In Support of Boards of Canada.

Also our new music breakdown for the month of February.

Read to the end for another little anecdote about my life. :)

We got a great list of new music to share this month, but before we get started, I want to talk a little bit about Hexagon Sun, the video I found about Boards of Canada. I've added some relatively ancient songs of theirs to the playlist this month, but I think it's worth mentioning how important this kind of counter-cultural force can be for the larger lifecycle of art and creation. So much of the discussion around technology right now is with AI, and I myself use MidJourney to create graphics now. So it's very apropos to talk about where these models are getting sourced from. And I think rightly so, if you are an artist who finds your work included in the massive sample sets that feeds these algorithms, you have a right to ask questions about compensation, attribution, and a longer-term lifecycle for contributing value to the ecosystem at large. Now I have to admit, that capitalism does, in fact, get a few things right; I am absolutely cognizant of the value that technology has brought to the world in the last few decades, although I try not to let that cloud my judgment in terms of things like ethics and being responsible members of a global community.

So my simple point is this: if you watch Hexagon Sun to the end, you will see a long list of modern artists that cite Boards of Canada as an important influence to their music. People like Bonobo, Amon Tobin, Radiohead, Tycho, and Solange have been deeply affected by the music of BoC, and it's the kind of value that I think a system like capitalism misses almost entirely. Just as AI products like Stable Diffusion and MidJourney haven't progressed (yet?) to the point where they understand the value of nurturing the data sets that go into their own models—where is the Open AI funded feeder program? How do these products intend to nurture the next generation of artists for their all important 'latent diffusion' neural network? I think these are important questions to ask. So anyway, this month, I wanted to give a shout out to one of the great 'bands behind the bands.' Boards of Canada deserves to be on pretty much anyone's radar that has a love of electronic music, electronic groove, and the happy nexus between drum machines and organic samples.

Artists Featured this Month

Luminous Folk Pop from Lincolnshire. - Dom Malin: All I Know

Thu, 02 Mar 2023 14:39:00 -0500

This emotional song tracks the movements, thoughts, and restlessness of someone who is weighed down with deep sorrow.Read More

Fresh Pop from NYC. - Introducing Jordan Mitchell: Too Old to Go Out

Wed, 01 Mar 2023 18:35:00 -0500

A fitting anthem for that irrepressible urge to just bring home a six pack and find something on Netflix.Read More

Big New Rock Vibes from Huddersfield. - Boxteles: Harry & Bruce

Sun, 26 Feb 2023 12:40:00 -0500

This band from West Yorkshire joins a classic, Telecaster-driven rock sound with explosive performances and a yearning to stay on tour.Read More

Fresh Indie Pop from Australia. - Savagery: Laughter

Sat, 18 Feb 2023 18:17:00 -0500

An effervescent sound that will line up perspicuously for fans of Alvvays and Phoenix.Read More

Hartford Songwriter Releases New Single. - Jake Huffman: Martyr

Sat, 18 Feb 2023 16:10:00 -0500

Written, recorded and produced at the world renowned PowerStation New England Studio.Read More

Charlie Bishop - Young Old Man

Sat, 18 Feb 2023 15:21:00 -0500

Deserves a long look from anyone searching for modern contemporaries of Zach Bryan.Read More

Oliver Hazard - Ballerina

Isabella Rosetta - 505

Arlo Parks - My Soft Machine - 06 Weightless

Arlo Parks - My Soft Machine - 02 Impurities

Emily King - Medal

Valley Queen - Falling

Luke Sital-Singh - Strange Weather

Allie Crow Buckley - Dreamboat Soulmate

Super Plage - Laurence - From_ Lisbon lux Records

Florian Picasso - Ay Papi

Jacob Lee - Easy For You

PLEEG - Still Friends

Rona Mac - Sense

Lomelda - Scaredy's World - 01 Scaredy's World (feat. More Eaze)

Dom Malin - All I Know

Boards of Canada - Aquarius

Boards of Canada - Rue The Whirl

Boards of Canada - Roygbiv

This Coast Bias - Raining On Sunday

Noah Derksen - Sanctity of Silence

Savagery - Laughter

Cinder Well - 03 Returning

Cinder Well - 01 Two Heads, Grey Mare

And now for a little story.

So here I am, finally with a minute to myself. I've been thinking about this a little bit recently and it's a little bit crazy how far I have to go back to really think of the last time I actually felt a little bit relaxed, which is how I feel right now. It might have to go back, back almost three years to when I founded the CHILLFILTR® Review back in Ashland just before COVID hit and things felt stable. Of course, that was an illusion because everything completely changed over the next couple of years. But that's how I feel right now. Again, I feel stable. I feel like things have come together. The new job is going well. I'm finally getting through a lot of the backlog of stuff that I had to get to. So mostly I'm just feeling really grateful. 

Today I wanted to touch on a subject that really comes up for me a lot, which is this… And I have a lot of these, a lot of just weird concepts that live in my brain and have for a long time and they're almost like little rules that I live by that I really don't share with anybody. But here's one that I am sharing, which is the concept that most of the mistakes that people make throughout the course of their lives—from a certain perspective, right? Just the larger mistakes that people make—often have to do with assuming people are like them. I think that's a thing that happens to a lot of people, but you have different outcomes because if you're a very aggressive person—going back to that split between architects and gardeners that I've talked about many times—if you're an architect, you're an Alpha, you're sort of ahead of the game all the time. And you can go ahead and assume that people are like you. And if they're not, it doesn't really matter because you're the bowling ball, right? And frankly, I can't speak to those people particularly well because that's not who I am. I'm oddly very much a gardener in a world of architects and I've talked about that many times. So my point is that it's a mistake that everybody makes, I think, over the course of their lifetimes. And it's really hard to get your arms around. 

If people aren't like you, then what are they like? And it opens up this whole thing that obviously you don't understand because it's not about you anymore. Maybe there's a use for just kind of assuming everyone looks at things the way you do. But let's let's give a good example because I feel like the whole concept still is probably feeling a little bit fuzzy to someone who's just hearing about it. So how do we mistake other people for us? What does that mistake look like? For instance, honesty is a really good example because if you're an honest person, it doesn't occur to you that people can lie, right? It doesn't occur to you that there are people out there that lie as a matter of course, over the course of your lifetime, you will probably get taken advantage of many, many times because as an honest person, you are vulnerable to people that use dishonesty as a tool. And then if you dig deeper into that, I think a lot of people would say, and I would agree, that it's still worth it to be honest. One of the downsides is that you will be taken advantage of. But as an honest person, the only alternative is to no longer be honest, which as an honest person is really a non-choice. You're not going to do that. 

So you can look at almost anything in life that way. That the way you attract friends, the way you interact with social media. All these things are really driven by a very intense sense of personality. And I think when you get into the mix, it can be very difficult to understand that other people are there playing different roles with a different set of values. So anyway, the only reason I mentioned that is that I've been wanting to tell sort of a separate story about this for a really long time now. And I'm going to try to say it quickly because this is already getting sort of long…

Years ago, decades ago even, I had a Wikipedia page about me. If you’d go to Wikipedia and search for Krister Axel, I'd pop up as a young songwriter and at the time I was on an MTV show as a keyboard player, backing up this girl Cheyenne, who was out of Texas. And that was a single season show that was on MTV in 2006, I believe. So I had this Wiki page and I was really proud of that, right? I've got a whole thing about leaving records for the future. I mean, that's what CHILLFILTR® is all about. And I was really chuffed, you might say. I’ve been working with some UK people and they have some interesting vocabulary. So I was chuffed at the idea that I had my own Wikipedia page and I really did a lot with it, right? I signed in every couple of months and I'd add new stuff and I had listed a bunch of different song awards that I'd won over the years. What was interesting about that time is that most of those websites are sort of gone now. There was one called Songprize that had a monthly contest and that's no longer there. And so I'm adding these things to my Wikipedia page and over the years it becomes some of those links break because the websites aren't there anymore. But I wanted to still sort of retain that as information that is basically useful. And this is a mistake that I made, right, because information is so important to me, because a historical record is so important to me. I assumed that that's just how everybody feels, and I was wrong about that. 

And the reason I know is now fast forward 15 years from that point and it's COVID 2020, the early months of COVID And I signed into Wikipedia page, to Wikipedia, and my page was gone. And I'm like, oh, I wonder what happened? And I dug in. And as it turns out, there was a user in Montreal who had flagged my page as not being, ‘newsworthy.’ And over the space of two weeks, all of two more people actually weighed in on that flag. And one person also down voted, and one more senior person refused to be on record, so they abstained. So I don't even know why they weighed in on the matter. And then that was it. Two weeks later, the page was shut down and that was it. And I struggled with that for a while because I was really hurt by that. But they get to do whatever they want with their website, and if they wanted to be run by unpaid volunteers that perhaps have a different agenda, then they get to do that. And there's really not much I can say about it, except, again, this is an example of that mistake where you just assume that what's important to you is going to be important to other people. 

And I still think that that user in Montreal was basically frustrated. He must have, he or she, must have sent me music and maybe I didn't decide to write about it, and that's a shame. They went as far as to sort of manufacture a motive, which is, again, maybe them making that same mistake, pinning their values on me, basically saying, oh, Krister must have built this Wikipedia page over 15 years just to add relevance to this blog that he built in 2018. I mean, the dates don't even make sense. The whole thing was just kind of ridiculous. 

But anyway, that's my thought for the month. It's important to remember that people don't always think the way you do. And sometimes those differences in interpretation can lead to vulnerabilities, can expose you in certain ways, and that's just something to watch out for.

Have a great month and I will talk to you in April.

---

Photo credit: Krister Axel via MidJourney

RSS formatted with CodeBeautify.org.