On Beyoncé's ‘Countdown’. ‘I’m so torn by this. On the one hand you have one of the most dynamic pop songs of the year. Something that roars with polyphony. One listen through and you feel like you could live in this shit, Matrix-like, deluding yourself in its universe endlessly. And on the other hand you’ve still got Beyoncé‘s mind-numbing conflation of feminist empowerment with consumerism and a conveniently male-approved sexuality.’

A software synthesizer I’d very much like to try.

‘As CD sales plummet and famed shops close, brave entrepreneurs are trying to reinvent the model. Is it too late?’

The outspoken Deerhunter frontman and reluctant indie idol talks to Larry Fitzmaurice about radical honesty, his thorny relationship with chillwave, self-loathing, and his excellent new Atlas Sound album, Parallax.

‘Jay-Z’s lyrics would work just fine in a literature or poetry class (Decoded is basically his own Norton Critical Anthology of Jigga), but that's irrelevant to this discussion because, as nearly everyone who mocked the course seemed to ignore, Dyson is teaching a Sociology course! And Jay-Z's career is perfectly suited for the study of that discipline.’

Good interview.

The elusive singer/songwriter attempts to talk about his own mysteriousness without giving any of it up and offers insights on death, comedy, and his pair of 2011 albums, WIT'S END and Humor Risk.

Counterpoint, consistency, and variety.

‘There needs to be room for music writing that’s not just about the author performing taste and making value judgments. So much of the life of music — the ways we hear it, the things we want from it, and so on — exist in a huge, complicated context, and someone needs to describe that context.’

Good interview.

‘A few years ago, before anyone knew his name, before rap artists from all over the country started hitting him up for music, the rap producer Lex Luger, born Lexus Lewis, now age 20, sat down in his dad’s kitchen in Suffolk, Va., opened a sound-mixing program called Fruity Loops on his laptop and created a new track.’ That was ‘Hard in da Paint’.

Great photos from Hallowbaloo this year, including the Baths show that I opened!

‘If we stop looking to the past, we might realize that we’re living in a golden age of music listening and discussion. The Internet has enabled more people to hear more music than at any point in human history. More people are writing about music than ever — on websites, on personal blogs and Facebook pages.’

‘One good indicator of this norm’s normalness? The main criticism you hear about this kind of record—even outweighing references to Starbucks and/or the bourgeoisie—is that it is just too dull to even bother producing any more complex indictment of it. These acts, intentionally or not, have won; they’ve taken a lower-sales, lower-budget version of the type of trip Sting once took, from a post-punk upstart to an adult staple.’

‘For most people today (9/27/2011) running a typical system, try not to go over 30,000 songs if you value the user experience. There is no doubt this will not be an issue in the future.’

‘The reaction to Jobs' death-- his full transformation into one of the era's most prominent secular deities-- reveals that we want more than anything to believe in the benevolent, progressive, and humane powers of technology.’

‘He gives us a window into his creative process and talks about several projects (old and new).’

Sabrina asked local bands about their experience with Kickstarter, including me for the ‘Gate’ EP project funded on the site.

‘LastHistory allows you to analyze music listening histories from Last.fm through an interactive visualization and to explore your own past by combining the music you listened to with your own photos and calendar entries.’

‘What other U.S. group was as good for as long?’

“This is not something I entirely want to do or say. After this year has ended, Coma Cinema will end it’s run as a recording and performing entity.”

Christa Wittmier reviewing my first Lapwing show at Kaleidoscope back in 2009.

David Goldberg reviews ‘Creative License: The Law and Culture of Digital Sampling’ by Kembrew McLeod and Peter DiCola for the Honolulu Weekly, using pieces of interviews with local musicians — noise artist and netlabel head Dominic Amorin (Uvovu), hip-hop producer TKO, and myself (as Lapwing) — as a lens into the book.

Two Portlanders who blog about their experience in Honolulu covered our Clones of the Queen/At Sea show. Very nice!

“It’s a portrait of two black men thinking through the idea of success in America; what happens when your view of yourself as a suppressed, striving underdog has to give way to the admission that you’ve succeeded about as much as it’s worth bothering with; and how much your victory can really relate to (or feel like it’s on behalf of) your onetime peers who haven’t got a shred of what you’ve won. It’s not a topic that deserves to be scrubbed up, either; there are things about Kanye’s tiresome self-involvement and moody debauchery — the way he sounds like some sullen hip-hop emperor, stalking around the crumbling gilded palace of his own psyche, muttering angrily and getting aggressive with the help — that belong in any such portrait.”

“What makes hip-hop such a durable form is its capacity to scramble fiction and fact; the artifice and the realities that art conceals or amplifies become one. In this way, Watch the Throne feels astonishingly different. It captures two artists who no longer need dreams; art cannot possibly prophesy a better future for either of them.”

“What’s worth remembering about Winehouse is not that she had some tortured inner light, or a tragic mien that made her a member of some insipid “27 Forever” club. It’s that she really could be wickedly good at using her brain and her expertise to create music that really worked. There were sad and dangerous things wrapped up in it — fatalism as a cop-out, the romance of failure and sorrow, masochism posing as bravery. But what you tend to take away is good humor, odd clarity, and flashes of actual bravery. At Winehouse’s best, she seemed more than good enough to convey those things without needing a life of tragedy to match.”

My friend Niko Rivas interviewed me and wrote up this great column on my Lapwing EP.