WXDU’s Top 65 NC Releases of 2014

Based on airplay by all of our DJs during the 2-month period each album was on playlist. I’m pretty sure I’ve never had the same band back-to-back in the top 5 before.

1 – John Howie Jr & the Rosewood Bluff – Everything Except Goodbye
2 – T0W3RS – TL;DR
3 – See Gulls – 2 Songs
4 – Hiss Golden Messenger – Bad Debt
5 – Hiss Golden Messenger – Lateness of Dancers
6 – Reigning Sound – Shattered
7 – Dex Romweber Duo – Images 13
8 – Solar Halos – Solar Halos
9 – Various – Merge 25th Anniversary Covers EP
10 – Daniel Bachman – Orange County Serenade
11 – Lilac Shadows – No Dark / No Light
12 – Humble Tripe – The Giving
13 – Last Year’s Men – Underwhelmed
14 – Datahata – Spectral Cities
15 – Diali Cissokho & Kaira Ba – The Great Peace
16 – Sylvan Esso – Sylvan Esso
17 – Horseback – Piedmont Apocrypha
18 – Silent Lunch – Late to Bloom
19 – Horizontal Hold – This is Not a Living
20 – Logical Sound Discovery – Thrill Seeker
21 – Shipwrecker – III
22 – Wesley Wolfe – Numbskull
23 – The Loudermilks – The Loudermilks
24 – The Tender Fruit – The Darkness Comes
25 – Dan Melchior und das Menace – Hunger
26 – Jenks Miller/JJ Toth – Roads to Ruin
27 – Curtis Eller’s American Circus – How To Make it in Hollywood
28 – Sagan Youth Boys – Annotated Universe
29 – Ezekiel Graves – Chthonic Journey
30 – Wood Ear – Electric Alone
31 – Secret Boyfriend – This is Always Where You’ve Lived
32 – Ashrae Fax – Never Really Been Into It
33 – Davidians – 2014 demos
34 – Flesh Wounds – Bitter Boy 7"
35 – Ama Divers – An Echo in the Sound
36 – Lud – Defenestration Boulevard
37 – Le Weekend – No Object
38 – Spider Bags – Frozen Letter
39 – VVAQRT – Detainee
40 – Backsliders – Raleighwood EP
41 – Blursome – Heavy Resting
42 – No Love – Tape #2
43 – The Tills – Howlin’
44 – Whatever Brains – SSR63/SSR64
45 – Drag Sounds – II
46 – Flesh Wounds – Flesh Wounds
47 – Chatham County Line – Tightrope
48 – Tashi Dorji – Tashi Dorji
49 – Museum Mouth – Alex I Am Nothing
50 – Solar Halos/Irata – Split 10"
51 – New Light Choir – Volume II
52 – Jack Carter & the Armory – Anthropomorphic Transfiguration
53 – Bo White – Millennial Tombs
54 – Staton Embassy – From My Head to Yours
55 – North Elementary – Honcho Poncho
56 – Malcolm Holcombe – Pitiful Blues
57 – Brain Flannel – Empty Set
58 – Jenks Miller & Rose Cross NC – Hopscotch 2013-2014 Recordings
59 – Art Jackson – Tulip Tree Poplar Flower
60 – Beauty World – Beauty World
61 – Totally Slow/Black Market – split 7”
62 – Kneads – 2013 Demos
63 – King Mez – Long Live the King
64 – Kaleidoscope Death – Restofthdrumtracks/DeadDrum
65 – Alpha Cop – Cue the Cold Air

WXDU’s Top 65 NC Releases of 2014

December 6-7, 2014

A lot of my thoughts over the weekend were tied up with the Eric Garner protests, both nationally and here in Durham, and I covered that in the post immediately prior to this one.

I spent Saturday afternoon working on a new streaming server for WXDU, and inadvertently learning things about Linux DBus that I didn’t know before. This, however, is because for the first time in several years, I’m reintroducing Linux into our server environment, and I’m very happy about that.

We’ll see how long that lasts. 

One driver of this shift is the fact that all of our boxes are Mac Pros, some of them fairly elderly, and the new Mac Pros (the black trashcans) aren’t really optimized for server duty. They’re heavy on GPUs and light on on-board storage.

Saturday evening we ate at Toast & then came home & engaged in the weekly halfhearted struggle to find a movie to stream. I have terrible luck when it comes to finding some obscure gem that sounds awesome, and suggesting it to M, without first checking to see if it’s streamable.

They never are.

Through some chain of circumstance we wound up watching Albert Brooks’s first movie, Real Life, which was mildly amusing in a highly self-conscious Albert Brooks kind of way. 

Sunday fit the standard pattern. 

So far in my year-end metal listening I’ve been most entertained by Abigor’s Leytmotif Luzifer:

And Lunarterial by Swallowed

<a href=“http://swallowed.bandcamp.com/album/lunarterial” data-mce-href=“http://swallowed.bandcamp.com/album/lunarterial”>Lunarterial by Swallowed</a>

December 6-7, 2014

November 23, 2014

I’ve had a trainee during my shift at the radio station off on & for the past couple of months, and today was his last training. I feel like I’m probably a terrible trainer, because I’ve been doing it so long that it’s all kind of second nature for me. But it’s good to be forced to bring it back to the foreground and think it through now & then.

In any case, as I told him near the end of the afternoon, it’s not really about doing everything perfectly, but rather about staying calm when you inevitably screw something up, and being able to recover comparatively gracefully. There you go: a life lesson that’s worth at least a semester’s worth of Duke tuition.

After dinner we watched Adaptation, which I had never seen. It was about like I figured it would be, I guess, only somehow I had forgotten that (a) it starred Nic Cage and (b) he played twins. The makeup was truly appalling – I hope someone was nominated for an Oscar for Nic’s hairpieces, and whatever kind of crazy dental appliance Chris Cooper had going on.

M has all kind of family things happening right now, which are awful & a drag. As is the news, daily. I hope someone makes a top-20 list of good things that happened in 2014, because I could use some perspective.

November 23, 2014