The day before

Tomorrow I leave for a semester abroad in the Netherlands, specifically Amsterdam.

This is the first time I've been out of the country save Canada, so this is pretty exciting for me, but also nerve-wracking as traveling can sometimes be. Somehow I always end up both eagerly anticipating and dreading the airport and the flight. Something about airport security makes me really anxious, and I don't know what because I don't have anything to hide and the whole process is really relatively painless. I think it might just be because the process has been given so much notoriety when really I don't have a problem with it other than my aversion being patted down (I much prefer the x-ray induced radiation that is really probably only comparable to eating a few bananas, for Chrissakes).

For the long plane ride as well as the entire semester, I have a whole bunch of lofty, challenging books ready to read. I'm currently trying to tackle Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace again which well we'll see how that goes this time. I'm kind of a literary masochist; I tend to only read a few books a year but they are usually...well, lofty and challenging. On the reading list is:
The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon
The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera
The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami
Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse
...and depending on how brave, stupid, bored I feel, Ulysses by James Joyce is still on the bucket list. When I graduated high school at the young age of 17, I felt like I was about to take on the world in college and proceeded to buy an annotated copy of Ulysses and vowed to finish it, Infinite Jest and the Holy Bible. I dropped that plan after trying to read the first two pages of Ulysses. Some three years later, the goal still seems overambitious but also at least within the realm of possibility. I'm hoping to do a lot more reading while abroad than I normally do, so we shall see how much I get done. I recently finished One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, which I felt was incredible, and before that The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger, which I felt I could not fairly assess because I am absolutely not the target demographic the book was being aimed at (teenagers going through identity crises).

I'm expecting (maybe hoping would be more accurate) that the next four months are going to be transformative, changing my attitudes and perceptions. I also hope to have a good time and to see and do a lot of new things, travel to many new places and meet many new people. I'm going to keep a travelogue in the awesome bound book that Amy gave me for my birthday, but also expect some updates about my trip here, maybe some pictures too...we shall see what happens.

As far as music goes, the only foreseeable event in that department is that I might go to the Pitchfork Festival in Paris to see Aphex Twin, if scheduling allows, which would kind of be a dream come true for me. Other than that I'm going to keep an eye on the city's concert schedules and probably end up coming back home with a lot of gaudy, expensive purchases that would ring up ridiculous import prices here in the states.

Some good music has been coming out lately. The Field's new album Looping State of Mind is up to par with his other work which says quite a lot. I like the new Balam Acab album Wander / Wonder. Play it really loud on a good stereo and it is a very trippy, beautiful experience. I still can't get over the new Machinedrum album, Room(s); it is very ambitious but also very fun. Zomby's new album Dedication is also sick, with a downright amazing flow and with a lot of sounds the likes of which I have never heard before. The new Fennesz EP, Seven Stars, is very relaxing and pretty. Shlohmo's album Bad Vibes is very relaxing, and I've been chilling to it a lot. I'm a little late to the game on these, but I've also been really digging Africa Hitech's jittery and colorful 93 Million Miles and Andy Stott's dark as fuck Passed Me By. 2011 is really bringing it.

And of course I can't possibly pass up the chance to plug my friend Drew Bandos' music. He usually goes under the name "Is and of The," but he just dropped a .zip file containing a release called Handpainted Glow under his own name on his facebook page. Apparently it contains some otherwise unreleased stuff, some finished songs and some unfinished songs. I wouldn't have guessed it contained the latter; it all sounded complete to me, and it is absolutely great. Dude's twenty and he's already doing stuff far better and more interesting than other rising electronic music stars of approximately the same age (Balam Acab and James Blake, for instance, who are downright boring in comparison.) Seriously I would not be surprised if Drew's work really blows up soon and he gets some widespread attention. If you're a fan of psychedelic music or electronic music or both, don't pass this guy up. Also, if you haven't heard Is and of The's album Heads Phased for Dreamless Sleep, it's streaming right over here and is also getting a physical release on Mush records in September (I think).

That's all for now. Wish me luck.