Damien Mannion

A re-read to be concurrent with my Mother’s reading of it. I like doing that.

A regular re-read of my favourite Vonnegut.

I have lost touch with Sigur Rós over their last few albums, but I bought tickets to see them in concert in Melbourne in May next year so starting to catch up. This will be my third time seeing them but my first since 2006 in Sydney and 2002 in Iceland.

I’m not much of a Fear Factory fan, but I have always loved this song and have recently been reminded of it. It is also tightly bound in my memory with its video clip, which is interesting because it is a pretty unremarkable (bad, even) video clip — except for the ending, from about here, which I really like for some reason.

An umpteenth rewatch of what might be my overall favourite TV show.

I really like this post Differing Values In A Team Are Costly, where ‘values’ refers to beliefs and preferences about software development.

By far the best running series on YouTube. Follows American marathoner Clayton Young (and his fellow runner Conner Mantz) as they prepare for the Paris Olympics. Great footage and great running with little theatrics or fuss. Highly recommended.

New music from Gill and Dave is always great. Highlights are The Day The Mississippi Died (in particular), What We Had (very Neil Young), and Howdy Howdy.

I bought this after reading this interesting retrospective on Stereogum. Not sure I like it all that much; the vocals are a bit angsty for my taste and it is all a bit derivative. But Jackson is pretty great.

One of the very few books that I have read that had a core idea that was deeply unsettling and properly messed with my head.

I watched a lot of the track events, which meant a lot of very early mornings. Fantastic and genuinely inspiring.

I actually like the albums by Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds before Warren Ellis had a strong presence a lot better, but there is some great stuff on the transition albums also. Particularly this one, No More Shall We Part this song probably has the most obvious Warren Ellis contribution, but also see Oh My Lord and Darker With The Day. There is also very nice violin towards the middle of People Ain’t No Good. I will need to talk more about their discography in the future.

I’ve written about this collaboration (and this song) before, but it is both great and is an excellent segue into what I’ve been reading.

As I’ve mentioned before, I am a fan of Neil Young’s music — particularly his guitar playing. I hardly know any of it though, given the extent of his discography. This was an interesting (or “innaresting”, as the book styles Young’s phrasing) biography and I learned a lot. I never knew anything about the Buffalo Springfield or CSNY stuff; I didn’t know he played on For What It’s Worth (Stop, Hey What’s That Sound), for example. I also didn’t know that he knew Charles Manson and liked his music, or that his song Revolution Blues from the great On The Beach was related to him. I’ve read some criticism about the writer being involved in the narrative, but I like it — he has strong opinions, best to be explicit about them. There isn’t really anyone in the book who comes across as very likeable (Nils Logfren, maybe), but that is probably pretty typical of these sorts of biographies. One thing I found very interesting was that Neil Young would often prefer to play and record with less practiced and technically proficient musicians.

The final in his trilogy after Plainsong and Eventide, another enjoyable book. The usual elements of Haruf’s great writing were all there.

Speaking of Haruf, this book reminded me a lot of his writing. Well, his writing reminded me a lot of this book — given that it came out well before Haruf’s writing. I wonder if there was any direct inspiration. Anyway, this had an unexpectedly Huckleberry Finn type of quality to it in parts and a degree of strangeness that I enjoyed.

Nina Nastasia came to mind recently after the death of Steve Albini, who recorded many of her albums. They are all great, but this album is particularly good (I have already talked about her collaboration with Jim White, You Follow Me — who probably plays drums on this track too, by the sounds); also see Treehouse Song, Brad Haunts A Party. I also really like the video clip for Cry, Cry, Baby (and the song, of course). Revisiting Nina Nastasia has also reminded me that I need to listen to her most recent album, Riderless Horse — its challenging backstory put me off listening to it when it was released.

I randomly put on this album and was reminded by how great it is and how I need to listen to more of her discography (I only really know this album, a couple of singles, and her songs with Nick Cave). It is the third in an outstanding set of opening tracks, coming after Big Exit and Good Fortune. I was watching Channel V a lot in the early 2000s (it was actually pretty good in those days) and I remember they had extensive Big Day Out coverage in 2001, when PJ Harvey was in the lineup. It was a bad time for concerts, with a death at the Big Day Out in Sydney that year (see Channel V’s excellent, though confronting, post-event perspective). But I remember PJ Harvey as being somewhat of an antidote to all that — here is her set from that Sydney Big Day Out.

This is from my favourite album of hers, Blacklisted, and, despite being so short, is my favourite track from it. It is a solid album throughout, but also see Things That Scare Me, Runnin’ Out Of Fools, and I Wish I Was The Moon. Her vocals are also great as part of The New Pornographers — particularly in their highlight Letter To An Occupant (particularly this part).

I feel like I should have really liked this — it has topics that I am interested in like tech and virtual reality and it was written by an author with tech credentials (including being referred to in one of my favourite non-fiction books, The Friendly Orange Glow). But I didn’t really like it, and instead found it to be a bit of a slog. I actually enjoyed the non-tech storyline in the book quite a lot more.

This was wonderful, a perfect read over a chilly and grey Melbourne weekend. I have talked about Kent Haruf before — I really enjoy his writing and characters, and this was close to the best of his that I have read. Sure, the characters are pretty much caricatures, but I find that to be enough in his work; somehow they fit with the world that is built. The McPheron brothers are particularly great.

As part of my ongoing efforts to improve my programming practices, I have been paying more attention to logging. I have just been using the standard logging module in Python and, once I have become used to its quirks, I am finding it very useful (I think I would learn a lot just by reviewing the documentation for modules in the standard library now and then — whenever I do, I become aware of so much that I hadn’t realised was there or had forgotten about). It is kind of like commenting in that it can also express intention at a particular point in the code. Something that I would really like, but have not yet worked out how to do, is to be able to have multiple ‘panes’ in a terminal window that are connected to different loggers; e.g., an ERROR logger at the top, a WARNING logger in the middle, and an INFO logger at the bottom. Otherwise, I find it hard to notice the different event types when they are mixed together. I think rich might be able to handle that (I should look more into rich in general, actually).

I am nearly fully recovered from the (rib) injury that kept me from running properly for about six weeks or so. It is great to be able to run unencumbered by anything again, other than the reduction in fitness that has occurred over the injury period. To try to quantify that reduction in fitness, I did a guided lactate threshold test on my watch on June 1. This estimated my lactate threshold as being reached at a heart rate of 163 bpm or a pace of 4:00 min/km. This can be compared with an estimate a few weeks prior to injury (April 8), which had a heart rate of 164 bpm or a pace of 3:54 min/km. According to this metric, at least, the reduction in fitness doesn’t seem to be too bad. The lactate threshold test is interesting in itself — it reminds me of adaptive methods in psychophysics experiments, where the properties of future trials are selected online to maximise the informativeness of parameter estimation. Indeed, the definition of the lactate threshold as the ‘elbow’ or ‘knee’ in a function that relates effort to lactate also reminds me of equivalent noise functions. Back to running: I think I will enter the half-marathon at the Sri Chinmoy Winter Running Festival in July. I ran it last year and really enjoyed it.

I have recently released pylater (as part of my work at MDAP), which is a Python library for working with the LATER model of reaction times — particularly for analysis using Bayesian methods. One part of this that I particularly enjoyed working on was implementing a specific figure type that is typically used in LATER modelling: where the horizontal axis is scaled according to the negative reciprocal of time and the vertical axis is scaled according to a probit transform of probability. This involved thinking carefully about scales in figures, which I had been more cursory about in the past, and their customisation in Matplotlib. Indeed, my fondness for Matplotlib continues to grow as I work with these more complex elements; see the code for details of how I used Matplotlib to implement the LATER plots.

Starting to get over-hyped, but their album Diamond Jubilee (complete with throwback GeoCities website!) is really good. It is very long and I struggle to get through it in one sitting, in part because I keep wanting to re-play this particular track (which actually reminds me a bit of one of my favourite The Mountain Goats songs, Going To Queens). I also really like the opening track. I think it will be good running music, and I’m looking forward to listening to it all the way through during my next long run.

I get very strong, and enjoyable, DJ Shadow vibes from this track — the opener from their new album, Three. I have followed most albums from Four Tet over the years (and often put them on while working), but still like his 2003 album Rounds the most. Incidentally, I get a lot of nostalgia from that album’s Wikipedia page in seeing that he used the software AudioMulch in its creation — I used to play around with that amazing software (created in Melbourne, actually) when I was a teenager. Also, I have only now realised that the album version of Unspoken doesn’t actually have a sample from Tori Amos’ great song Winter — it just sounds like it. Apparently he wasn’t able to get clearance to use the intact sample, but that version is floating around. But Slow Jam is still the best — particularly the squeeze toy.

Iron & Wine is a bit of a target for lazy inference; immense beard, acoustic guitar, varying degrees of fidelity, hushed vocals can make it easy to write off the music as trite and forgettable (for example, see this insipid retrospective of Our Endless Numbered Days from the usually-excellent Stereogum). I really enjoy a lot of his music though — there aren’t many who do ‘wistful’ better, and I’m a big fan of wistful. I lost a bit of interest in his mid-career period, but really liked his previous album Beast Epic (e.g., About A Bruise). But his early work was definitely the best (e.g., Southern Anthem, Sodom, South Georgia, Passing Afternoon, Flightless Bird, American Mouth), particularly his In The Reins EP with Calexico (e.g., 16, Maybe Less, Dead Man’s Will). I’m not completely sold on this new album (yet, maybe), but compiling these together makes me realise the strength of his overall catalogue. Incidentally, I have a vivid and excellent memory from when seeing Iron & Wine at the Manning Bar in Sydney in 2008 of him opening the show with the nearly 10-minute epic (and close to his best song) The Trapeze Swinger — what an opener.

After trying a few times, thought I’d pick this one up again after the recent death of the author. It has a lot of very interesting concepts and a Neal Stephenson-like mix of medieval and future settings. It dragged a little bit, but I liked the writing and the ideas.

I have been watching quite a few movies recently — most have been forgettable, but one that I enjoyed was Spaceman, featuring Adam Sandler in a dramatic role. When I noticed that it was based on a novel, I thought I’d give it a read. I quite liked it — it is pretty different to the movie, both in good and bad ways. I liked the Czech perspective and the magical elements.

I am injured. Surprisingly, after all this running it is not my legs that have tripped me up but my ribs — I have somehow managed to injure them (lifting my bike is my best guess). I tried to keep running as-normal for a week after I first noticed their soreness, but the soreness kept increasing. After a terrible run where I had a high heart rate for the pace and noticeably sore ribs, I visited a physio and was prescribed a week’s rest (to start with). Incidentally, it has been interesting to see my watch respond to the injury — my resting heart rate has increased and my heart rate variability has decreased notably since I first felt the soreness. Oh well, it is a good reminder to not get too attached to routine and dependent on something — and to enjoy and appreciate it while it is there.

It is challenging how much time and work in the area of research computation goes into aspects that are not directly related to the problem domain or to the technical implementation. Things like dependency management, documentation, continuous integration, tests, licensing, containers, linters, formatters, version control, hosting, etc. take so much effort and it sometimes makes me wonder how much of it is ‘worth it’. Unfortunately, ‘worth it’ is a tricky concept — I think anything that improves the correctness of code is worth it, but I think the worth of measures to increase the usability is less clear. Is anyone actually likely to use it beyond one specific invocation or context? It is further complicated by its chicken-and-egg nature, in that usability features are necessary but not sufficient for broad usage — and we are notoriously bad at predicting what will obtain broad usage. I am trying to gradually build up a suite of pre-made solutions to these additional requirements in the hope that they can be replicated as needed in future projects. However, the ecosystem around these aspects seems to move so fast that they can quickly become outdated.

Of the movies I have watched lately, I really liked After Yang (the second movie I have seen from the director Kogonada after Columbus, which I loved). I also recently re-watched the great Good Night, and Good Luck — “at least we got our facts straight, and it was brief” is an excellent aspirational quote for my research work. I really like the Fallout 3 and Fallout New Vegas computer games and I was interested to have a look at the TV series, but it was too violent for me. I was also keen to see the adaptation of the Three Body Problem book but didn’t enjoy what I saw of the TV series. I liked playing the adventure games Observation and What Remains of Edith Finch?. I was disappointed in Grand Theft Auto V (too violent; a bit of a theme) and Dave the Diver (too much like ‘work’).

One of my favourites from the new Grandaddy album, “Blu Wav”. It’s a great album overall with a very consistent sound and theme — very different to previous Grandaddy releases.

I have mentioned before how much I enjoyed hearing Will Oldham talk about the album from which this is from on the Life of the Record podcast, and it has been recurring in my mind. This is one of my favourite songs from the album, and a fantastic opener. It is also the name of an excellent café near my home — I have wondered if it is an intentional connection. I’m going to choose to assume that it is.

I’ve been listening to this song in particular a lot lately — such a good song. Incidentally, it is one of the first songs that I remember having in MP3 format and playing on my computer (in Winamp — a great music player!). There are also some great live renditions, such as this one.

The next novel in my chronological read-through of Don DeLillo novels. Sadly, another one that I didn’t enjoy. Just unpleasant characters and nothing really very interesting. I’m starting to wonder about this plan of mine. I remember reading Kurt Vonnegut saying something about how when he released what was critically considered to be a bad novel, those critics also then wanted to claim that he had always been writing bad novels. Will I no longer revere Underworld and Libra? At the moment, I doubt it — indeed, I suspect that I will view them as all the more remarkable given the low quality of those coming before.

A re-read of a favourite from my teenage years. The first third or so has held up very well, whereas the rest gets a bit mystical and pseudo-psychological. Incidentally, this book was the inspiration for one of my favourite bands as a teenager — The Mark of Cain (who are still going strong).

It is hard to read a novel that is also a movie, even when that movie is excellent like it is in this case. But I still enjoyed reading Contact a lot — interesting ideas and quite well written.

As mentioned previously, I was fortunate to be able to see Mr. Bungle live again — 24 years after seeing them play for the first time. It was a completely different show, in which they only really played from their recent re-recording of their very early thrash-based demos and some covers (setlist). Still great though — excellent musicians and they seemed to be having such fun, very infectious. Particularly great moments were this special guest and lyrical adaptation and this reunion with past Mr. Bungle members (and now Melbourne residents). It was the first show in which I have worn earplugs; a good choice overall (particularly for the openers, The Melvins) and my ears were grateful the next morning, but it did deaden the sound a bit. Also a new venue for me in Melbourne, being my first visit to Festival Hall — which was not a particularly good venue, and reminded me a lot of the Hordern Pavillion in Sydney. It was a bit of a throwback to past concerts at the Hordern in general, with metal detectors at the entry, moshing, and crowd-surfing! Not by me, of course.

Probably not quite as good as I thought it would have been, given its critical reception, but still worth playing. Not really much choice during the game, some pretty grim storylines, and limited and annoying controls. It looks pretty amazing, though.

I’m continuing to greatly enjoy working with type annotations in Python, and appreciated the opportunity to formalise some of that enjoyment into a talk I did at work recently on “Using type hints in Python”. Maybe I should be looking more into Julia (and its type system) as another language to learn properly — even though some of its evangelism is off-putting, as is its general Matlab-iness.

Rectify is a pretty special (and underrated) show, and Low is a fantastic band. This is one of the best moments in a series with lots of them, with the great characters Daniel and Tawney. It is worth listening to the whole song, too (I’ve actually mentioned this before, back when I was talking about Low by themselves). There is other good music in the show also, such as Shark Fin Blues by The Drones and We Are Fine by Sharon Van Etten — though the score became a bit too prominent in the mix for my taste in the later seasons.

Six Feet Under was a show that I regularly watched with friends on late-night TV. We were heavily into music, and Radiohead was a big part of that — seeing them in unexpected combination was great. Some other good moments from the show (each pretty overblown, as was the show’s motif) are All Apologies by Nirvana, Transatlanticism by Death Cab For Cutie, and Breathe Me by Sia (a great show finale).

I couldn’t find a clip of this appearing in the show, but it is such a good song and really grabbed my attention at the time (I had heard of the band and a few of their songs before, but not this one). “The time” was actually when I was living in Minneapolis and training for my first marathon in Austin, Texas — given the Texas link between the band and the TV show, it became my marathon theme song.

As mentioned last month, I have started working my way through the bibliography of Don DeLillo’s novels — starting with this, his first. It was different than I thought it would be, as a first novel. Denser and longer. I can’t say I enjoyed it all that much, given that the characters weren’t very pleasant to spend time with. Again, shades of great writing and precursors to topics and characters he would explore more fully later on (the advertising executive in Underworld comes to mind, in particular).

This was more like it! I really enjoyed this one. I had read it before, but liked it more this time — that I tend to get the most out of DeLillo on re-reading is something I will have to keep in mind as I proceed through his novels. Sports (particularly topical as I was reading this during the Superbowl period), nuclear weapons, interesting and memorable characters and scenes.

A very interesting book about the social, commercial, managerial, and organisational aspects of technological work. Most of it rang very true with my experiences and it provided a few new things to ponder in relation to my day-to-day work.

My use of Garmin’s “suggested workouts” to set my running schedule continues to go well. I am on track to run every day in February, which is a frequency I haven’t really approached before (typically 3–5 days per week). I like running daily — it is easier to maintain a consistent routine, and I haven’t found it to be particularly difficult to recover each day. It is leading me to some of my highest weekly distance totals of my 15 years or so of regular running (about 83 km this week).

Although I still find it to be the best way to create publication-quality figures in Python, I think it is time that I moved on from Veusz. It always proves difficult to install and it isn’t seeing much developer activity lately. I had a bit of an explore of the other options in the Python landscape, but most of them didn’t seem to be to my tastes. I will switch over to matplotlib; I have always used it for quick interactive plotting in IPython sessions, but now I will use it for more serious figure creation. It is actually going pretty well, with some new features in the library making things easier (e.g., subfigures) — this blog post has also been very useful. This has led me to create my first Python package that has been released on PyPI: pympljstyle. This is a library that applies some appropriate matplotlib figure settings depending on the journal, the figure size, and the figure contents.

I recently saw Columbus and absolutely loved it — one of the best movies I have seen in a long time. The soundtrack by Hammock was great. I’m surprised I hadn’t heard of them actually, given that I’ve read them being described as a mix of two bands that I have mentioned here previously: Explosions In The Sky and Stars Of The Lid. I’m not sure that this specific song appears in the movie itself (it is in the trailer, at least), but it is so good, and suits the movie so well (particularly when paired with the visuals from the movie in this clip), that I had to select it. I can highly recommend the movie, particularly if you’re in the mood for a slow, dreamy, affecting, aesthetic experience. I would love to see it in a cinema.

This was my favourite movie for a long time. I am a big fan of Neil Young (and need to write some more about him soon), and his soundtrack for this movie was mostly atmospheric guitar work. Except for this track, which played over the credits (I love the audiovisual congruence when the electric guitar comes in) but was inexplicably left off the released soundtrack album. Great signature Neil Young-style guitar playing.

I haven’t seen this movie for a long time (I think it might be an underappreciated Scorsese movie, like another), but the soundtrack album (Passion) is excellent and still gets the occasional listen (it is also a good album to listen to while working, I find). Peter Gabriel is an interesting character and is someone who I feel like I should be more familiar with. I remember him being quite innovative technologically — I recall a multimedia work of his being on a CD-ROM I had that was bundled with a PC magazine in what would have been the mid to late 1990s. And his duet with Kate Bush, Don’t Give Up, is a classic with a great music video.

A relatively complex work with many characters and storylines. I don’t think I fully grasped it, but I enjoyed it anyway and found it to be great in many places. It was interesting that I could identify ideas, phrasing, situations, etc. that he would repeat or explore more fully in his other works. Incidentally, I’m thinking of starting to read all of the DeLillo novels in order of publication. I’m excited by what I might find in the many novels of his that I haven’t yet read. First up will be Americana.

I had read this a while ago and felt like reading it again. I don’t know — it is nice to hear a running regimen and philosophy be articulated by a writer, but overall it felt fairly slight.

After enjoying his talk on “An Audacious Plan to Halt the Internet’s Ensh*ttification” (see my entry for December 2023), I thought I’d have a read of some of his fiction work. This was a kind of a ‘techno-thriller’, which I don’t tend to enjoy too much. That trend continued here.

I really enjoyed the Life of the Record podcast on Bonnie “Prince” Billy's great I See A Darkness album. Will Oldham speaks so intelligently and interestingly on a range of topics, and it was great to learn more about the making of the album. It also reminds me about the greatness of the Will Oldham on Bonnie “Prince” Billy book by Alan Licht. Speaking of music journalism, it was sad to see the merger of Pitchfork with the GQ magazine (?). It is not a website I visit too much these days, but it was essential visiting for me in the first decade of the 2000s (back when it was pitchforkmedia.com).

I have been having fun writing a browser extension for work. Well, I was having fun until I tried to make it cross-platform so that it not only works with Firefox but also with Chrome-based browsers. Unfortunately, I had written it for an extension API called Manifest V2 and the Google-controlled Manifest V3 has now become required in Chrome-based browsers — but without directly transferable functionality with Firefox. It will take more work to convert it to V3, and hopefully the browsers will have settled on a convention by then. But keeping it to Firefox for now is also OK.

I mentioned last month how much I was enjoying looking into the Elixir programming language, but that one downside was that it didn’t support type checking. Well, it seems that it is coming to the language! It might be worth looking into more, maybe via Machine Learning in Elixir.

A pretty typical Fiery Furnaces song: off-kilter music and Eleanor’s speakey voice and clarity of enunciation. The album on which this appears (EP) also has the sort-of-summery themed Tropical Iceland.

A great hazy mix of glitchy electronica and acoustic guitar sounds evokes a great wistful summery vibe. As does the eponymous album overall — see Shisheido for another particularly good track.

A good song about the summer heat. As is often the case for Animal Collective, the album that this song is from is inconsistent but pretty good (and has a neat cover). I’ll return to Animal Collective in this section soon.

This author’s “A Gentleman in Moscow” was a comforting read for me during pandemic isolation. Unfortunately, I didn’t enjoy this one anywhere near as much. Some nice writing, if often overly precious, but a lot of changing perspectives made it a bit ponderous and it had an oddly nasty tone.

I didn’t like this one very much either! It was difficult to put down, but I found it hard to keep track of the characters and didn’t find the storyline all that interesting.

Mid-tier DeLillo, by my reckoning. But, being DeLillo, there is still lots of great writing in it and a few standout scenes. I don’t tend to like books where there is a writer as the protagonist — it always feels a bit self-indulgent to me.

I think my experiment with using Train As One as my virtual running coach is over. Although I overall liked the platform and its approach quite a lot, I found that it wasn’t really adapting very well to my running and their marathon training plan didn’t work very well for me (low peak distances). Instead, I am now trying Garmin’s “daily suggestions”. These have been great so far, and it should be able to incorporate a lot more information into its plans (given that I wear my watch constantly). I’ll see how it goes.

Grandaddy might be my favourite band at the moment — they scratch an itch that no other band does, or even tries to. This is the first single off their album coming out next year, “Blu Wav”, and I really like it. Hopefully bodes well for another great album. I’ve also been listening lately to their recently-released album of Sumday B-sides, Excess Baggage (e.g., Build A Box). The solo stuff from their frontman, Jason Lytle, is also great — e.g., Ghost Of My Old Dog and You’re Too Far Gone.

Another band who is right up there with my favourites and is still making great music. Their album from last year, When The Wind Forgets Your Name, is consistently really good (the new bassist and drummer are great) — this track, the closer, being the best. A couple of other recommendations from that album are Alright (with a great example from about 2:07 and 3:13 of how they can lock into a groove that I could listen to go on forever) and Spiderweb (a bit of a different vocal approach for them, works really well).

I actually didn’t like his recent album titled Keeping Secrets Will Destroy You all that much — not that it was bad, just not particularly memorable. Maybe I need some more time with it. But although sharing the album name, this isn’t actually on the album (admittedly a pretty Will Oldham thing to do) — I like it quite a lot. I’ll have a lot more to say about the Will Oldham discography in the future.

Covers similar concepts to a couple of other books that I have enjoyed — particularly “The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood” by James Gleick and “The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation” by Jon Gertner — but focusing specifically on Claude Shannon of information theory fame. I found the first and last parts of the book to be rather slight and not all that interesting, but the middle section was great (probably a pretty common pattern in biographies).

I borrowed this from the library on a whim after an internet search for ‘authors like Don DeLillo’. An interesting premise (I like magic realism) and quite well-written, but not that enjoyable overall.

An interesting and eclectic book with a good spirit.

Feeling nostalgia for my first over-18’s gig: Mr. Bungle in 2000. This was at a small nightclub in Newcastle (Fanny’s, at the time), and we were pretty much the first ones into the venue. Mr. Bungle then proceeded to put on an amazing show, complete with a Mike Patton stagedive during the crescendo of Retrovertigo as the final song of the night (very briefly captured on video). This nostalgia has been brought on by the announcement of an upcoming Mr. Bungle tour — looking forward to seeing them in Melbourne in April!

My favourite song of theirs, their first single. While the vocals are the most noted aspect of The Cranberries, the instrumentation is also great—which is more obvious in live versions (I used to watch that concert a lot; it was often on Channel V in the early days of pay television in Australia). Having said that, the vocals can also carry instrumentally-sparse songs like No Need To Argue. It is unfortunate that Zombie, being somewhat trite and unrepresentative of their broader catalogue, is their most well-known song. The earnest Ode To My Family is another highlight, as is Dreaming My Dreams (and its excellent cover by Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy).

Stone Temple Pilots started out in the grunge era and were unfortunately labelled as hangers-on within that genre. They never really fit in that mould though, and they have an impressive and diverse range of great songs—this song being a particularly good example (love the bass in particular). Big Bang Baby is another ripper from that era (again, the bass), but I was most familiar with them around the time of Purple—which had great songs like Interstate Love Song, Big Empty, and Still Remains. There are some good songs on their debut too; most notably, Plush and Creep.

I have been on a below-ground kick lately. For some reason, I find underground areas very compelling—particularly the twilight zone in caves and subterranean rivers. The writing in this book is a bit flowery for my taste, but the content is very interesting. I like the thematically-similar “Underground: A Human History of the Worlds Beneath Our Feet” by Will Hunt, which I read a while ago, quite a bit more.

Very nicely written and appropriately compact, but I wasn’t all that captivated by the content and themes. For some reason it reminded me a bit of Demian by Herman Hesse, which was a favourite of mine in my early twenties (not so much anymore).

A pretty useful guide as I get back into cycling for the first time since I was a teenager. The biggest downside is its almost complete lack of illustrations.

My desktop computers are typically salvaged from machines heading to e-waste, which is fine for my mostly terminal-based interactions on Linux systems. However, it does mean that I can”t really play recent games and so I need to go back a decade or so if I want to play anything graphically-intensive. A consequence of this is that I find out about wonderful games long after they are released. My most recent example is having the pleasure of playing through Tomb Raider (the 2013 version). What a great game! Fun to play, intuitive controls, and very immersive—my fear of heights was strongly activated at many times while playing.

Does performance in running marathon distances reveal character? If so—and I think it might—I have failed that test once again. My planned solo marathon did not go to plan; I conked out at 35km and had to stop. Sore left hip and screaming stomach muscles, as usual, and bruised ribs from my vest and its water bottles—despite having trained hard this time, keeping to a program completely. But maybe I am just too quick to give up (relevant). Oh well, back to a regular training regime.

As mentioned previously, I have started cycling now that I have sold my car. I have bought myself a beautiful bike (a Surly from Minneapolis, which I take as a good sign—particularly as I used to drink Surly beer when I was there!). I’m slowly practicing and getting myself familiar and comfortable with riding again and gradually commuting to work. Happily, the cycling infrastructure is pretty good here in Melbourne—certainly much better than Sydney!

In terms of traditional albums, the album from which this track is taken—Copia—is my favourite from Eluvium. However, the single-track album Static Nocturne is great can’t-sleep music, and perhaps my favourite of all of his work. I also really like his experimentation with vocals—Similes is a great album, with excellent tracks like Cease to Know. I like the piano-oriented albums less (e.g., An Accidental Memory in the Case of Death), but they are still very listenable.

Stars Of The Lid are all about long drone-y soundscapes with interesting song titles, with two particularly great albums—The Tired Sounds of Stars of the Lid and And Their Refinement of the Decline. They are best listened to as albums rather than individual tracks, as is pretty typical with the ambient genre.

This track is a great album-length EP from a recording of a live show. As usual, cokemachineglow give it an excellent writeup. I particularly like the organic glitchy and scrapy sounds at around 27:50, which fit really well. An aside, but I’d like to go to more live ambient shows—it would be an interesting experience. I think the only one I have seen is when Eluvium opened for Explosions in the Sky. Back to Keith Fullerton Whitman—his album Playthroughs is also excellent (e.g., Modena).

Probably the best Kent Haruf novel I have read. He has a Richard Ford-esque ability to provoke unease.

An enjoyable page-turner! Though I did once reference the author’s lack of prognostication regarding the internet in a commentary on Navigating the vision science Internet.

I have sold my car and am enjoying being car(e)-free again. I am now in the market for a bicycle; mostly to commute to and from work, but also perhaps to travel around generally. I haven’t ridden a bike properly in, what, 25 years or more—so it will take a bit of time to build up skill and confidence again. But I’m looking forward to it.

I have been on the waitlist for the Melbourne Marathon on October 15, but it doesn’t look like I will get an entry. Oh well, I will run a solo marathon instead, probably along the great Merri Creek Trail for most of it.

I saw the movie The Banshees of Inisherin recently, and it is one of the most interesting movies I have seen in a long time—it keeps coming up in my thoughts. Siobhán is the best.

Starting out with the saddest one. I first knew this as a hidden track off Sparklehorse’s fantastic It’s A Wonderful Life; it then (wisely) appeared as a regular track on their subsequent album, Dreamt for Light Years in the Belly of a Mountain. A beautiful sad song about an old dog.

I’ve talked about Joanna Newsom before, and recommended this track specifically, but its dog-relevance makes me recommend it again. Sure, the opening is rather keening—but it is a wonderful song if you stick with it.

A fun one to finish with. This track is off their great sprawling epic Blueberry Boat album. I think I like Eleanor Friedberger’s solo stuff better (mentioned here before), but there are some great Fiery Furnaces songs—I should do an entry about them at some point.

Keen to see Alex G in concert in December.

Preparing and giving a talk to the Complex Human Data Hub at the University of Melbourne on my past perception research. Getting my head back into that space has been interesting.

A monster of a pop song, certainly one of my favourite song in that genre — just an all-round ridiculously good song. It also features in an episode of the Can’t Get You Out Of My Head documentary series by Adam Curtis, who I know of from the very interesting All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace documentary.

Died Pretty were an influential Australian band, slightly before my time. I know of this song from a compilation I had on cassette tape of the Triple J Hottest 100 of all-time in 1991. So many great songs on that tape, including another song that could appear in this one-off list: a wonderful, haunting live version of Tomorrow Wendy by Andy Prieboy and Johnette Napolitano.

I have heard a few Edith Frost songs, but like this one way above the rest. I also love this demo version a lot more than the more polished released version.

Learning the Elixir programming language.

Humans is a good TV show so far. An unpopular opinion, but I didn’t think The Last Of Us TV show was particularly good.

I love this instrumental and bagpipe-laden track from one of my favourite bands (if not the favourite). It captures a lot of the Neutral Milk Hotel musical aesthetic and is genuinely rousing, in a critical point in the wonderful In The Aeroplane Over The Sea album just before the closer Two-Headed Boy, Pt. 2. I think the musical side of Neutral Milk Hotel tends to be underappreciated, with Jeff Mangum’s voice and lyrics tending to take focus. I have seen Jeff Mangum solo twice (in New Jersey and Minneapolis) and both were great, but seeing the whole Neutral Milk Hotel band (in Sydney) was a completely different level of great—perhaps the best concert I have been to. I’ll write more about Neutral Milk Hotel in a future entry.

From one of Will Oldham’s projects (of which the best known is Bonnie “Prince” Billy), this is a great ramble of a live track. I love the looseness of a lot of the Palace stuff, and the album on which this track is from (Lost Blues and Other Songs) is a favourite of mine (see Ohio River Boat Song, Lost Blues, Come In). Incidentally, I am looking forward to seeing David Pajo (as Papa M), who played on some its tracks, live in September in Melbourne. The vinyl release of the record contains a poster that I used to have on my wall; interestingly, so did Nick Sobotka in the under-rated Season 2 of The Wire. That reminds me of the appearance of a Liars poster in Julie Taylor’s room in Friday Night Lights (and I agree with the Liars that Tyra Collette would have been a more likely Liars listener; and Matt Saracen, of course). Again, I will write more about Will Oldham (and Liars) in a future entry.

I find Interpol to be a bit uneven, but they can be great at their best — such as this song, the opener to their debut Turn On The Bright Lights. That album has some other great tracks also, such as NYC and The New (particularly the first half). Their follow-up, Antics, was a bit more consistent — with highlights such as Take You On A Cruise and Public Pervert. I think Wrecking Ball was the only real highlight on their subsequent album, even given that it had a track referencing the great White Noise novel by Don DeLillo. I lost touch with them after that album.

I’ve mentioned Loscil before, but there are few better musicians when I’m after some enveloping background music to accompany some work. When I recently moved to Melbourne, I was staying temporarily in Yarraville and go for runs down to Williamstown. Along the way was Newport Power Station, which has a chimney that is painted like the cover of the album that this is from (Plume) — I always used to think of Loscil as I was running by. I tend to put the albums Plume, Submers, and Endless Falls to play sequentially. The latter ends with The Making of Grief Point — a great song that introduces some spoken word that marks the end of the sequence.

Sometimes a bit of spacey bombast gives a good background, and M83 are among the best exponents of that vibe. Their songs can be distractingly great though, such as this one — and other examples like Skin Of The Night and Don’t Save Us From The Flames. They do have some ordinary songs as well, but it comes a bit with the territory they’re operating in.

Explosions In The Sky are somewhat unfairly maligned in the “post-rock” genre, but I like them and find their music good to work to when some dynamics are in order. This song is more of an example of a great song of theirs (love the drums) rather than a great working song (e.g., the presence of the sample from The Thin Red Line). I like to put on the album that this song is from, Those Who Tell the Truth Shall Die, Those Who Tell the Truth Shall Live Forever, and the albums All of a Sudden I Miss Everyone and The Wilderness to play for a few hours. It’s also worth noting their association with the great TV show Friday Night Lights.

Tool should do more covers—based on the strength of this song, at least, which is one of the best tracks in their whole catalogue. I wonder if having the constraints of an existing song might rein in some of their more excessive tendencies. This track is just great.

Gillian Welch and David Rawlings are among the best exponents of the cover song, with many great renditions—indeed, this song comes from a whole album of covers: All The Good Times (Are Past & Gone). I love the looseness of this song—does Gil not know the words and go with the vibe at points?—and the serendipitous ending of running out of tape. Of course, it is also a great song (though I don’t actually know much about Bob Dylan). Some more examples of their great covers are Hello In There (John Prine), Method Acting / Cortez the Killer (Bright Eyes / Neil Young), The Weight (The Band) (I love how much fun Gil is having in this), I’ll Fly Away (traditional), and Pochahontas (Neil Young).

I think an underappreciated aspect of Nirvana, particularly for those who grew up with them as I did, is how much they used their spotlight to draw attention to other bands through their covers. Indeed, 6 of the 14 songs on their classic MTV Unplugged in New York album (from which this song is drawn) are covers. In addition to this fantastic rendition there are others in the Unplugged session like Oh Me (The Meat Puppets) and Where Did You Sleep Last Night (Leadbelly). Elsewhere, other great covers of theirs are The Money Will Roll Right In (Fang), Love Buzz (Shocking Blue), D-7 (The Wipers), and Turnaround (Devo).

It took me a while to get into this album (Since I Left You)—it just seemed too busy, exemplified by Frontier Psychiatrist (which, while obviously great, still feels a bit out of place on the album to me). But it became a favourite once I did come to terms with it, particularly once the coherency of the album emerged (see Electricity, Radio, and Live at Dominoes for additional standouts). I liked their long-awaited follow-up album Wildflower (e.g., Colours, Subways), but I liked their most recent (We Will Always Love You) even more—e.g., The Divine Chord, We Go On, Gold Sky (which also made an appearance last month). I have always pretty strongly associated The Avalanches with Melbourne, maybe because of their link with the starting of the St. Jerome’s Laneway Festival.

This is a slow builder (see Deep Waters for a similarly great song—I particularly love the out-of-place ‘beeps’, ?, that come in towards the end) on a slow builder of an album (Ocean Songs)—my favourite of theirs and great all the way through. They also have some excellent rollicking songs (e.g., Sue’s Last Ride) and a couple of particularly great (albeit funereal) last tracks in Ends of the Earth and Lullabye for Christie. They are also excellent live! Their collaboration with Low (who appeared on this page back in July, 2022), In The Fishtank 7, is also great—particularly When I Called Upon Your Seed and their cover of Neil Young’s Down By The River.

The Lucksmiths have an extensive catalogue, but I am only really familiar with their last couple of albums—loving both Warmer Corners and First Frost. Some highlights from Warmer Corners are Now I’m Even Further Away, The Chapter In Your Life Entitled San Francisco, and Fiction; from First Frost, Lament of the Chiming Wedgebill, How We Met, and Who Turned On The Lights?.

I’ve been really into Alex G’s music lately, and this song in particular, in a way that I haven’t been with a band for quite a while. I quite liked the Rocket album and saw them on tour for it at the Lansdowne Hotel in Sydney, but this song is the standout on their subsequent House of Sugar album that stepped things up a notch. It is pretty solid overall and Cow and Walk Away are particularly good. Their album God Save The Animals from last year took me quite a few listens to get into—some of the production and choices are quite modern to my ears. Once I got over that “listener error’, it has become my favourite Alex G album. It is worth listening to as an album, but my standouts are Ain’t It Easy (especially), After All, Runner, Cross the Sea (see what I mean about the production), and Forgive.
But yeah, Gretel is the best.

My favourite song of theirs, off my favourite album of theirs—the very consistent Show Your Bones (see also Phenomena, Warrior). I also like some of their earlier stuff, such as Maps (a classic that is still great, despite its ubiquity), Y Control, and Our Time. There are also some great songs on their more dance-oriented It’s Blitz!, such as Zero, Heads Will Roll, and Skeletons. I think their drummer, Brian Chase, is underrated and one of the best around—listen to the drums in Maps, for example! They are also great live.

Released in 1967 on the great The Velvet Underground & Nico album, still sounds amazing (see also I’m Waiting for the Man and All Tomorrow’s Parties). I also really like their later albums The Velvet Underground (e.g., Candy Says, I’m Set Free, After Hours) and Loaded (e.g., Sweet Jane, New Age, I Found a Reason, Oh! Sweet Nuthin’). Their work has also had some excellent covers, such as All Tomorrow’s Parties (Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds), Sweet Jane (The Cowboy Junkies), New Age (Tori Amos), I Found A Reason (Cat Power)—and I think “Heroin’ is referenced in The Avalanches’ great Gold Sky (I have made a very big decision). This is all consistent with the great quote, apparently attributed to Brian Eno, that their first album may not have sold very well but that everyone that did buy a copy started a band (incidentally, something analogous has been my aim with my research ‘impact’—albeit unrealised).

The first track off their great The Moon & Antarctica album, which is well-worth listening to in its entirety (a couple of other standouts are Tiny Cities Made of Ashes and Life Like Weeds). Their previous album, The Lonesome Crowded West, is nearly as good (sometimes I think it is even better); e.g., Teeth Like God’s Shoeshine, Trailer Trash. They have lots of great songs on their other albums too, such as Float On (despite its over-exposure), Dramamine, Spitting Venom. Excellent travelling music.

The closing track from her excellent first album, The Milk-Eyed Mender. Her later albums would get more expansive, refined, and sprawling (in track length and number), but I particularly like her simpler early stuff—see also Sadie, Peach, Plum, Pear, Bridges & Balloons. There are great songs on her later albums too, though; e.g., Sawdust & Diamonds, Does Not Suffice, Sapokanikan. I have seen her perform live three times, each one great and memorable: in 2005 on tour with Smog, in 2007 in The Famous Spiegeltent as part of the Sydney Festival, and in 2016 at the Sydney Opera House.

The album The Glow Pt. 2, which this track opens, is best listened to in its entirety (and through headphones)—it feels especially wrong to separate it from the album-title-sharing next track. Other stand-out tracks are Headless Horseman, I Want To Be Cold, I Felt Your Shape. From their next album, Mount Eerie, I really like Solar System (careful of the loud static at the start!)—particularly this live sing-along version (I know you’re out there).

This is a great live version of one of the best songs on their very consistent () album (which was released while I was in Iceland—a great winter album). I also really like their previous album Ágætis byrjun (e.g., Viðrar vel til loftárása), which was one of the main things that made me interested in studying in Iceland. A lot of their subsequent music is great too (e.g., Hoppípolla, Gobbledigook). I’ve also seen them live a few times, and they have always been excellent.

This is from their great Finally We Are No One album (see also The Land Between Solar Systems for a great epic). It’s also worth listening to the version in Icelandic, Grasi Vaxin Göng. Their previous album Yesterday Was Dramatic - Today Is OK is also good (e.g., I’m 9 Today).

Although I liked their albums Blue Lines (particularly Unfinished Sympathy) and Protection (particularly the title track), I really loved (and still love) their album Mezzanine. This song is my favourite (also see this great live version), but the whole album is great. Other highlights include Angel (which I remember giving the bass boost functionality on my walkman a workout), Teardrop (which might be overplayed now but is still great), Inertia Creeps, and Dissolved Girl. But yeah, just listen to the whole album. I was fortunate to spend six weeks or so in their hometown of Bristol, England, a while back, and I thought about them a lot while I was there.

The Endtroducing..... album, on which this track appears, is great and worth listening to in its entirety (see Stem / Long Stem for another great track). It was my main introduction to sample-based music, and I had fun using software like Pro Tools and AudioMulch. The subsequent album, The Private Press, is a bit more uneven but still has some great songs—including what I think is my favourite song of his, You Can’t Go Home Again. The singles collection Preemptive Strike is also worth a listen—particularly the epic four-parter What Does Your Soul Look Like and the fun Organ Donor.

Continuing the theme, the whole Moon Safari album is worth a listen. They have a different, spacey, oddly retro and futuristic vibe to them—and great bass. A couple of other highlights are All I Need and Talisman. I didn’t follow them too much after Moon Safari, but they have a few other great songs—such as Alone in Kyoto.

A very important band for me at the time and one that I enjoy re-visiting. Their great musicianship, esoteric themes, and interesting video clips were right up my alley—the crudeness and edginess not so much, but that was easily ignored. Lateralus is my favourite album of theirs (e.g., the title track), and I also like Undertow (e.g., Flood) and Ænima (e.g., Pushit). I could never get into 10,000 Days, but there are some songs on their latest album (Fear Inoculum) that I quite like (e.g., Descending). A great live band, too, that I have seen a few times (four times, I think).

My second-ever concert, at the Hordern Pavillion in Sydney in 1997. Just a great band with a great and diverse sound, from early stuff like From Out Of Nowhere and The Real Thing to mid-career stuff like Digging the Grave and Just A Man. They were also an entry-point into the universe of Mike Patton—particularly Mr. Bungle, who I am also a fan of (e.g., The Air-Conditioned Nightmare). The cover art for the King for a Day… Fool for a Lifetime album also introduced me to the artist Eric Drooker, whose graphic novel Flood! was a big influence on me (and who I remember emailing back in around 1997—and receiving a reply!).

My first-ever concert! Again at the Hordern Pavillion in Sydney, this time in 1996. I was majorly into their Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness and Siamese Dream albums at the time—and still greatly enjoy them. The voice of Billy Corgan and the guitar tone are probably the most recognisable aspects to the sound, but I have come to realise that Jimmy Chamberlin’s drumming is critical—one of the best around. I’ve also grown to like the second disc on Mellon Collie (yes, I still think of it as two CDs) much more than I did back then (e.g., Bodies and Thru The Eyes Of Ruby). Perhaps oddly, I also really like the instrumental title track. Siamese Dream is great all the way through—e.g., Disarm, Mayonaise, and Geek U.S.A. (see what I mean about the drumming!).

In the midst of the hype and legacy, it can be easy to forget that Nirvana is a great band. This song is from their essential Live at Reading performance (see Cokemachineglow for a wonderfully-written review that I keep coming back to). All their albums are great, including their MTV Unplugged session—particularly the covers, such as The Man Who Sold The World. Their posthumous You Know You’re Right is one of their best; a great surprise when it came out.

I love that this is the first song on their great Dirt album—just launching straight into it! I like their different approach on their Jar of Flies album just as much, if not more (see Don’t Follow and Rotten Apple, for example). Their MTV Unplugged session is also fantastic; see Nutshell, for example (it’s cool how they enter and start playing separately—and I think the bass sound here would be up there with the best I’ve ever heard).

Their two albums from this period, Nothing’s Shocking and Ritual de lo Habitual (the latter in particular), are great all the way through. Their bass player, Eric Avery, is one of my favourites—I don’t have the music knowledge or vocabulary to explain why, but I love his playing in their epic Three Days (their best song) in particular (e.g., how his playing changes from fluid at about 5:30 to just the essentials at about 5:55 as it build up).

Their sound and tech-relatedness resonate greatly with me; their Sumday album, in particular, is worth listening to in its entirety, but they are all excellent. In addition to being a great song, Jed’s Other Poem (Beautiful Ground) has a great video based around an old Apple computer. Also, their cover of the Beach Boy’s In My Room was a COVID-19 lockdown anthem of mine.

Lots of candidates for my favourite song of theirs, but I think this (just) comes out on top. Some other possibilities are Broken Chairs, All Our Songs, Untrustable / Part 2 (About Someone Else), and Tomorrow (yeah, I love their epics!).

The entire Moon Pix album, on which this song appears, is great (and also features two of the Dirty Three); What Would The Community Think (e.g., In This Hole) and You Are Free (e.g., Good Woman—featuring the third member of the Dirty Three) are also excellent. I also really like the epic Willie Deadwilder. I’ve seen Cat Power in concert twice; once was very slick and professional but not all that great, and once was pretty ramshackle but excellent.

Signing up for another trail running race, after I enjoyed completing my first one recently (the Ridgy Didge 22km in Lithgow, NSW).

Jason Molina created so much wonderful music. Here are just a few of my other favourites of his: The Black Crow (it’s fading!), Being In Love, Didn’t It Rain, Hold On Magnolia (I think it’s almost time), Whip-poor-will (demo version), Hammer Down (I saw the light), I Can Not Have Seen The Light (do I have to be alright all of the time), Long Desert Train (never be … enough), O! Grace.

I had mostly liked their earlier albums At Dawn (e.g., the title track) and It Still Moves (e.g., Steam Engine), but this album that this song is from took me by surprise by how much I enjoyed it. It was released during COVID-19 lockdowns, and was a comfort.

A longtime favourite—her and David Rawlings at the Roxy Theatre in Parramatta in 2004 is one of the best concerts I have been to (and at Hardly Strictly Bluegrass in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco in 2010!). She has many great songs, but a selection of one from each of her albums is Orphan Girl, My Morphine, Wrecking Ball, and Hard Times.

A great winter band, from Duluth, Minnesota. They have many great songs, but this might be my favourite. See also their Silver Rider (used in an episode of the great TV show Rectify) for a similar style.

An underrated band, with many great songs and albums.

I like a lot of Nina Nastasia’s music, but I think this album (You Follow Me)—a collaboration with the great Jim White of the Dirty Three—is her best. See also the great review on cokemachineglow (a sorely-missed music website with lots of excellent writing).

I really like all of Eleanor Friedberger’s solo music, and this was the first single from her first solo album. It reminds me of Minneapolis / St. Paul, where I was living at the time it came out.

The Flaming Lips played the last concert that I went to before the COVID-19 restrictions began. It was a great concert, at the Sydney Opera House—one of the best sounding gigs that I’ve been to. This song is off the great The Soft Bulletin album.

This song has only recently made it into my ranking of top-tier Tori Amos songs. Maybe it is the odd intro, but it hadn’t stood out to me until the past year (the same thing happened with “Hey Jupiter”—it wasn’t until I saw it played live that it became a favourite). There is also a great live version of this song.

Playing through Portal 2 again. I still think the first Portal is quite a bit better.