This is an incredible album that has locked down an admirably-wide lane for me - slow Spanish guitar, the most sedate vocals possible from Ximena Sariñana, and no discernible cultural impact whatsoever. Omar Rodríguez-López was a big deal as a part of At the Drive-In and The Mars Volta, but a huge part of his legend was the staggering amount of material that he released in every conceivable style (and, to a lesser extent, the wildly varying quality of those releases), and it's exactly this sort of curio that keeps people combing through his discography. There's no indication that El Trio will ever reunite, and the only music that does remotely the same thing for me was made by a guy who's dead now.

At some point in my childhood, I inherited someone else's massive, space-consuming collection of National Geographic magazines - some twenty years' worth. This was not, as you might expect, the happy accident which birthed my love of nature; it was, however, my introduction to the craven commercialization thereof towards which all Earth-focused publications trend. In that sense, this trip was an inevitability - myself, two Hip Replacement day ones along for the ride, and a third making appearances in both Denver and Salt Lake City.

I can't remember the last time that a project grabbed me this immediately. It probably helps that the first track (and the fourteen following) runs its course in a minute flat, but it's not like more of any of these would be a bad thing. It's been amusing to watch people around the internet freak out trying to solve this, convinced that the simple-enough concept - fifteen minute-long raps - is a part of some greater mystery, or that there are full-length (i.e.

Kendrick Lamar is inescapable, to put it lightly. This past Sunday, I spent the morning and half the afternoon listening back through his discography, To Pimp A Butterfly in my headphones and DAMN. on at the coffee shop; Section.80 on the stereo and good kid, m.A.A.d city on the playlist at the breakfast spot with the $12 burrito. DAMN. again from a passing Subaru.

My devastating Oneohtrix Point Never anecdote is that at the 2016 edition of Moogfest I briefly fell in with a crew of four tech bros who worked at LinkedIn and were really excited about the prospect of me getting their utterly garbage band, Rad Dads, onto the radio. The opportunity to make fun of other peoples' anglo-ass names is really rare for me, and so it's with great pleasure that I tell you that one of them was named Siegfried Bilstein (I am, alas, making none of this up). Anyway, these dunces left in the middle of an utterly incredible Dawn Richard set in order to get good seats for Oneohtrix Point Never.

M. Geddes Gengras laughs a lot, and not just any laugh. He has nearly the exact mannerisms of my (and maybe your) friend Azeem.

I never got a chance to do a TMT review of this for a couple reasons, but I was gonna feel really bad if I let it go by entirely. Reviews overall were pretty positive, I think, but the album probably got a bit shortchanged by a general sense that people were afraid to criticize it rather than giving it deserved praise. I'd probably just stay quiet if I thought it sucked, but I listened to this for a month or so straight before other new discoveries started to creep in.

The only two things I'll ever identify as good at are playing basketball and interviewing musicians (since moving to Denver my ping pong skills have atrophied beyond recognition), and people know better than to get me started on the former. I started doing the latter because the god Mitch Oliver told me that I could get into music festivals for free if I identified myself as a WTJU staffer, but I felt a little guilty about doing nothing with my ill-gotten press passes. I started doing festival interviews with any- and everyone that would have me, my tendencies towards the obscure paying off for once as a startling number of my musical heroes felt, to some extent by self-preservatory obligation, that they could not pass up an interview with a large college's student radio station.