There are more things to look at at here.
I’m going to get in trouble because I keep working on new music when I’m supposed to be doing other stuff.
Today I’m putting checkmarks next to these songs in my notebook:
Tammy, Tammy
Zhivago
Eyesite
Up next: Phil Collinz and Commitment
Ryan Leslie “All My Love”
R Les’s second album of the year, a record of straightup baby making music start to finish.
I did this cover last summer, right before I really started working on my record. Making it lit some kind of spark in me. I wanted to put it out on BULBZ but Moodgadget talked me into leaving it for the new Ghostly International Compilation of Moodgadget artists. I’m psyched to see it come out finally.
I’m watching the Scott Walker documentary. Really love this Camus quote on the back of Scott 4:
“A man’s work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened.”
I’m already obsessed and deep with the next record. My old friend and axe-murderer Arun Bali stopped in the lab today to put down tracks. This solo on “Tammy” makes me so happy…
Writings of light assault the darkness, more prodigious than meteors.
The tall unknowable city takes over the countryside.
Sure of my life and death, I observe the ambitious and would like to understand them.
Their day is greedy as a lariat in the air.
Their night is a rest from rage within steel, quick to attack.
They speak of humanity.
My humanity is in feeling we are all voices of the same poverty.
They speak of homeland.
My homeland is the rhythm of a guitar, a few portraits, an old sword, the willow grove’s visible prayer as evening falls.
Time is living me.
More silent than my shadow, I pass through the loftily covetous multitude.
They are indispensable, singular, worthy of tomorrow.
My name is someone and anyone.
I walk slowly, like one who comes from so far away he doesn’t expect to arrive.
It’s like I paid this person to say these things:
Daniel Johnson’s career in electronic music started with Bulbz, a record Daniel used to teach himself how to use the Logic sequencer software. He must have finished the manual by now, because here’s his debut full-length, Lazrus finds Johnson fulfilling a similar role to that of Deastro on his recent Ghostly International album, Moondagger, re-contextualising conventional rock band-type songwriting dynamics within an agile, yet not excessively overblown electronic production. While Johnson starts off with a grandstanding piece of bluesy electro-rock on ‘Heart Of A Dog’, by the time he reaches ‘Goodbye Silhouette’ he’s closer to the sort of preppy electronic bubblegum heard on the Discovery LP. There’s plenty of depth in these songs though, and there’s never a sense that Johnson’s falling into the customary Postal Service-copying traps. Even the most stripped back and revealing songs like ‘Hard Core’ and ‘Devil’s On Our Side (Don’t Be Shy)’ work out favourably, suggesting that this is an artist who’s a proper writer rather than merely a singing producer/programmer.
