Lost Lake could be the title of a Mary Lattimore song, but it’s actually the name of the dive bar in which we met. It’s a sharp contrast to her music: more than a little dingy and situated right on Colfax Avenue, a one-time highway that Playboy allegedly called the longest, wickedest street in America. Not that you could tell once Mary started playing; her set, drawn in equal measure from the just-released Hundreds of Days and her back catalog, was utterly transportive.

It was very difficult to anticipate what would get OMB Peezy excited. When I met him last July at a show in Denver (where he opened for SOB X RBE), he was the youngest person I'd ever interviewed; where the tendency of older artists to be completely normal people is a welcome surprise, the prospect of interviewing any 20-year-old, let alone a famous one, remains horrifying. That his first few answers averaged about a sentence in length didn't help.

Turns out that Julee Cruise, the woman on whose album the Twin Peaks theme appears, has other albums. They're massively overlooked, if not exactly instant classics. This one, released in 2002, is a compelling document of a particularly odd time, infusing that same dreamy vocal sensibility with the good-not-great jazzy drum and synth work of the electronic lounge music era.

This was recommended by the usually-reliable E. Fosl, but doesn't do a whole lot for me. The EP is a weird form for electronic music; it makes total sense for a genre in which standalone ten-minute tracks are the norm, but is just a tad too close to the appearance of an album to get away with sounding this disjointed from song to song (the ability to integrate a couple severely slammin' grooves into a totally coherent hour-long experience is exactly why I'm so high on Black Mahogani).

I found this album on a very good RateYourMusic list called † black culture ∞ - 2017; to the extent (none) that I am capable of certifying this sort of thing, it absolutely belongs. Sometime in the late 1990s (and echoing ever since, albeit in a somewhat less-inspired fashion), house people got a little tired of the whole pounding four-on-the-floor thing and decided that dance music need have no particular structure so long as it continued to draw from some sort of danceable musical tradition. There are kicks here, sure, but they're practically buried among samples from every conceivable era and expression of black music - it's one thing to try and track down an anonymous earworm from some song you heard a minute of in a mix, but another entirely to listen to a full album in which the samples feel more like in-jokes than closely-guarded secrets.

I’ve written more than enough about King Krule (real name Archy Ivan Marshall) already, I’m sure, but never about my favorite of his albums. I still don’t really know a lot about A New Place 2 Drown; it came out at the very end of 2015 and escaped any meaningful notice beyond half a day’s worth of tweeting and, if I recall correctly, a non-committal but generally on-brand nod of approval from Pitchfork. It’s one of the first albums that I considered reviewing, in those weird days where I had no venue for publication and no sense of the music writing world and big hopes about being a professional writer of some sort (both of the former are required for the latter).