I feel like there's something that Warp Records is looking for when they're signing a new artist. It's often said that the label's philosophy is to produce 'tomorrow's classics' (and enormous forward-sightedness is true of many of their artists), but 'futuristic' is a label that probably fails to do justice to the latest album by American hip-hop producer (and more) Steven Ellison, a.k.a. Flying Lotus. In the same way that Warp labelmates Boards of Canada or Squarepusher achieve in their music what could be described as a remix of history itself (often drawing influences from jazz, 50s ballroom music and even the corny synthy music of educational nature videos), Flying Lotus scans the vast global musical tapestry of the 20th century's and filters it through the lens of the 21st. The result is Los Angeles, Ellison's second album, and in my opinion a really fluid, dynamic and scintillating work.

Los Angeles is at once an album of contrasts: the opener, Brainfeeder, features a full bodied synth melody (so scifi you can practically see the spaceships spinning across the sky) against the scratchy vinyl interference of one of your grandad's old records, two completely incongruous elements which work impeccably well together. In fact, the pops and clicks of vinyl is a sound that continues across the entire album, an idea which, while could be criticised as an easy method of giving an album a certain vintage quality, never falls to the level of gimmickry. Ellison's use of this lo-fi aesthetic is instrumental in selling some of the album's best ideas, from the gorgeous atmospheric drum ceremony in Melt! to the swaggery chillout in Golden Diva.

Flying Lotus's talent also lies in his ability to reimagine and invigorate old sounds which have the danger of sounding kitsch to modern ears. Testament, with its impassioned vocals and deep cello plucks is a beat-driven track in the style of 90s trip-hop (arguably with the same cabaret flavour as Portishead). GNG BNG on the other hand is like a corrupted throwaway beat experiment from the 80s hip hop archives, what with its decadent use of sitars and xylophones; but then, when the hyperactive snares and peaking synth kick in,  transforms into the sort of electrorock Air might have been making circa Moon Safari. You might not feel like the sounds on Los Angeles  are alien to you, but there's no doubt that you'll hear them in a completely different way.

Aside from the retro stylings, this is an album where Ellison really showcases his talents as a music producer. His brand of slippery, syncopated beats don't lose their edge or run out of steam at any point on the album, and there's enough broadness in his musical scope to always keep your attention; the beats and sounds in a track like Camel sound incomparably different to that of the brooding Riot or uppity Sleeping Dinosaur, but they all match each other in idiosyncracy. Overall, Los Angeles matches fascinating ideas with inspired execution, and not only is there something new to discover with each listen, it's endlessly enjoyable to listen to.

A feast for the ears and the brain: 8.0

2008 is probably high time for a new watershed in electronic music. For a genre that is usually where people look for musical progressiveness, retrospectivity has been the name of the game for quite a while now. Justice's 2007 full-length Cross reimagined disco with its robo-glam beats and low-fi synths, while albums from both The Presets and Digitalism brought a rock philosophy to a new brand of abrasive, muscular electro.

As far as musical retrospectivity goes, the burgeoning chiptune scene has it in spades, and it could just be the watershed we're looking for. Using the 8-bit noises from 80s video games immediately sounds to me like a great idea- in all honesty there is something totally fresh about the sound. Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that video game music history cannot be separated from its electronic origins; while rock and jazz have a illustrious social and musical history behind it, game music was born as digital notches in Japanese consoles, and stands as such an alien and completely recognisable sound. It's important to remember that the music in landmark games like Super Mario Bros. serves a completely different purpose to concert music. Game musix is  composed to directly complement a narrative, unashamedly forcing an emotional reaction in the listener; its the domain of the victory and the death theme, the ominous brooding tune when you enter a dark cave, and the euphoric melody whe you pass a level. With childlike innocence it wears its every emotion on its sleeve.

But is chiptune that watershed? Despite its appeal, as it stands right now its pretty inaccessible, as it can't deliver a lot of what makes conventional music fun. Try getting a thumping bassline or ascerbic, IDM-style beats out of a GameBoy. What chiptune needs is a showcase album to demonstrate its merits without letting it miss the mark of enjoyability.

Crystal Castle's self-titled debut is that album. Having gained attention from the mainstream for the appearance of their single 'Alice Practice' on the British teen drama Skins, Crystal Castles have shown that they can craft totally original, devastating chiptune dance pieces with complete emotional honesty. 'Alice Practice' is a video game firestorm, with martial beats against a highly layered synth melody, made all the more compelling (yet tortuous) with the banshee vocals of Alice Glass. It sets the pace for the rest of the album, with other fantastic dance efforts like 'Xxzxcuzx Me' and 'Love and Caring' driven with the same powerful bass and hyperactive sample melodies.

But even during its many slower moments, Crystal Castles never runs out of steam. The playfulness of 'Crimewave' (featuring noise band HEALTH, a recent collaborator with the duo) and 'Untrust Us' is a joy to listen to. The second single 'Courtship Dating' superbly executes the band's many meritable ideas and is probably the best electronic song I've heard since Simian Mobile Disco's 'I Believe'. I was happy to hear (what I thought was) a bit of Aphex Twin influence, not just from the masterful intricate beats, but also the casual melodies on songs like 'Magic Spells' and 'Knights'.

Crystal Castles has also gained attention because of the interesting persona of its vocalist, Alice Glass. She is not a ubiquitous presence on the album, but her turns in 'Courtship Dating' and 'Good Time' make her one of the most interesting vocalists to listen to, up there with Bjork and James Murphy (of LCD Soundsystem). Vocals on what is essentially an album of video game music may seem heretic, which may be true, but here they can't often be distinguished from the music itself. The alien, animal-like calls and chirps in the fantastic 'Air War' is another example of a bit of a trend in music at the moment: vocal alteration (see Bloc Party and Battles). The vocals in this album never go against the grain but always make it something special.

There is a danger for an album like this that the use of video game sounds would be gimmickry; it is often true that the use of a distinctive and not-often drawn upon style of music is jumped upon by an artist in an attempt at originality (see Venetian Snares' Rossz Csillag Alatt Szuletett, a drum and bass revisitation of 19th century Hungarian classical music). This is not the case here at all: this album could through and through be mistaken for video game music, as it embodies all the emotional honesty and innocence of the game music philosophy. But even forgetting its chiptune flavour, Crystal Castles is simply completely original electro, filled with lots of new and interesting ideas, and turning its influences into something fresh. Most importantly, its awesome to listen to.

9/10, and i can't wait for more.

• Uni is great, if not somewhat disorienting. Aside from the obvious differences (the throwing off of the constraints of high school, the lawn-chilling), what excites me most is (at least in Arts) honing your critical edge simply requires you to read as much and as widely as possible, and in all the areas that take your fancy. This appeared to me an enthralling and comforting thought, that my course would lend itself to an understanding of the greater world, rather than the acquisition of a repertoire of specialised skills. This leads to the other side of the coin, however; uni has brought to me a whole range of new fears and anxieties as well. Managing an array of friends to fit in with my time is not looking easy. Who I actually want to be friends with is harder still. As far as academic work goes, it's all well and good that an Arts degree will rely on some participation and observation of culture, but my greatest fear is what, during my traversal of the course, I'll leave behind. I already reckon I've lost a hefty amount of literary vocabulary, a lot of it having atrophied over lack of use; it doesn't pay to be eloquent if you don't want people to resent you. I can sacrifice smart for cool- at least, I can be a different person when I'm alone. But different identities are like managing a pack of dogs.
• Do we fall in love with someone's personality or their sexuality? I know a person who is in a relationship with someone of the same sex- that partner had been married and had a kid. What about a person who is attracted to the same sex but still wants (genuinely, irrespective of outside influence) to be in a loving relationship with someone of the opposite sex exclusively? Is it because while they are sexually compatible with the same sex, they may be more capable of a long term relationship with the opposite sex? Could this work the other way round?
  Not that I pretend to have all the answers, but personality has to play some role in who we fall in love with. What I don't know is how sexuality intersects with this. Think of a functioning, organised married couple ten, fifteen years after they were wed. If they're still happy to see each other when they come home from work each day, if they still sit in front of the TV with their kids, can they have forgotten about when they were rampantly hungry for each other more than fifeen years before? Or do they still need to want to have sex for the marriage to last the years?
• I tell you what, I can try to deny it, but I fucking love games. Books and stories rivet me, movies engross me, music entertains me, but games transport me. I just got a 360, I've been playing Assassin's Creed- it's brilliant. Its another one of the games I might consider adding (but it'll have to work hard) to the list of the games that I can honestly say have shaped the way I am: Metroid, Zelda, Morrowind, Donkey Kong, Resident Evil, Alice, Secret of Mana, Illusion of Time. Games can reach majestic heights of narrative brilliance, create completely immersive spaces and concepts, and provide truly vast opportunities for the individual and the collective to explore and have fun. I don't think games are a corruptive media form, I don't think they foster moral decay. I think they're art, with all the new-millenial potential as hypertext and viral video. So go play.

• I've never had much exposure to highly genderfucked people, but when I watched Chris Crocker's video about Codependency I had a pause for thought. While its no secret to myself that I crave validation and that I can feel very weak without it, I didn't consider whether this was indicative of anything more than a little negligible personality trait. But do I fail to love myself? Probably, and its very much my custom when i'm feeling down to bolster myself with unrealistic and narcissistic fantasies of being famous, or revered, or powerful- rather than just being myself. Which is why today, when I walked away from work after a day involving an altercation with my colleagues and no less than a heated argument with one in particular, I was shocked that I walked away, not embarassed, not regretful, but embolded by some sense of solidity or identity. Today was the first time I thought that I was all needed to be happy.
• Do you want to know what the altercation with my colleagues was about? A drunk man came into my work, he ordered some coffee and sat down, and then couldn't hear us when we called it out for him, and when he did he staggered up and took it, offering to pay for it although he already had, and seeming not to hear our responses. He lurched around his table and looked like he was going to fall, but he didn't. Anyway, the police rocked up- some customers had called it. I was furious- this man wasn't bothering anyone, he didn't smell, he wasn't doing anything unlawful or even offensive. However, what he did serve as was an ugly blot of poverty on a consumer heaven horizon, which obviously offended against the ettiquette protocol ettiquette of some idiot, whose sense of social justice is so far up their ass it's broiling with their latte. It ended with me arguing my case, no one really being convinced by it but arguing back all the same, and me feeling only a little bit proud for not backing down on my opinions. I got on with the workers after that, so I guess I've got away with not suffering for my opinions.
• Right now I'm not academic. But for magical intervals during the day my mind is livewired.
• My favourite symbol of the moment is a medicross. I'd love it tattooed somewhere on my body where you can see it- somehow, deep down, there's a medibot in me, who was engineered with the duty to heal.

• Money makes the world go round. Does it make your head go round too? I'm sure that the cashed-up middle class soccer mums who come in to me for coffee don't think money drives their existence, but when I look in their eyes, one after another, each of them breaking a $50 dollar note to pay for a $3.60 cup of coffee, I see differently. These people stroll round the city in a state of respectable, fashionable cleanliness, daydreaming of yachts and horse races. They chat about their mortgages and credit ratings with their best friends on their glittering mobile phones, and see the world in utter technicolour grandeur: pink and orange cosmetics, gold and silver Guess bags, green and blue AMEX cards. They mutter a coffee order, get pissed off with you for asking them to repeat it, and then won't look at you when they're handing over their money. You hand their coffee to them, and fifteen minutes later they will come back, complaining that the coffee is warm. We'll make it again, but drink it immediately this time, you plastic slab of filth. If you spend your time harassing hospitality workers for contributing to a momentary dip in the state of absolute fabulousness that is your life, then I can tell you're not thinking about Sudan, China, or Cambodia. And every time one of you rich sluts pays out a passing Aborigine I would love to remind you that its in their place that you're living the good life, and at their expense that you are rich.

Blog entries are difficult to do when you're in transit. It's sort of like writing in a moving car- your knee keeps wobbling and the pace is too fast to think. Blogging what I think and believe is difficult when what I think and believe becomes blurred. Maybe blurred is the wrong word; maybe the right one is fragmented. I'm like a fly, I have a million hexagon shaped incongruous images of the world, and being in this isolating state of mind seems to make your personality some kind of temporary construct within your body, which acts as an empty carrier. If you talk about personality as a list of traits, I couldn't produce a list of traits for you. If you talk about 'liking' things such as sports, books, and music, then I couldn't definitively tell you what I 'like'. I could tell you what I'm between, what I'm above and what I'm beneath. I could tell what I avoid. I could say I craved fame, and achievement, and that I feared disappointment and failure. But otherwise I'm rather adjectival; meaningless without context.

• I'm stronger now. Not too long ago I was so self-conscious that walking through my high school's front gates used to make my legs turn to jelly. In fact, walking is actually a major source of self-image anxiety for me; after all, a proud, badass strut emotes power in a way that's almost unattainable in any other way- case in point, The Matrix, Kill Bill Vol. 1 (Oren Ishi-i and her assassin entourage). But right now you might be glad to know that, even though I'm not there 100% just yet, I'm reconciling myself with a lot of things that used to cause me stress. I'm pretty sure I'm aware of the power that self-acceptance gives you (although I don't think I've quite abandoned my quest for the most supreme badass strut just yet).
• I'm now officially a Law student. Admittedly less than fortnight ago I was shitting myself at the prospect of studying something as academically titanic as Law, I have to admit I'm liking the idea. Law is not something that exists on a quantum level to society, rather, law is society, and the way that people interact and live with each other today is wholly contingent upon the system of rules that exist to control them, and the systems of rules that shaped the history we've inherited. That said, law is not just the study of rules; it's the study of justice and morality and their interpretation, practice, and morphology. Law is also something with a huge historical legacy of information, the thought of which is nothing but tantric for someone with infowanderlust like me. So whether or not I make it in the discipline, there is my little chunk of justification for at least giving it my best shot.
• I fell in love with systems a long time ago. Systems are mathematical, political, cultural, legal, scientific, administrative, cybernetic, semiotic, and more. Systems are composed of inputs and outputs, connections, links and threads, communications, transfers and processes, efficiencies, production. Systems can be explored and manipulated. Emergence is a term denoting the automatic manifestation of complex systems in nature, like beehives and termite mounds, natural ecosystems, and gigantic superorganisms such as the Great Barrier Reef. Computer systems are controlled with C++ programming, robotic systems with electronic engineering, employee systems with human resources, citizen systems with public policy.

Environment demanding change.
Fuck what’s real: retinas trip heavy
Down on gaudy kitsch, at items in
Anachronistic violence feeling surge and bliss
in colourstream, multiply
and take on form, amber dream,
Sucrotic juice, turtoxic vice
Tchaikovsky screaming fire and ice.

I live in neuropolitik,
In biochem and haute couture,
Taxonomy, the Western Dream
political economy.
In time does come the past again,
it never ends, it oscillates
through trivium, so life is great
And all that lies within our fate

Is drinking starlight mercury
in Aquitaine Shinjuku drone.
Breakbeat Magisterium
Come pounding beats, erratic grace.
“That bulletin on MySpace
was the blood of angel circuitry.
In heavens glowing high and bright
are angels breathing datalight.”

There is nothing that can make your mind more interesting.
It's impossible to actively achieve depth.
When your personal experience is lacking you have to turn to that ball of light splinters, the imagination.

Invention: neurocartography. Converting the intangible dimension into the second. Giving weight and depth to that which has none. Drawing links between node coordinates in mental Cartesian space.

Thesis: an organic supercomputer has limited memory but can run programs. The brain runs few programs but has a expanse of memory second to none.

Field: Meta-alchemy. Substance interaction. Cultural noise. Social acidity/conflict/turbulence. The relationship between the human and the object: the computer and the brain, the electric and the neuroharmonic.

In a peachflower forest on the north coast lives a city where people decided to do things right. In natural ecosystems energy enters as light and leaves as heat, and matter cycles from biotic to inorganic. The people designed buildings to grow inside and around trees, and for electricity to pulse green, shooting through axelsynthetic veins up oxygenated skyscrapers, cool and light, filled with artesian air.
400 years prior to this, a young man lives in an apartment in static altitude space, and enjoys its insularity, its closedness, but happy that he can slide the windows open once in a while. Two bridges away, there is a skypark full of ponds and lotus flowers. Noise is all around him, loud enough to assert the presence of the population, soft enough to allow for the delusion that they're very, very  far away.

• Ephemera is printed paper that exists for a moment in history and then dies. This includes party invitations, flyers, business cards, receipts, advertisements handed to you on street corners. When ephemera is removed from its momentary relevance in space and time, it becomes an anachronism: a chronological error, a faulty intersection, a historical fuckup. In fact, the word ephemeral means fleeting, momentary, spontaneous, dying quickly. Ephemera is the dynamic omnipresent spirit of the paper world that is constantly moving: capture it and try to keep it, and it vanishes into (paper)thin air.
• Broaden your definition of what a text is. Texts have text (novels, poems, non-fiction), and they also have no text (plays, movies, songs, pictures). Texts don't need to last forever; like ephemera they may lose their relevance but we still have that insight into the moment of time when they still had it. These days ephemera doesn't quite dissolve into nothing as easily: MySpace comments, spam email, banner advertisements; they're all data ephemera, and I think a lot of people would agree you can learn quite a lot about a person from looking at their MySpace comments. Text is the noise of a culture: noise made by people doing, being, living, consuming, producing, interacting and engaging with other people. Literature is a textual manifestation of society, as is music and art, and inevitably the language-on-paper that a society generates. Noise is in the moment, but an echo in theory lasts forever.

  Well, this little post-mocks mini-holiday has certainly taught me a lot about myself: namely that I need people around me to stay sane. I'm serious, I've been alone for a week and I'm losing my mind. My attention span has vanished: I've walked from one end of the house to the other, doing something for fifteen minutes then getting bored with it, doing something else, getting bored with that, then just ending up lying on the ground. Bored. The minutes seem to fly away, but the days feel so long: there's a sense of both transit and inertia simultaneously, moving but ending up in the same place. My mouth gets dry and my body gets lethargic.
   Ironic that I should go out of my mind in the absence of people and then get neurotic when I'm actually with people. It's that diametric genetic conspiracy I was talking about: my mother's genes force me to crave people; dad's, on the other hand, tell me to run away very fast.

Let's talk about university.
    Knowledge is the business of the academic. Do we have an 'academic identity'? Do we identify ourselves by the knowledge that we have come into? When I finish my university degree, will I be a arts scholar or a scientist or both or neither? When people ask 'who are you?' are they really asking 'what do you know?' The idea of being in a brain-damaging accident and losing all your knowledge is very disturbing to me: so my personal answer to the general question above is yes, what I know is very much a part of me. Sometimes I love the idea of knowledge being my life: I have a very steampunk, feudalistic image of scholars in my head, all conducting experiments with scales and alembics in huge gothic castles on mountains, discussing philosophy and quoting verse from The Politics, in huge Greek style amphitheatres beside big European forests and big stained glass cathedrals. In a big way I want to live a glamorous intellectual life, waking up with coffee in the morning to read the New York Scientific Journal, walking into my little atelier in an apartment in Hong Kong, where I have bookshelves reaching up to the ceiling. But that's all aesthetics: being a type of person is more than looking like you're that type of person, no matter how many gothic castles full of libraries and laboratories (or apartments in New York) you live in. That's me though: life is in the performance. Perhaps, for me at least, what you look like is who you are (which is why being able to change your face through the internet gives you near-unlimited control over your perceived identity).

I can be a scientist.

I can also be a writer.

And I reckon I'll have fun doing both.

(pictures courtesy of ninive from deviantart)

• Data is not information, or so my 'experience design' art book tells me. Yet data is the currency of 21st century meaning. You don't need to talk to someone every day to really know them: all you need is access to the data they generate. Look at their credit card payments to see  what they've bought, hack into their home security system to see what time they come home on friday nights, count their top twenty most frequently used words in email and MSN. Its possible, if you have access to public CCTV files, to collect all the photographs containing a particular licence plate number of a car travelling down a major highway and build a mathmatical map of everywhere a person goes, how often, how far. There are cameras all over canning highway and any major train line: use an algorithm to recognise a certain license plate and all of a sudden, you don't need bushes and binoculars to stalk a person. Forget biotechnology: if there's one way that computers are really going to become part of the human consciousness, it is our propensity to create numbers in whatever we do: we are living, breathing, multiecheloned data structures in moving flesh and blood.
• In history there is continuity, and there is change. Continuity is how the democracies of ancient Greece still exist in a theoretical sense in the global roundtable, and how consumer goods are still the line between who has something in society and who doesn't. Change is in the way black people were once slaves to the way they are on the covers of magazines, our heroes and idols. Change is in the way art deco New York made 'up' the new direction for urban development. A revolution is change: but a revolution has a lot to say about continuity as well
• In terms of voice, our generation really doesn't know how lucky we are. With access to the internet there is absolutely no interest we have that we can't satisfy. This is good and bad. Every kid with a thirst for knowledge can look up 'astrophysics' and 'chinese literature' and 'japanese nihonga art' and let their mind wander for hours. In the same way, any lonely teenager doesn't have to look far for a ways to test if a noose is going to break under the weight of your hanging body, or how ingesting less than 500mL of ammonia will slowly but very noticeably kill you one screaming nerve ending at a time. In years gone past, people had to go to Paris and New York and look for months to find a whole underground subculture of artists and poets that listened to avant-garde neo-fuck post-rock jazz music, but who didn't have a problem with wearing Von Zipper: these days its as simple as tribe.net. Go log on to Yahoo! Groups right now and type in "I like fucking cats with herpes" and you will find a whole clan of people just as fucked up as you.
• One day I will write a scifi epic and I want the world to be ready.