big ups to rng for giving me a nice softball on my first day. i've already been feeling the more ambient side of dance music recently, ambient techno and chillout and stuff; i've always had a huge soft spot for this sound. i'd sort of assumed this would be a bit more new age-y, maybe take a bit more world music influence, just given the confounding and Mildly Intimidating orientalism on proud display as the front cover, but no, much of it is pretty standard kinda downtempo dance music. very british. Very 90s. i was reminded of, like, Irresistible Force and even Underworld, of all things, a couple of times. every once in a while this thing will slip into a beat that sounds like a Massive Attack instrumental, or something. very british. VERY 90s. ol' mate willy's biggest claim to fame—at least if you're a know-nothing pop dufus, like me—is his production work on Madonna's ray of light. now the title track on that record is like the greatest song of all time, or something. so this guy's some kind of heroic genius, right? we can all agree on that? i was pretty hype, then, to hear his solo work, especially because you just get a feel from the cover that this record is going to be very. very Produced. and that feeling is correct; it's an extremely Produced record. you will, in fact, get to hear production, from the guy that co-produced ray of light. one might argue over-production. if you're a Philistine. a true cur. but i don't believe in such a thing. my brain are huge. and you're are small... okay, well it actually is a little overproduced. Sometimes. so, on my initial listen through, i was extremely on board through the first two tracks. the opener, water from a vine leaf, seems to have been flagged as the standout on the record. it's got the most spotify plays by far, and the terrifying userbase of rym reviewers seem to agree that it's the best. even people that don't like the album agree that it's good. it's followed by into the paradise, which is this real edgy beat that actually evoked nine inch nails in my head, but don't tell anyone i said that or i'll lose my cred and you'll all gut me like the pig i am. i've Seen it. very strong tracks, those two. and then time to get wize comes around and, woof. look, if you're interested in 90s electronica—or man, a Lot of 90s music in general—you've just got to build a pretty high tolerance for its particular brand of cheese and corn. i Have a really high tolerance, but the spoken word bit on this track is... So much. i just had to kind of scoff and roll my eyes. i tried not to. it felt mean. it's not even that bad, i guess it just hit me like a truck for whatever reason. wasn't ready. it's so corny dude. oh god. i found the next track kind of so-so as well; i was, like, fully slipping out of the album at this point, but it does actually pick back up. in fact i really like the rest of the album! i'm particularly fond of all the atmospheric bits leading up to and away from the actual beats, it's a strong structure that's on full display with best friend, paranoia, one of my favorites. it starts out with this excellent, purely ambient synthwork that i so selfishly wish could just go on forever, and slides into a really nice beat and a far more evocative use of vocals than get wize. the last three tracks are also among my favorites, definitely the ones least beholden to a traditional dance structure. the most ambient and experimental the record gets, for sure. deus ex machina is very appealing to my aesthetic sensibilities; i actually really love that track. and water babies sounds like a track off the spyro the dragon (1998 psx) ost. so that's cool... man, my comparisons are fucking wack. anyway, yea! pretty good stuff! you can probably tell just from the Cover whether this is your kind of thing or not. it's definitely mine. i imagine i'll spin this quite a few times, and a lot of the tracks are definitely great for playlists and mixes. i'll have to look into more of this guy's stuff. Pieces in a Modern Style seems pretty intriguing, and i definitely need to hear his pop production work i haven't gotten around to yet. that all saints record looks pretty cool!

i haven't the faintest idea how to write about this, so i'm giving myself a break and kind of deciding not to. at least not a proper review. for one: this thing's highly self-referential, if not to specific moments and bits of iconography from Bowie's career, then at least to Bowie's status As a career artist. i don't know anything about Bowie's work, not really. i've heard some singles. i'd heard spiders from mars before. and that's like it. yeah, lack of background knowledge hasn't stopped me from providing real write-ups to other records—i got the last (real) Doors album as my First Doors album and i managed that just fine. but man, this is different. the man's dying. so look, i'll just say i like this a lot. i can't give everything away coaxed some very real tears out of me at nine am on a monday. and that's that. … okay, but look, while we're here, the idea that an artist's death leads to their work being OverHyped or something feels extremely Foolish. there's already this arbitrary purist tendency among critics and more snob-adjacent music fans to try to Pull music from its context as much as possible. you see it when a negative review claims an album "aged poorly," and you see it all the time in whatever follows "people only like this because []." but like. music isn't Just music, right? the story Matters, the artist's charisma and their background and politics and the musical landscape the record was released in and the Fucking album title and the cover and the promotion—all that shit matters, because why the hell Wouldn't it? like it or not, You're bringing a lot of baggage from outside the music itself into your listening experience as well. your own background and taste, the setting you happened to hear the music in, your choice of medium itself (headphones? knockoff earbuds? speakers? vinyl? streaming? are you a sit-still-and-close-your-eyes style listener or a pace-outside-or-around-the-room style listener? do you check your phone? it's not a sin to check your phone!) this shit Matters. an artist up and fucking dying after releasing an album changes the context because art is fluid and squishy and weird. that's, like. a Lot of the appeal, honestly. i continue to not understand why anyone expresses interest in this form at all if they're going to approach it with such rigidity. how do you enjoy music? this art form, even more than Most, defies that kind of thinking! what is in this for you? …that's a rhetorical question, and i don't actually think it's that complicated. i don't think someone is, like, evil, or stupid, for approaching art differently than me. it's just music. who cares. but it does also, honestly. makes me a bit uncomfortable. that's all. i'll get off the soapbox now. y'all do y'all, it ain't serious.

big ups to rng for giving me a nice softball on my first day. i've already been feeling the more ambient side of dance music recently, ambient techno and chillout and stuff; i've always had a huge soft spot for this sound. i'd sort of assumed this would be a bit more new age-y, maybe take a bit more world music influence, just given the confounding and Mildly Intimidating orientalism on proud display as the front cover, but no, much of it is pretty standard kinda downtempo dance music. very british. Very 90s. i was reminded of, like, Irresistible Force and even Underworld, of all things, a couple of times. every once in a while this thing will slip into a beat that sounds like a Massive Attack instrumental, or something. very british. VERY 90s. ol' mate willy's biggest claim to fame—at least if you're a know-nothing pop dufus, like me—is his production work on Madonna's ray of light. now the title track on that record is like the greatest song of all time, or something. so this guy's some kind of heroic genius, right? we can all agree on that? i was pretty hype, then, to hear his solo work, especially because you just get a feel from the cover that this record is going to be very. very Produced. and that feeling is correct; it's an extremely Produced record. you will, in fact, get to hear production, from the guy that co-produced ray of light. one might argue over-production. if you're a Philistine. a true cur. but i don't believe in such a thing. my brain are huge. and you're are small... okay, well it actually is a little overproduced. Sometimes. so, on my initial listen through, i was extremely on board through the first two tracks. the opener, water from a vine leaf, seems to have been flagged as the standout on the record. it's got the most spotify plays by far, and the terrifying userbase of rym reviewers seem to agree that it's the best. even people that don't like the album agree that it's good. it's followed by into the paradise, which is this real edgy beat that actually evoked nine inch nails in my head, but don't tell anyone i said that or i'll lose my cred and you'll all gut me like the pig i am. i've Seen it. very strong tracks, those two. and then time to get wize comes around and, woof. look, if you're interested in 90s electronica—or man, a Lot of 90s music in general—you've just got to build a pretty high tolerance for its particular brand of cheese and corn. i Have a really high tolerance, but the spoken word bit on this track is... So much. i just had to kind of scoff and roll my eyes. i tried not to. it felt mean. it's not even that bad, i guess it just hit me like a truck for whatever reason. wasn't ready. it's so corny dude. oh god. i found the next track kind of so-so as well; i was, like, fully slipping out of the album at this point, but it does actually pick back up. in fact i really like the rest of the album! i'm particularly fond of all the atmospheric bits leading up to and away from the actual beats, it's a strong structure that's on full display with best friend, paranoia, one of my favorites. it starts out with this excellent, purely ambient synthwork that i so selfishly wish could just go on forever, and slides into a really nice beat and a far more evocative use of vocals than get wize. the last three tracks are also among my favorites, definitely the ones least beholden to a traditional dance structure. the most ambient and experimental the record gets, for sure. deus ex machina is very appealing to my aesthetic sensibilities; i actually really love that track. and water babies sounds like a track off the spyro the dragon (1998 psx) ost. so that's cool... man, my comparisons are fucking wack. anyway, yea! pretty good stuff! you can probably tell just from the Cover whether this is your kind of thing or not. it's definitely mine. i imagine i'll spin this quite a few times, and a lot of the tracks are definitely great for playlists and mixes. i'll have to look into more of this guy's stuff. Pieces in a Modern Style seems pretty intriguing, and i definitely need to hear his pop production work i haven't gotten around to yet. that all saints record looks pretty cool!

yesterday i'd given a shoutout to the great, benevolent, and Balmy 1001albumsgenerator dot com gods for starting this ill-advised journey off in a genre i'm pretty well acquainted with. in return, it dropped a fucking interminable box set release by a singer whom i hitherto "hadn't heard but heard of." funny stuff. i pogged. i pogchamped. yea, pretty intimidating, but thankfully i'm not 100% out of my comfort zone or anything. i like showtunes (or at least things that Sound like showtunes), i like vocal jazz (or at least etc.), i've heard one (1) frank sinatra album. "i can do this," i said. "i can making this hapen." this actually wasn't a difficult listen at all. very breezy. i am eternally fanatic for music built around and led by a strong vocal melody. i've really just gotta bite the bullet and fully explore the vocal jazz of this era because it's clearly my thing. i love the instrumentation, straight up. i'm just a complete sucker for a big, fat brass section. and man, when we cash in those sappy violin glissandos, i literally get chills every single time without fail. it's like a cheat code for music—it's Almost not fair. i wasn't familiar with any of these songs; they seem to have been primarily written for musicals, mostly stage but some film, that i've never heard of in my entire life because i'm ignorant and Also living nearly 100 years after the fact. but they're super strong both in composition and arrangement! i really like the lyrics, too. often very puerile and playful, having a lot of fun with like… with Words. i guess. "when you said you care / imagine my emosh / i swore then and there / permanent devosh." awesome. maybe i'm just Simple, y'know? in the head? you hit me with fifty-odd silly love songs with gorgeous arrangements, i'll eat that shit up with a spoon. all there is to it. truth squirts, don't it? let's not beat around the bush here, though: we're listening to this for Fitzgerald's vocal performance. and what can i say? she's incredible. i was completely blown away. i don't think i've ever heard a voice sound like that, just so immediately enrapturing and captivating, at once commanding your attention but also bending to the whim of the music. that's all jazz, is what that is. i've desperately got to hear her works with Louis Armstrong; i can only imagine how well they play off each other. as it stands, though, an all-time performer for sure. her laughs on they all laughed, the clear fun she's having with let's call the whole thing off and my cousin in milwaukee, her inflection on love walked right in (for sure a standout for me—i've been humming the melody as i write), the way she hits those lower notes on that track, ugh. beautiful. i was honestly full-on smiling through a lot of this thing. it's happy-making, oh yes it is! really it feels impressive to me that i'm coming off of three hours of music that does, more or less, all sound quite similar (just by virtue of using the same palette), and i'm already kind of itching to go back and play a fair bit of it again. just speaks to both to the immaculate construction of these songs and to Ella's immense talent as a performer. though it also just speaks to my aesthetic proclivities. it mainly speaks to that.

in my cursory glances across Esteemed journalistic tentpoles such as wikipedia and the fucking allmusic blurb, it seems that a sort of general consensus is that this record features a Less present David Bowie than the last. now, i haven't heard the idiot, but i found this pretty funny because this thing has Bowie all over it. in song structure and composition—even given my admittedly limited experience with Bowie's music—i was just constantly feeling the man's influence. that's certainly not a bad thing, to be clear. i don't even mean to diminish Iggy's Own influence on his Own album; the guy who Wants To Be My Dog is still definitely here. if anything, it's that melding of minds that's the whole appeal: the ramshackle proto-punker known for self-harming on stage and the careful, calculated art rocker who makes concept albums about aliens or whatever the shit. i like it. i was, of course, already familiar with our title track and the passenger, staples of soundtracks, rock radio, and commercials for, fuckin, i don't know. shaving cream, or something. i’d always had a soft spot for both songs. lust for life as an opener is just a great hype machine; it’s a riff and a drum beat that will outlive every single one of us and continue to sell many an OverPriced Cruise Ship or Vacation Destination from now until the day the fucking bombs drop. the passenger's iconic, for sure. the big revelation of punk, i think, is that soul-crushing ennui feels a lot better when you're flashing a smug smirk. bored and self-assured. it's a pretty striking track. sixteen is about exactly what you'd think it'd be about, and we're moving on. the rest of the a-side is strong too. i found myself getting really into some weird sin and tonight, both of which are extremely Bowie. what a surprise. b-side's good, a lot looser. i like neighborhood threat. gave me a god damn heart attack because i thought it was gonna be don't fear the reaper, inexplicably. nope. there are just so many arpeggios in the world. i got horny for nothing. i promise i didn't take it personally. turn blue is this extremely uncomfortable rambling mess. it's about heroin. a lot of things are about heroin. it's definitely evocative and dramatic and it works in the album. you're probably never going to play just turn blue. you're probably never going to be in the mood to Only play turn blue. kinda the same with the closer, fall in love with me, which is cloying and leering and desperate and horny. i like songs like that. it's not bad. it does say the word "young" ten entire times. it Damn sure does. rock n' roll. you can only shrug and sigh. good stuff, as a whole! i'm glad to get around to it. this is the kind of thing i've seen on best of lists and topsters and last.fm and fucking 4chan dot org charts and All That Crap for years but never actually sat down and listened to, and very likely never would have, knowing my general taste and listening habits. the first example of such a record in this project for me, and it certainly won't be the last.

live albums can often feel sort of fractured, at least in regard to the actual song selection. a lot like a greatest hits compilation, there's often some noticeable disconnect between one track and another. now, this phenomenon is Already mostly mitigated just by the Form and the Context of this particular release. i mean, a lot of the hang-ups around this sort of grab-bag approach in an album release stem from taking songs out of the context of their albums, and Muddy Waters had a whopping One album at the time of this recording. we kind of forget that the album is not the be-all end-all music format. it's especially easy if you're approaching this as a piece of Western Music Canon where The Album has inexplicably and SomeWhat UnComfortably been put on a massive pedestal and treated as the Correct Form. but hell, many albums around this time and throughout the decade were Also more or less just collections of disparate tracks. this was back when a record being half standards and covers was just… what a record Was. and blues, much like any other kind of folk music, is a genre that embraces this approach regardle—man, i'm getting entirely off-topic and sandbagging my own point. i always do this. i bring all this up in the first place because i was struck with some exceptional track sequencing here, that's all. it really ramps up and tells a story through the energy. hearing the band—as well as the audience—loosen up and build over the course of the performance grants a certain kind of cohesion that made it pretty easy to conceptualize this thing holistically. i guess i could've just said that. i really enjoyed hoochie coochie man. looking it up and learning that's where that fucking stop-time riff comes from blew my mind. you know the riff. even if you think you don't, you do. it's the bad to the bone one. this wasn't the first recording of hoochie coochie; Waters had first released it as a single in '54, but it still feels like witnessing the discovery of Fire. how must that have sounded back then? crazy to imagine. much hay has been made for both parts of got my mojo working as well, and those are some fantastic performances, for sure, definitely the fiery beating heart of the record. i do not actually care much about Muddy Waters' place as a stepping stone to a lot of the acclaimed bluesy rock acts; yea yea, he was a big influence on the Stones, who wasn't? but setting that apathy for rock canon aside—wow, yea, you really can hear it on mojo working. probably better than the Stones, though. or at least better than bad to the bone. hope we can agree on that. good god. that song gives me hives. i don't even know if it's actually bad. i'm just allergic to it. i'd honestly thought this would be a more difficult listen than it was. i guess i don't know why, even; i suppose just due to its age and my lack of experience with actual factual true-blue blues. but i like old folk music, and i do like rock music, despite everything, so it's not as if i didn't have an in. maybe i'm just a scared little pussy. maybe i'm just a little piss baby. maybe i'm just a bitch. who knows. really glad i listened to this, though; it feels like as good a foundation as any to get into blues proper. maybe it'll make me a little less of a bitch. a little less of a scared little piss baby. maybe it'll make me—

shockingly, this kind of bounced right off me! it's difficult to even put a finger on Why. it's almost tempting for me to pretend that i have some objection to the lyrical content (it's fairly easy to read this kind of romanticization of an idealized past as conservative or even fascist (when people talk about Preserving merry old engerland nowadays, they mean something very specific and quite ugly)), but firstly, it's not like problematic lyrical content has ever Stopped me before (see my glowing write-up on lust for life two days ago), and secondly, i don't think it's even a particularly fair reading. i'm very much inclined to give the benefit of the doubt here. sure, it's something the record is clearly Evocative of, or at least, it's something the record kept evoking to My ear, but it's certainly not what the damn thing is actually About. so if it's not the lyrics, then what's wrong with it? the answer's probably "nothing." it literally Just bounced off of me. maybe it'll click later. maybe it won't. who knows. who Cares. it don't gotta be complicated. it don't gotta say something. it's just music. it's ONLY music.

i'm unsure if an album has ever clicked so hard for me halfway through my first listen, to go from being underwhelmed and somewhat disappointed to thoroughly engaged and on the same wavelength. a very productive listen; i feel as though i've Unlocked something. the Doors are a band i've been tentatively interested in for a while now, but whose discography i've yet to explore. they're actually quite a bit divisive in my "scene," as it were—my scene of younger queer people autistic about music, i mean. they've become something of an easy target. i couldn't really tell you why that is—something about the cia, something about "boomers"—i tune a lot of it out. i don't really think it's Personal; it's just a product of an ever-changing culture, different political priorities, and generational gaps. it happens. that kind of stuff never bothered me, though, and what little i knew of the Doors had me intrigued: a highly eccentric and dramatic train wreck, a heady artist type full-on hollering beat poetry over a blues organ… that just seemed so obviously like my thing. i'd of course heard light my fire and break on through, they're impossible tracks to miss, staples of rock radio and soundtracks, but this marks my first real experience with their music. like all good stories, i've started at the end. gritty, ragged, and quite burnt out. the psychedelic 60s were over. we forget, really, how quickly the hippie movement came and went. i mean, this is a band who were, in a very real way, only active for five years. Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane would form in '65, and just four years later we'd see woodstock. we think of the woodstock festival as the beating heart of the movement, but really, in a lot of ways, it was the death throe. the same year, the hells angels would kill Meredith Hunter at altamont free. the manson family would murder Sharon Tate and several others, and a highly publicized court case ensues that didn't do much for the hippies' already sour reputation in the mainstream. this had all already happened by the time l.a. woman had come out. the writing was on the wall. the scene was dying. and you can hear it! it sounds exhausted. i think listening to this thing extremely hung over was a nice bit of tonal serendipity, though it's the kind of thing that usually appeals to me anyways. thankfully, this album isn't actually like, a massive bummer. it's tired, yes, and it's dark, but still fiery and intense. lots of inspired creative decisions. the building intensity towards the end of the sprawling title track in particular strikes me as the core of the record. electric. i was super into it. real head trip.

despite all of the Everything about me, i've never really gotten into prog. i have no particular reason for that; i certainly don't abide by any of those thought-terminating clichés oft-touted against the form's defining eccentricities. anyone who has the misfortune of knowing me for long enough will recognize that the easiest way to get me to listen to a record or watch a film is to describe it as "pretentious" or "self-indulgent." i often—not always, but often—conceptualize art first and foremost as a way of really Seeing the artist(s), i desperately Want to hear their dumbest whims and fixations, i don't want artists to rein it in; i want everything, i want you. so yeah, i have no problems with prog. on top of that, i like theatre kid shit. i like impressive musicianship, i like solos, i like sprawling interminable length on both the micro (song) and the macro (album) level. i like concept albums, i like story songs, i like Flutes and Organs and Mandolins and shit. and i've listened to and enjoyed tons of works that circle the Periphery of prog. i like a lot of krautrock and psychedelia. i like the Devin Townsend albums i've listened to—the most classically prog rock styled record that i've actively listened to recently enough to have any real memory of it is Steven Wilson's raven that refused to sing, which is an album that i love dearly. so why haven't i gotten into prog? i literally just haven't gotten around to it. it's not actually complicated. this is an unnecessary indulgence of an opening paragraph. but i like to practice what i preach. it's got the songs, baby! oh yeah, it does! big revelatory standout for me is starship trooper, it's glorious. the melody is just Soaring, all three parts are interlocking and playing off one another, the band sounds fantastic, it's total bliss. the final part (called würm, because prog is the fucking coolest thing in the entire fucking shit) is so good it's this brilliant crescendo to a totally cartoonish and euphoric guitar solo. it rips. i got chills. aside from that track, i like the conspicuously-titled solo guitar rag, "the clap." i think that's a good collection of things for a song to Be. the first track is super strong as well. Chris Squire's bass immediately jumped out to me. i'd sort of known through cultural osmosis and the memetic status of roundabout that Yes had a very prominent and virtuosic bass player, but it's still something that immediately hit me from the start of my listen. i love the harmonies all over this thing too, of course. i always love harmonies. oh and there's a song here that's, like, about chess. or, y'know, it uses the imagery of the chess game as a metaphor to describe th—they wrote a song about chess!! i Love chess!!! five stars.

this is traumaqueer music. i won't elaborate on that or belabor the point—i feel like if you know, you know, y'Know?—but i'd still be remiss not to mention it at all because it was, like, my Revelation halfway through the album. full-on Epiphany. lightbulb over my head and shit, it was cartoonish. so here we have a record as intimate and horny and lovestruck as it is leering, desperate… Obsessive and Neurotic. it's kind of bpd music as well, actually. there's a lot of overlap, probably, between these two not-genres of music that i just made the fuck up on the spot. i digress. lyrically, the album keeps oscillating between a sort of intense sexuality (soft as snow, lose my breath, feed me with your kiss) and debilitating dissociation (you're still in a dream, several girls galore, i can't feel it). i like how both themes seem to make the other feel That much more disquieting. and it's interesting, too, because sonically the record is pretty bright and airy, at least in arrangement. there are Pop hooks on this thing. the track where Kevin Shields croons the word "suicide"—like forty fucking times—is Catchy. not to get all watchmojo-youtube-video-top-10-happy-sounding-songs-that-are-actually-depressing on you or anything. i mean, firstly, i don't know if i Would call the songs "happy sounding" (the evocative and noisy production, i think, unlocks some other emotion whose name is known to neither God nor Man). i don't even think i'd call these lyrics "depressing" either, actually. it feels like there's something Reclamatory, almost, in the album's tonal incongruities, though i can't quite put my finger on it. i suppose my only "evidence," as it were, is anecdotal: i don't Find this thing to be a depressing listen. okay, well, no more sorry is a bit Intense; that one Was a depressing listen. it's also like the best song on the album. it Did make me a little nauseous. it happens. but otherwise, yeah, i don't know! it feels more cleansing than anything—vacuuming up (because it's the vacuum band haha lol) all the fucked up bits of my dumbshit brain and soaking them in fuzz and reverb and whatever the hell else until they're unrecognizable. that is, to me, pretty valuable. and i'm Also several girls galore. so i appreciate the representation.

i haven't the faintest idea how to write about this, so i'm giving myself a break and kind of deciding not to. at least not a proper review. for one: this thing's highly self-referential, if not to specific moments and bits of iconography from Bowie's career, then at least to Bowie's status As a career artist. i don't know anything about Bowie's work, not really. i've heard some singles. i'd heard spiders from mars before. and that's like it. yeah, lack of background knowledge hasn't stopped me from providing real write-ups to other records—i got the last (real) Doors album as my First Doors album and i managed that just fine. but man, this is different. the man's dying. so look, i'll just say i like this a lot. i can't give everything away coaxed some very real tears out of me at nine am on a monday. and that's that. … okay, but look, while we're here, the idea that an artist's death leads to their work being OverHyped or something feels extremely Foolish. there's already this arbitrary purist tendency among critics and more snob-adjacent music fans to try to Pull music from its context as much as possible. you see it when a negative review claims an album "aged poorly," and you see it all the time in whatever follows "people only like this because []." but like. music isn't Just music, right? the story Matters, the artist's charisma and their background and politics and the musical landscape the record was released in and the Fucking album title and the cover and the promotion—all that shit matters, because why the hell Wouldn't it? like it or not, You're bringing a lot of baggage from outside the music itself into your listening experience as well. your own background and taste, the setting you happened to hear the music in, your choice of medium itself (headphones? knockoff earbuds? speakers? vinyl? streaming? are you a sit-still-and-close-your-eyes style listener or a pace-outside-or-around-the-room style listener? do you check your phone? it's not a sin to check your phone!) this shit Matters. an artist up and fucking dying after releasing an album changes the context because art is fluid and squishy and weird. that's, like. a Lot of the appeal, honestly. i continue to not understand why anyone expresses interest in this form at all if they're going to approach it with such rigidity. how do you enjoy music? this art form, even more than Most, defies that kind of thinking! what is in this for you? …that's a rhetorical question, and i don't actually think it's that complicated. i don't think someone is, like, evil, or stupid, for approaching art differently than me. it's just music. who cares. but it does also, honestly. makes me a bit uncomfortable. that's all. i'll get off the soapbox now. y'all do y'all, it ain't serious.