Luke Muehlhauser

Media diet for Q3 2019

by

Music

Spotify playlist for this quarter is here. Playlists for past quarters and years here.

Okay, music I most enjoyed discovering this quarter:

Had completely forgotten about, now rediscovered and really liked:

Why so many re-discoveries this quarter? I’m listening through the history of rock music again and constructing this playlist along the way. (Many other great albums I listened to recently aren’t listed above because I hadn’t forgotten about them.)

Movies/TV

Ones I “really liked” (no star), or “loved” (star):

  • Paul Feig: A Simple Favor (2018)
  • Gaspar Noe: Climax (2018)
  • Ari Aster: Midsommar (2019) ★

Games

Ones I “really liked” (no star), or “loved” (star):

  • [none]

Books

  • [none]

Comments

  1. I see that Aster’s “Hereditary” didn’t get a star. Did you prefer Midsommar? Did any particular element of Hereditary not work for you? (I think both are masterworks, but Hereditary haunts me in a way that Midsommar hasn’t.)

    • I did like Midsommar better, hard to say why. I guess it was more unique, and I thought the details of Aster’s filmmaking craft were somewhat more successful in Midsommar. But it’s a small enough difference that it could just be I was in a better mood or paying more attention in one case vs. the other. 🙂

  2. Have you listened to the most recent Residents reissues of Not Available and A Nickle if Your Dick’s This Big (compilation of two previously unreleased pre-Meet The Residents albums)? They are both incredible imo. T bonus disc on Not Available provides incredible insight into its composition and serves as an alternate album of sketches that were rerecorded or put together into the original release. Nickle is absolutely fascinating, showing them at their rawest and most uncompromising and including compositions such as “Cantaten to der Dyin’ Prunen” that rank among their best.

      • There’s a lot of stuff on Nickle that’s terrible, but in a way that’s unprecedented and hard to take my ears off of (like a massive circus train wreck in audio form).

        By the way, you don’t happen to know any other albums that sound like Meet The Residents or Not Available (as in like either one, as they both evoke widely different emotional worlds for me that I have yet to see replicated elsewhere), do you? Closest I can find is Caroliner (which if you’ve never heard you should check out their first few albums as well—Scaruffi barely has a blurb on them but they deserve more).