This is apparently the more famous Cisneros work, although I was introduced to her via Woman Hollering Creek (recommended to me by Sandy at Daedalus; written about in the 6/29 Hip Replacement). Mango Street is similar, keeping up the form of vivid portrait by way of vignette but maintaining consistent narration and location throughout. I've written already about the ability of Sandra Cisneros to inhabit absolutely anybody, and that's still at play here; she's unbelievably adept at filling scenes with complete characters whose contribution may be as little as mere presence or a single line.

I was a teenager once, and more recently than I would like to admit. I was unsupervised after school, vaguely angry at… existence, and had more idle hours than I appreciated at the time. Inevitably, I found 4chan.

A little over a year ago, I saw James Blake live with Moses Sumney opening. It was a great show, and I remember both sets very clearly, but I imagine that over time the memory will blur into something like LIMBO. It's neat stuff, retaining the trademark Blake-ian fragility of voice and production but considerably more upbeat in terms of both tempo and mood.

Midtown 120 Blues is a seminal Deep House album, and is comprised mostly of delightful long-form warehouse excursions. It's also a forthrightly political work, and on two occasions features voiceovers in which the album's context is set. Given the content, it'd be a bit tone-deaf to excerpt them, and so here they are.

I’ve spent some six years of my life listening to this album in every situation imaginable, so it figures that the definitive experience would happen yesterday. Maybe it’s because I hadn’t actually listened to the album in a while, or maybe it’s hard to put myself back into the exact mindset of the era when I truly loved this thing - 2012, 2013, 2014, when I befriended at least three of you mostly because I could talk about Shlohmo for an hour and you’d tolerate it. Anyway, yesterday was far less exciting; the biggest joke of all about my job is that on the rare occasion that I do have to do any work it’s in the most hellish circumstances possible.

Jam City is a fella who made a record called Classical Curves which is widely heralded as very good and one of the decade's most influential pieces of electronic music. I've always found it pretty boring, and no one seems interested in explaining its importance in even remotely legible terms. A few years later, Jam City made Dream a Garden, a highly-anticipated and quickly forgotten left turn of a follow-up that saw him veer away from club bangers for nerds and plunge headlong into, like, funky guitar-based dream pop shit with vocals best described as ill-advised.

Apologies for the lateness, y’all - today and yesterday, I’ve been at a conference for something called DNN, which we don’t have to talk about at all. Because I’m a lazy, unprincipled shit, I offset my considerably-earlier-than-usual wakeup time with a Lyft to the convention center. My conversation with the driver, Oswaldo, unsettled me for several hours following, and I’m only now getting to this.

Truth be told, I don't often give album art the consideration that it deserves. Sometimes it seems pretty half-assed, or sometimes it leans heavily on an overused aesthetic, as is the case here; rarely, however, does indulging in that aesthetic render all other attempts to do so obsolete. The cover of Restless Idylls is an utterly perfect encapsulation of the album's sound - baroque, of a time that you're happy not to be in, and more than a little spooky.