Coming soon: CRANCH

Martel was angry. He did not even adjust his blood away from anger.

Suggested reading: Scanners Live in Vain by Cordwainer Smith.

Front Cover | MP3s

1. Alex Chilton – The Replacements
2. Love Lost – The Temper Trap
3. Wish You Dead – LoveLikeFire
4. Fast Blood – Frightened Rabbit
5. Introducing Palace Players – Mew
6. You Go On Ahead (Trumpet Trumpet II) – Sunset Rubdown
7. Rose letter – Cocco
8. Keep Me Warm – Ida Maria
9. The Geese of Beverly Road – The National
10. Miles Davis & The Cool – The Gaslight Anthem

Don’t worry so much; things will work out.

Coming soon: You Have to Wait

Front Cover | MP3s

1. Dinosaurs – The Stills
2. Mistaken for Strangers – The National
3. I Don’t Have a God – Robots in Disguise
4. House Jam – Gang Gang Dance
5. The Prayer – Bloc Party
6. California Dreamer – Wolf Parade
7. Wintertime – Yeasayer
8. She Is Turning Into You – Snowman
9. Sing! Captain – Handsome Furs
10. Child-Heart Losers – Sunset Rubdown

The title was coined by a mouth-foaming pundit decrying the influence of “atheistic scientists and rational Satanists” on America. The phrase stuck with me – an “atheist” is just a nonbeliever, but an “atheistic” individual is a militant believer in a malevolent un-God.

These songs are spiritual, but not religious. Filled with faith and expectation, yet none of it pointed skyward. They hope to define a negative space without allowing a positive one to exist.

Coming soon: Athiestic scientist.

Front Cover | MP3s

1. Papa Was a Rodeo – The Magnetic Fields
2. Nothing Better – The Postal Service
3. Candy – Iggy Pop feat. Kate Pierson
4. Elevator Love Letter – Stars
5. Xavia – The Submarines

These songs are men and women singing at each other, not always with each other. Moreover, they are songs where the entrance of the female voice comes as a surprising revelation. They start as monologues but unexpectedly become a conversation.

I meant for this album to sound like an unfolding relationship – but now I think it’s a relationship dying, and all the tracks are in reverse.

Front Cover | MP3s

1. Memorial Address (take 2 version) – Ayumi Hamasaki
2. Candy Pop (Kid Whatever Pole Position Remix) – Heartsdales featuring Soul’d Out
3. Taste Your Stuff – m-flo
4. Signal (Album Remix) – Do As Infinity
5. GLAMOROUS SKY – NANA starring MIKA NAKASHIMA
6. STAND BY YOU – SHAKA LABBITS <3 175R
7. Dreams – SIAM SHADE
8. Kimi ga Oikaketa Yume (“The Dream You Chased”) – Gackt
9. Life’s Like a Love Song – Hitomi Yaida
10. illusion – globe

I like all of the songs on this CD. In fact, most of them I love. These tracks are Japanese pop pablum at its finest – charters, each and every one.^* But they’re also wonderful songs. My hope and intent is that, despite its provenance, everyone likes this CD. How you feel about yourself afterward is up to you.

_{*While the “Pole Position Remix” did not chart, the original did. I claim a moral victory, as well as an awesome one. Besides, nobody’s in any danger of confusing either track with the latest Forkcast.}

Coming soon: NOW! That’s What I Call Jpop

Front Cover | MP3s

1. Running Crazy – Phoenix vs. Gnarls Barkley
2. Simple X – Andrew Bird
3. 2080 – Yeasayer
4. Kids – MGMT
5. Gender Bombs – The Stills
6. Friend of Mine – The National
7. Dashboard – Modest Mouse
8. Anne Elephant – Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin
9. The Taming of the Hands that Came Back to Life – Sunset Rubdown
10. The Passenger – Iggy Pop
11. We Were Born the Mutants Again with Leafling – Of Montreal
12. Challengers – The New Pornographers

This disc began as “LA LA LA,” a mix with songs where the lyrics “broke down” – abandoning words in favor of chanting and ululating. As I chose songs, however, it became clear that there was a secondary feeling at work. That the lyrics fell out of the song not because the singer couldn’t think of anything to sing – but because, at that point, there was nothing that could be sung. This disc is the sound of not knowing what to say.

Coming soon: I’m getting nervous

Front Cover | Back Cover | MP3s

1. Parade – Hirasawa Susumu
2. Positive Tension – Bloc Party (Jason Clark of Pretty Girls Make Graves Mix)
3. We Share Our Mother’s Health – The Knife (Ratatat Mix)
4. Murs Beat – RJD2
5. Evan and Chan – Dntel (Barbara Morgenstern Mix)
6. This is Hardcore – Pulp
7. Dear Johnny – Poe
8. Tyler – Toadies
9. Naomi – Neutral Milk Hotel
10. Shut Up I Am Dreaming of Places Where Lovers Have Wings – Sunset Rubdown
11. Oasis – SINGER SONGER

“God is first, others are second, and I am third.”

All empty sets are congruent.

It meant permanent exile from God, no more and no less; the truth of this was plain for anyone to see on those occasions when Hell manifested itself. You couldn’t communicate with [the lost souls]?their exile from God meant that they couldn’t apprehend the mortal plane where His actions were still felt. Of course, everyone knew that Heaven was incomparably superior. But to Neil, the prospect of living without interference, living in a world where windfalls and misfortunes were never by design, held no terror for him. –”Hell is the Absence of God,” Ted Chiang

Ted Chiang is a speculative fiction author who has written nine short stories and zero novels over the past two decades. The first eight are collected in Stories of Your Life and Others; between them, they’ve won three Nebulas, a Hugo, and a Sidewise award for alternate history fiction. If his just-published ninth story, The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate, doesn’t win either the Hugo or the Nebula, I will be extremely surprised. Like Harlan Ellison, another short story author who’s never written much of novel length, Chiang writes short, innocuous-seeming stories that, once inside your head, explode. And the rest of your life will not be enough time for your brain to rewire the damage.

One of these stories is “Hell is the Absence of God.” I placed the whole story online for you to read, right there, behind the link. I strongly recommend it.

Nine stories may not be a lot, but it’s more than enough to grasp an author’s major themes. Chiang’s stories are driven by the idea of what role there is for people in a post-faith universe. In “Story of Your Life” and “The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate,” he seeks the purpose of free will in a strictly deterministic universe, much like Vonnegut in Slaughterhouse Five. The former explores this theme through alien linguistics; the latter, time travel and the bustling suq of Scheherazade’s nights. But both struggle with the same question: if your entire life is already as frozen as a fly in amber, why live at all?”Division by Zero” equates the uncertainty of any relationship with the unprovability of mathematical axioms. “Tower of Babylon” equates the desire to know the mind of God with the spirit of scientific inquiry–and questions whether either path has an end or use. Though his stories are written with a beautiful clinical detachment, they wrestle with the most fundamental truths of faith and purpose.

The world of “Hell is the Absence of God” is devoid of faith, but not of God; instead, He and His angels are a given, and their destructive manifestations on the mortal plane both regular and unknowable. The story, a retelling of the book of Job and C.S. Lewis’s The Great Divorce, poses two difficult questions. The first: in a world with so much suffering, how can you learn to love God? The second, more brutal one: should you? By posting these questions but refusing to answer them, the story has been interpreted as an argument both for and against “true devotion” by believers, unbelievers, and the undecided.

So what does this have to do with neurological dissociation and Chinese boxes? The core theme of the mix CD is that of estrangement. Estrangement from self, estrangment from God. In the former scenario, you cannot perceive the universe; in the latter, the universe cannot perceive you. This idea of unknowable falliability drove the musical selection; the idea that, somewhere between you and not-you lies a flaw that can never be corrected. That no matter how hard you try, there is a portion of the universe forever outside of your perception, grasp, and understanding. Even worse: you can never even know that you don’t know it.

This is not a pleasant thought.