Like this:

A mix cd I received last year:

1. Ulrich Schnauss – Monday Paracetamol
2. Manitoba – Every Time She Turns Round It’s Her Birthday
3. Chris Clark – Holiday As Brutality
4. Autechre – Eutow
5. B. Fleischmann – As If
6. Apparat – Birds
7. Future 3 – Frisk
8. Tosca – Gimmi Gimmi
9. Peace Orchestra – The Man (Gotan Project El Hombre de la Pampa Mix)
10. Thievery Corporation – Shaolin Satellite
11. Dabrye – The Lish
12. Boards Of Canada – 1969
13. Múm – Awake On A Train
14. DJ Frane – Toad

I suppose there is no real reason why this IDM jizz explosion of an album resurfaced after over a year of languishing on my hard drive.  For instance Lukas tells me one of my most annoying traits–next to my lack of any strategic boardgame skills (what kind of diss is that?)–is that I don’t actually listen to anything anyone gives me until maybe months or years after the fact.  I argue that it’s because I want to give music a fair shot by being in the “right mindset” when listening to it.  He politely disagrees and tells me I’m “fucking lazy.”

Lukas ended up giving me the album on the unfortunate date of 07/20/08, the day before I died in surgery.  Even more unfortunate, he wrote on the bottom tomorrow is another day, buddy.

Well…there is a certain falsity to that statement that you can’t ignore.  Things kind of sucked for awhile.  Honestly, the album never had a chance.

But 15 months pass and I’m back to my old self and more importantly back in New York.  And NYC, it turns out, is a beautiful and fucked creature.  I imagine this is probably heightened by leaving Los Angeles just as it was being consumed by brush fires, floating ash, and another well-meaning but failed relationship.  There is a certain confusion here that you can only feel with not having any of your shit together (read: unemployment), but it certainly keeps boredom at bay in an amusing and sometimes insightful kind of way.  Despite the comfort of friends, I spend the majority of my time alone, usually wandering the city for hours.  What is so seductive and ultimately dangerous about New York is that it can really consume you and push you to see just how alone you really are as you shuffle pass crowds and crowds of strangers on a Friday night.

And somehow this all comes together: this past week I found myself listening to the cd for the first time.  Eventually I wrote Lukas a nice email thanking him for the album over a year after the fact, and told him I enjoyed it.  I don’t tell him that I set the album on loop and stayed up all night.  I might have wept; actually I’m fairly certain I did.  Lukas likes to tell me that the reason why electronic music is compelling to him is because it’s malleable enough to form your own emotions and narratives.  I don’t tell him that it resonates with me because it is a jumble of emotions and narratives that I know are there, but I just can’t transcend beyond feeling incredibly isolated.   In many ways it is the most accurate reflection of my time so far in New York.

But tomorrow, I suppose, is another day.