[satiemaniac]

My window had to stay open all night. Seems that, like my native Las Vegas, New Orleans likes to dish out summer just as the first gasps of warm spring air start to push off the volatile winters. Everywhere there is a palpable musk - beads of sweat don't drip but stick. Hair is contorted by its own moisture and shirtless bodies are the only ones that find sleep when the absence of the sun does nothing to diminish its hostile energies. Having spent my weekend experiencing hell on earth in the form of a perpetual hangover simultaneously warded off and compounded far too often by all manner of beverage and illicit substance, I awoke today essentially braindead, with no motivation to make my first class which is at the unbearably early hour of noon. I was going to wake myself up a bit with Napalm Death, but my roommate is out, so I won't have his artisan coffee to get me jittery enough to appreciate their particular method of arousing alertness. Instead, I decide to put on commiserators, people who understand the excitement and malaise that come in equal parts with such thickly heated air.

Animal Collective's Sung Tongs erupts from "Leaf House's" very first electronic sound's descent into an incredible hymnal and I know I've found my aural home for the next hour or so. What's incredible about Animal Collective, and I've discussed this, as I'm sure everyone has, to death, but what's incredible about this fucking band is that they manage to create the warmest, most "stripped-down" feeling vibes by the most maximal production possible. There are always new melodic niches to explore and new things to make your heart swoon. Don't like a particular direction? Don't worry, it'll go away in about five seconds. There's a titanic feeling here that is really unassuming. Where Arcade Fire wants to win you over with bombast, Animal Collective just let themselves get away from themselves. The album keeps going on and I'm sucked into the energy as rapidly as I've been sucked in by an album lately. "The Softest Voice," right on queue, serves as the comedown, a track where these impassioned, simple lyrics are put behind a deafening wall to... what? protect the vocalists' tender hearts? I'll take it as that for now. This arc of recovery and occasional sublimity after the raucous first tracks is exactly what I needed. I could keep typing and bore you more, or I could let myself fall in. I think I'll do the latter.

[satiemaniac]

The day didn't go by too badly today. I had to spend an inevitable couple of hours in class being increasingly bored and restless (a difficult feeling to suppress when I have about three weeks of actual class left before summer) before being pleasantly surprised by a coffee date proposal. My day went pretty fluidly from there. I spent time wandering around Oak Street with the girl who invited me out before meeting with friends in the park for a couple Js and relaxation. I spent some time in meetings for a campus organization dealing with social justice and yadda yadda yadda. Now I have about a quick thirty minutes to hear music before I'm off to the next social obligation I have. Since my mood is pretty complacent and in need of some picking up, I decided to patch my psyche with some poppy EPs.

First up was what I would probably consider my favorite EP ever, Trixie's Big Red Motorbike's Peel Session, something that may or may not be a bootleg and thus will never get its deserved place at the top of a future custom chart. It's eleven minutes of the band at their best: stripped down, twee guitars with perfect female vocals and yeah about what you would expect but done way way better than can be described. An obvious highlight for the carefree, blase attitude of the recording would have to be the brief intro on "Norman and Narcissus" where, with an exaggerated accent, one of the Trixies expounds, "Hold it fellas hold it. That don't moooove me. Let's get real real gone for a chaaange" before the band gets into this really wonderful swing. Hard to come up with an appropriate way of expressing this at this time of night but listen to it. Real real good stuff.

I then decided to shift my attention to an EP that I had been recommended heartily on RYM. My first experience with it the other day coincided with my left earbud deciding to randomly fail, so I missed its last couple of tracks due to a continual struggle to tell if it was my file or my earbud that was the issue. Anyway, Christine Delaroche's La fille du soleil is a decidedly darker, sexier work than the Trixies EP. Everything about it screams the coolest elements of Ye-Ye, from crazy piercing guitars to smoldering, smoky vocals and beyond. A record of contradictions, being very accessible but also detached in its coolness.

To wrap up my listening (possibly for the day?) I decided to give a quick spin to powerviolence EP Peter Mangalore's Decay of the Iron Man to bring me full circle to something related to the kind of fast-paced, freak-the-fuck-out music that I was craving in the morning. The EP clocks in at about five minutes, and it's chock full of chugging guitar lines and drums overlaid and complemented by spastic, punchy screaming vocals. The perfect alternative for a contrarian like me to "Turn Down for What" before a night of frivolity.

OK, in all honesty, I spun DJ Snake & Lil Jon's "Turn Down for What" before I left. That song is actually pretty good and the music video is killer.

[satiemaniac]

On Tuesday, I was unfortunately unable to find a spare moment to listen to a good amount of music between classes, a required service project I did in the evening, and subsequent relaxation with friends to decompress from the nightmare that is watching small children to whom you aren't related.

Yesterday, though, I got a bit of music in. I just listened to some of Oscar Mulero's Black Propaganda Reconstructed EP from last year as I got ready in the morning because I knew I wanted something driven by synths and other electronic bloopity bloops. The EP is really good, and if I had been in the right state of mind, it would have surely been a great experience. Mulero deals in that deep, dark kind of electronic sound that doesn't quite reach Deep House but approaches it rapidly. It just wasn't what I was looking for on this first sunny day in a few days.

I couldn't quite get my finger on what I wanted, though, and after finishing up my shave and toothbrushing, I decided to change gears for my shower proper and got about halfway through New Order's 1981-1982 EP. That really hit the spot for me, and I kept listening in earbuds as I walked to class. The EP is basically a streamlined Substance, featuring New Order's best songs, in my opinion, with "Temptation" and "Hurt" being the obvious highlights and the closers. New Order probably needs little explanation here, so I'll just say that walking outside into the sun after a couple overcast days as the introductory vocals to "Temptation" pour over you is rhapsodic. It put a real spring in my step that is hard to muster as you're starting off a long day of work.

As I walked between other classes throughout the day, I wanted to keep the vibes going and went to my go-to Van Dyke Parks's Song Cycle. I have written extensively about this album here, so I'll refer you to my chart, but on this particular day, I was really plugged into "All Golden" and felt really great. I even went out and treated myself to a pretty decent slice of pizza. After that, I went and drank a bit in the park and then headed over to my friend Anne's house for some wine and pizza (the stuff of college high-art cuisine). There was some music sprinkled in by my friends, who are quickly turning into EDM heads, but I couldn't name any of the bits I heard for the rest of the night.

Today, I had another long morning of work before class and wasn't feeling music, but I decided upon getting back in to try a spin of the sample source for Kanye's "Bound 2," Ponderosa Twin Plus One's "Bound" (and its B-side, "I Remember You"). It was so great I listened twice as I sat in bed playing around with a new gadget I got, an e-cig upgrade so I can cut back my smoking a bit.

Now, I'm listening to Lil Ugly Mane's Mista Thug Isolation. Note to self to play around with a bit more of his music. His Three-Sided Tape was really good, vaporwave-y sort-of hip hop, but this is very clearly Memphis-anchored with a lot of his weird cloudy pretensions rising on the edges. It's been a pretty satisfying listen so far and could easily become my favorite of his. Definitely interested to see if he plays around with other hip hop subgenres for entire releases this way. If I had to pick a best fresh music experience I've had for the past couple of weeks (despite being slow on that lately for reasons I don't really know... fatigue, maybe?), it would definitely be this and I would say any hip hop head here looking for something cool and vaguely experimental should look into it, in all its playful DJ Screw-ness.