembering 2023 on Apple Music.

  • Week 51.23

    Week 51.23

    Merry Christmas! Let’s talk about music this week.

    I received the Beats Studio Pro headphones as an early present, in the Sandstone color, only 22 weeks after I wrote about how I thought they were set to be a fantastic update to the aged/obsolete/frankly embarrassing Beats Studio3 Wireless model. In that post, I said I would not be buying them for myself on account of having enough headphones. No promises have been broken, and I can confirm that they sound really good and are comfortable even with my big head. If you’ve found others like the B&O H95 or B&W PX7 too small to fully enclose the bottom of your earlobes, these may do the trick.

    I often try to convince myself that a pair of AirPods Pro should suffice for my/anyone’s needs, that a pocketable pair of smart, well-engineered buds are more than enough. Who needs HomePods or other home speakers, over-ear headphones, soundbars, etc.? But just as you can feel the bass from a towering set of speakers in your chest, a pair of big drivers blasting air into your ears do feel something different.

    Since I had the week off, I spent hours testing them out, thinking about what music I enjoyed the most this year. I sometimes do an annual wrap-up playlist with all my favorites, in lieu of making playlists throughout the year like I should. But this year I’ve made three: BLixTapes 1, 2, and 3, so I’ll see if I feel like it next week.

    In the meantime, I think I’ll name some personal “winners”!

    2023 sangsara.net music awards

    Best comeback: Damon Albarn (Blur, Gorillaz)

    Please note these are personal picks, and I’m not saying Albarn disappeared, but for a long time I’d written him off completely — a remnant of the 90s and mid 00s who still puts out funny tuneless projects every few years that I play through once then delete from my library. When that time came around again with this year’s The Ballad of Darren and ‌Cracker Island from his Blur and Gorillaz bands respectively, I played the albums and was stunned. Did he get his mojo back?! The jams get your feet tapping, the lyrics are somewhere between conceptual backstory and dadaist poetry as usual, and the pretty moments are so pretty they just pop into my head some mornings as I brush my teeth.

    Honorable mentions:

    • Everything But The Girl, Fuse: How often do you hear from a band after 24 years of hanging up the name, and the new stuff is up there with their best work? Sure, Tracey Thorn and Ben Watt kept busy with other projects but I never expected them to release new music together. This coming out of the pandemic was one of its silver linings.
    • Bob Dylan, Shadow Kingdom: Revisiting one’s old material with the benefit of age and experience made Joni Mitchell’s Both Sides Now (2000) a revelation for me when it came out, and while I still don’t know Dylan’s work well enough after all these years to appreciate every nuance of these new versions, I’m planning to put in the work.

    Best reissue: Jesse Malin — The Fine Art of Self Destruction

    The 20th Anniversary Edition of this seminal album sadly took on a different meaning a couple of months after it was released. Jesse Malin suffered a freak “spinal stroke” in New York and became paralyzed from the waist down (an update in December revealed an unfortunate lack of progress, with him now seeking stem cell treatments in Argentina). The Fine Art was somehow a formative album for me, although I had no reason to identify with its East Coast bohemian city life vignettes. I suppose it’s universal the same way Springsteen is. This new edition includes 2022 versions of key songs, and although Malin’s voice is virtually unchanged, you can hear the years on his shoulders in these slower, introspective readings.

    Honorable mentions:

    • Portishead, Roseland NYC Live 25: This came out of nowhere, a remastered 25th anniversary edition of an insanely historic performance, and now with three tracks that were previously only in the film. I remember buying it on VCDs (remember those?) from the local HMV. If only they’d remixed it in Spatial Audio… I would die to experience this like a real concert.
    • R.E.M., Up (25th Anniversary Edition): I already mentioned this one in Week 45.23. As I noticed these last two albums with 25th anniversaries, I thought “huh, 1998 sure was a special year”. And thanks to Apple Music showing other playlists where a song is included, I discovered this one: At Home With Jack Antonoff, which is entirely dedicated to the magical moment that was 1998. Check it, The Smashing Pumpkins put out Adore, Neutral Milk Hotel made In The Airplane Over The Sea, and Natalie Imbruglia sang Torn?! What was in the air?
    • Daft Punk, Random Access Memories (10th Anniversary Edition): I actually wrote a couple of sentences about this album when it came out in 2013 and accidentally found the post while searching for a more recent mention. Still a masterpiece, now in Spatial Audio.
    • Daft Punk, Random Access Memories (Drumless Edition): And this crazy rerelease idea. As I said a few weeks ago, who the hell would have thought making a version without the drum tracks would result in such a wholly new experience?

    Best single line:

    Thank God I’m fly!
    — TGIF, XG

    Best bars:

    I’m down to click out you hoes and make a crime scene
    I click the trigger on the stick like a high beam
    Man, I was Bentley wheel whippin’ when I was nineteen
    She call my number, leave her hangin’, she got dry-cleaned
    She got a Android, her messages is lime green
    I search one name, and end up seein’ twenty tings
    Nadine, Christine, Justine, Kathleen, Charlene, Pauline, Claudine
    Man, I pack ‘em in this phone like some sardines.
    — First Person Shooter, Drake feat. J. Cole

    Best new (to me) artist: yeule

    I racked my brain trying to think of another Singaporean-born artist who has achieved critical acclaim overseas singing in English (we have quite a few who make it in Mandopop, in Taiwan and so on), but couldn’t think of another besides yeule, a London-based non-binary 25ish self-taught musician who studied fashion but also paints and streams and has a way with theatrical makeup. Their latest album, softscars, got an 8.5 from Pitchfork, and the last one got 8.3. That’s a hometown hero medallion as far as I’m concerned, and for the record I really like these records. There are interviews online that suggest a tumultuous childhood, and looking at how they’re covered in tattoos and generally act and look like someone who would give an Asian parent a coronary, I can imagine the difficulties faced growing up here were potent inputs for artistry. They also have an extremely-online underground idol type of presence, with a community distributed across platforms — I’d never joined a musician’s Discord server before this one, but why isn’t more of a thing?

    One of the things I realized this year was how the ways we as fans connect with artists we love have crossed a line, and the tools and channels we use seem to be encouraging the development of parasocial relationships. This is something that maybe evolved from Asian pop and idols, e.g. handshake events, but I believe is going to become very mainstream from here.

    Honorable mentions:

    • Kassa Overall: A super talented drummer who performs a funky modern mashup of hip-hop and jazz. An indie Anderson .Pakk? Btw I discovered the Seattle radio station KEXP while looking for yeule’s performances, and discovered a wealth of great music on their YouTube channel, as well as a ton of new bands to look into. Fortunately, Kassa Overall also played a set for KEXP and it’s — to use a term Scott Forstall once tried to make happen — absolutely blow away. And that logo with his name on all the band’s hoodies!
    • Samara Joy: Another jazzy discovery from late in the year, and possessor of an incredible vocal instrument you need to hear. Here’s her album Linger Awhile on Verve Records.

    Best album: XG — New DNA

    I waited months for the New DNA mini-album. I watched hours and hours of “documentary footage” on YouTube, following the members as they struggled through five years of frankly brutal and manipulative training under their manager Simon’s direction. I learnt all seven of their names. I watched each new single and video drop, and then watched reaction videos. I watched fancams and BTS specials (but drew the line at braving a heatstroke at their Formula 1 concert here). From the moment I first heard them in February, I knew they were different. They’ve doubled their following on YouTube since (currently with 2.41M subscribers), but I think they’re still being slept on. J-Pop groups are never this polished, and K-Pop ones are never this accessible. With every song in English and a style that effortlessly unites hip-hop, electronic, and 90s R&B, these girls deserve to be massive in 2024. I wish New DNA contained all their previously released singles, which would have made a beefier release and maybe helped them break out, but I suspect that’s just the millennial in me talking. Everyone knows nobody listens to whole albums anymore, which makes this category very sad.

    Honorable mentions:

    • Sufjan Stevens, Javelin: It was close, I wanted to call this the album of the year. Deeply moving, and kinda makes up for not having any new music from Joanna Newsom.
    • Kevin Abstract, Blanket: I never listened to Brockhampton, of which Abstract is a member, and I don’t remember his previous album ARIZONA BABY doing anything for me. But Blanket is something else. Like yeule’s softscars, it draws on 90s alt-rock to create a new sound that goes beyond labels.
    • boygenius, the record: I miss the days when we had more supergroups.
    • Vagabon, Sorry I Haven’t Called: I really need to play this more often. It’s a soulful, elastic collection of ingenious songs and the opener, Can I Talk My Shit?, is one of my favorites of the year.

    ===

    Other media activity:

    • I finished reading The Paris Apartment and gave it two stars on Goodreads. Please don’t.
    • We binged the Dead Ringers TV miniseries on Amazon Prime Video. Wow. Rachel Weisz does that incredible thing actors do when they’re bored of playing one character and want to play a set of twins. You literally forget they’re not two people. Also the bloodiest show of the year, not for the squeamish.
    • Slow Horses is back, and we’re nearly done with Season 3. It’s still very very good, and even better than the last season. I’ve only just discovered they’re based on a series of novels by Mick Herron, of which there are eight, so that’s my 2024 reading challenge sorted.
  • Week 50.23

    Week 50.23

    Christmas is creeping closer, but the Goodreads Challenge angel won’t be darkening my doorstep as I’ve redeemed myself with two weeks to go! James Hogan’s Thrice Upon A Time was the twelfth book of my year, and definitely one of the better ones. It’s a 1980s time travel story where no time travel takes place, but it grapples with ideas about how timelines are rewritten, plus some other global topics that seem quite prescient when read today. Stylistically, it’s aged, but in that classic sci-fi way I love, which takes me back to reading books in the library after school. I think those hours, that precious access back then to a ton of books I couldn’t wait to read, were the part of going to school I looked forward to most. Anyway I’ve started a dumb new book that I should be finishing this year for bonus credit: The Paris Apartment by Lucy Foley.

    If you’re looking for reading material, it may interest you to hear that I somehow managed to finish B’Fast, the AI-generated breakfast zine project I mentioned last week. The InstaZine GPT I made to create the content is also available through the same link (I updated the page with some additional usage tips today). Now that it’s done, I’m planning to make a companion breakfast-themed zine called “B’Fast (Brandon’s Version)” which will be made entirely by me, in a way that an AI presumably would not. But probably not straight away.

    ===

    Earlier this year, Hipstamatic redesigned and relaunched their Hipstamatic X app. The “X” was dropped, and they added a new social feed. It was the official replacement for their original app which became Hipstamatic Classic. Where the original was funded by in-app purchases for new filters (at a pace of roughly one new 99c release each month), the new Hipstamatic charges a $30/year subscription, doubling their income from faithful fans.

    I used the new app for some photos during my trip to Japan and mostly enjoyed the experience, but it was too buggy and the UI was still too cluttered and confusing (a longstanding problem with the original Hipstamatic app as well) for me to consider continuing with a paid subscription.

    Their main problem is that there are now over 300 filters in the forms of “films” and “lenses” and “flashes” that you can combine to make infinite looks, and no good way to make the attractive human-curated combinations they recommend accessible and discoverable. In the last version, they tried to give a few of these combinations the tangible metaphor of being unique “cameras”, each one with a different skeuomorphic body you picked off a shelf, but essentially they were presets you could call up. But you can keep, what, ten of these aside in a little drawer before you couldn’t tell them apart? And so many of the other combinations were left out of sight and out of mind.

    Now, after a week of teasing social media posts, wherein a “physical camera” was shown in videos — quite obviously a 3D model rendered in AR, but some people believed they were going to release a hardware product anyway — they’ve released a major update (v10) that tries to untangle the Gordian knot of their UX issues.

    In this new version, they’ve tried to marry what worked in the original app with a new info architecture and set of metaphors to manage the library of looks they’ve accumulated over the last 14 years. You get just ONE skeuomorphic camera to call your own and customize the look of, and this camera is capable of loading up many presets. You can either let the camera detect the scene and choose a suitable preset for it (Auto mode), or specify the preset yourself (Manual mode). There are 9 possible scenes, such as Travel, People, and Still Life, but in a puzzling and unfortunate move, when you start using the app, each of these scenes has just one or two associated presets. That means you’re going to see the same looks over and over, when there are over a hundred more hidden away in a long list. This was presumably done to allow you, the user, to customize your experience and assign your favorite presets to the scenes.

    There are two major problems at this point. One: leaving it up to the user to gain their own understanding of all the pre-existing “good combos” and assign them to 9 scene categories is insane. It’s a lot of work to hand off to a customer you hope will pay you money. The team should be doing the work of tagging each preset combo with a recommended use case, AND making it easy to assign them. It’s not currently easy. I had to move back and forth between two sections of the app looking at presets and memorizing their names to go assign to a scene, because these things aren’t placed together. Off the top of my head, it just needs an in-line list of suggested presets (from the aforementioned tagging exercise) on the same screen where you customize a scene’s presets. Perhaps this is coming. I’d argue it should have been in the MVP release of such a big redesign.

    Two: as I mentioned, there are infinite possible presets given the number of ingredients they’ve accumulated. You can make your own combos, but there’s no great way to experiment and do this — there should be a sandbox where you can explore each lens/film/flash’s characteristics and try them out in real time to find a good combo. There used to be a section of the app called the “Hipstamatic Supply Catalog” where you could browse all these effects (it was only like a static magazine, but they could have made it interactive), and this now seems to be gone or I can’t find it anymore in the maze of menus and buttons. Perhaps they’re okay with most users just using the curated “good presets” and never making their own, but it seems like a missed opportunity.

    I was feeling a mix of optimistic and bored, so I paid for an annual subscription anyway and will be trying to take lots of everyday silly snaps with this, and maybe even use it on my upcoming trip to Thailand. But if you know someone who works at Hipstamatic, please talk to them about taking on some external advice.

    ===

    • I finished watching Pluto on Netflix. It’s still a strong recommendation for me; a modern anime made with classic sensibilities and a story that really keeps you guessing. It’s also a very different Astro Boy story, suitable for people who hear “Astro Boy” and think it’s stuff for kids.
    • We started watching A Murder at the End of the World and I’m really liking it so far. Especially its star, Emma Corrin, who I’ve never seen in anything else before. They’ve got the most strikingly similar face to Jodie Foster, I was sure they were related.
    • New playlist! BLixTape #3 is done, made up of mostly new songs that I’ve been listening to since mid-October. Add it here on Apple Music.