One morning, I spotted somebody's Christmas remnants and heard Fleetwood Mac leaking out of a popular cafe before resting in a park while a pair of masked lapwings patrolled the grass near me. Another morning, a wafting smell of food grabbed me as I crossed a railway bridge, and just nearby, a friendly cat talked to me from somebody's garden. The cat had so much to tell me, in fact, that it jumped the fence into a neighbouring garden to continue meowing to me as I walked away.

The streets remained quiet, though, for which I'm grateful. My restless mind craves a chance to breathe, to listen, to explore without the stress of a crowd. Sometimes, I'm revisiting memories; Sometimes I'm thinking about conversations I need to have, and it's all part of a never-ending battle to Remain Present. Music helps, and often it's the soundscapes that really help.

#walks #photography #weekends #wandering #restlessness #music #ambient

This was a post from Cos.

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Favourite things released this year

• Tindersticks – Soft Tissue – I’m calling it a comeback, as this grabs me somehow more than other recent and not-unpleasant work. It hits a definite groove, and it's a masterpiece.
• Cindy Lee – Diamond Jubilee – A box full of experiments, some of which work, and a couple of which are transcendent – Not unlike a Guided By Voices album of old in that respect, except that it’s a two-hour behemoth with a bit more 60s-inspired fuzz/reverb. Glorious.
• DIIV – Frog in Boiling Water – Warm, familiar, and making the sounds they’re so good at, but the feeling that Something’s Not Right is unavoidable. A strangely unsettling album.
• Jessica Pratt – Here in the Pitch – when I inevitably wake up from whatever dream this life is, I expect to hear Jessica Pratt's music softly playing, before the grand revelation that my existence was all part of some late-60s experiment.
• Adam Wiltzie – Eleven Fugues for Sodium Pentothal – what I'd probably be listening to just before I wake up from that dream.
• Klein – marked – Definitely the kind of album I’d only hear about from one of two places – The Wire magazine, or one of Boomkat’s e-mails. I heard about it purely by chance, but it's the kind of discovery I relish – someone's out there pouring themselves into slabs of noise like this, and it's beautiful.
• Snarski vs Snarski – Waiting for the Bell – Two musical brothers take their turns with each others’ songs through the ages, giving a bit of new life to familiar tunes via each of their lovely voices. Come for Crossing off the miles, stay for Be careful what you put your name to.

Pleasant Discoveries from other times

• The Sorcerers' Ethiojazz-inspired tunes. I saw this video playing silently in the window of a shop in Northcote one evening. Not long afterwards, I saw some other reference to the band, which led me to In Pursuit of Shai-Hulud. Sometimes the universe sends you signals, I guess.
• Tony Molina (thank you acb!) who reminds me of Elliott Smith, Guided by Voices and something else.
• Hollie Cook – Happy Hour in Dub which I found hard not to enjoy.
• Voice Actor – Sent from my telephone – what if your stoner friend popped in every now and then with some random dream memories or other observations? I've listened through the whole album, but this feels like the perfect kind of source material to drop into a mixtape or two.

Continuing Earworms

• Drab Majesty gives us the 80s of our dreams.
• Spunsugar gives me one take on the 90s in my dreams.
• Night Tapes – drifting felt like a fine slice of dream-poppy excellence.

Recent releases I'll take into next year

• Saint Etienne – The Night
• The Necks – Bleed

I need to spend some time with these to form proper opinions.

Late 2023 releases I brought into this year

• bdrmm – I don't know – nice fuzzy noise that hits the spot. I see the next album's on the way in February, too.
• Blonde Redhead – Sit Down for Dinner – if you're looking for a soundtrack to feeling overcome by wistfulness, this might be it. Had I seen them play back in June, I may well have drowned in my own tears.
• Hermanos Gutiérrez – El Bueno Y El Malo – currently replacing Khruangbin as the band you'll hear in many inner-suburban situations, and rightfully so – a second example of brotherly excellence in this list, too.

Three albums I keep coming back to

• HTRK – Death is a Dream
• Susumu Yokota – Sakura
• Christian Fennesz & Jim O'Rourke – It's Hard For Me To Say I'm Sorry

No notes on these three – I encourage you all to find out for yourselves.

#music #EndOfYear #NowPlaying

This was a post from Cos.

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Dreary #winter; time for some dreamy, drifty #music.

• Shinjuku Thief's Bloody Tourist – so many years since I listened to it, but with Paul Schütze popping up again recently it's a short jump to this album that he'd produced at the start of the 90s, back when I was a nervous Young Person buying CDs from the very same Darrin Verhagen as he worked in a CBD music shop, and listening to a show on 3PBS FM that he sometimes played music on. The languid, slightly feverish Open Wound nicely fit my morning walk, as Preston struggled out of bed on a cold morning.

• Bill Callahan’s Have Fun With God – a so-called “dub” reworking of the Dream River album – stops my mind from getting caught up in Other Things this afternoon. “I wonder if I'll ever wake up?”

This was a post from Cos.

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When did I first hear this song? I’d bought the CD in Singapore and listened to it on this train trip to Kuala Lumpur in early 2004, in very different weather to this wintry morning:

I learnt so much on that trip, and saw so many things:

As we get older, it’s harder and harder to fight the pull of nostalgia. What would I have done differently? Plenty of things, but also nothing.

#music #memories #Malaysia

This was a post from Cos.

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My wife found it odd. I couldn't really explain how songs seep into your bones over time, but it related to how I needed to experience a more random nature of Tokyo beyond other people's top-N lists.

We could've seen anything at all here, and it would've helped a few more connections form somewhere in my brain. That's what I'm looking for – the joy of less-conscious discoveries. After all, it's up to you what the image means.

#music #travel #japan #tokyo #photography #film #digital #memories

[ photo notes: the first one's on film from my Olympus XA2, the other two are from my Leica M Typ-240 with an old Canon 35mm M39/LTM lens ]

This was a post from Cos.

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An influential friend gave me a mixtape in the last year of high school containing a single from a local band we all liked (and whose guitarist would, in a strange mixing of worlds much later on, become my manager for a year or so). The b-side of that single was a cover of Little Johnny Jewel which lodged itself squarely in my mind, even after I bought the impossibly good Marquee Moon later on.

Somewhere among the waves, I enjoyed reading Lucy Sante mention how every gig sounded different – it almost makes me miss going along to more live music in the hope of those transcendental moments (who am I kidding? I feel too old for all that standing up).

While I still love the insectoid spikiness of LJJ, another song feels closer to me in my middle age, and it feels like every time we're on the road on a warm afternoon, headed for nowhere. One might say this case is closed, eh?

#music #memories #TomVerlaine #Television

This was a post from Cos.

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I took a few film shots this morning, and only one phone shot:

What have I got from prior years, around this time? Five years ago I was in #Thailand:

Ten years ago, I was in #Fitzroy looking at somebody's photography exhibition, in the middle of a haze of confusion around the new life I was trying to settle into:

Fifteen years ago, I'd flown to #Adelaide to help setup someone's WAN connection in their new office, and unexpectedly needing to stay overnight:

Twenty years ago I was watching Grand Salvo play:

#FilmPhotography #street #memories #music

[ This is a #NowAndThen post, where I try to dig through my #photography archives ]

This was a post from Cos.

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I’ve been hanging around the Internet since the days of UUCP connections. The distributed / less-centralized nature of those times is something that still appeals to me, which is why I’m still here #selfhosting and hosting for others – I’ve loved empowering friends to get their thoughts up and into the Internet so that it’s not just the same old nerds like me in here.

I’m trying out WriteFreely as a way to better aggregate my writing and some other information. This post serves as both an #introduction and a test.

what do I like to do?

A significant part of my brain seems to be filled with #music – lots of it. I used to try and blog about it long ago, but now I'd rather just keep listening than finding ever-more convoluted ways to describe it.

I love #walking, especially as a way to explore #FilmPhotography (or digital #photography). I’m not scared of #PublicTransport and quite like #trains.

My photography goes way back on Flickr, a little less further back on Instagram and I've more recently been experimenting with Pixelfed – see @cos@pixelfed.social or @cos@pixelfed.au. Either way, I try to find beauty in the everyday with my images. I'm particularly fascinated by blankness.

what do I care about?

The world's a better place when we don't feel we need to hide who we really are. To me, this means (among other things):

• Trans rights are human rights.
• Black lives matter.
• Human beings are not “illegal”.
• Love is love.
• People should have control over their own bodies.
• Science is real.
• Kindness is everything.

where can I be found on social media?

These days, the Fediverse is where it's at – you can find me at @cos@aus.social.

what do I do for work?

I spent a long time as a systems administrator, network engineer, systems engineer and otherwise, but these days I focus on the people aspects of #DevOps, #SRE or #PlatformEngineering by managing teams, growing people, and helping everyone understand that Software’s Not Just For Christmas. If you want to know more, you can read my LinkedIn Profile.

what's some other tech-related stuff that I'm interested in?

#emacs is not a dirty word. Given my change of work focus, I’d guess that 98% of my time in it nowadays is spent using #orgmode to keep notes on what’s going on at work.

Once upon a time, I helped some friends start a #Linux User Group called LUV. It's been a long time since I was involved, but I'm glad that it kept going for all these years – plenty of other people put in a lot of work to make it so, and more power to them! Despite that love for Linux, I've enthusiastically used other #Unix / Unix-like operating systems over the years too, and happily use a Mac desktop these days – it's all ok by me.

I was so fortunate to have a really good friend with a cool older sister who was well-tuned-in to 3RRR (thank you!) and, through her, we learnt about all sorts of great bands I might have otherwise missed at the time. The incongruous nature of an English band singing about driving didn't escape me, but they nailed the sound and the chaos so well that it just didn't matter. I'll never forget the 3RRR rooftop gig they did when they toured Melbourne in 1998.

I still have the mix tapes my friend gave me, in a box in the garage (not far from a walkman or two). I'm scared to revisit them, as they shaped so much of my musical leanings, and I know I'll be so intimately familiar with the order of the songs. Years later I discovered that Adam Franklin continued to make music on his own, plenty of it great! The new Swervedriver stuff isn't bad, either – I'm particularly keen on Dub Wound for reasons unknown.

#music #90s #swervedriver #shoegaze #memories

This was a post from Cos.

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There are tiny hints amongst the blankness – subtle things, not the wall-high scrawls – I appreciate the little notes.

Remnants of another milk bar that succumbed to the ravages of our times, though I struggle to remember the particular nature of this one.

Really, it's just nice to be out, seeing nothing in particular.

Musical accompaniment was something new (competely unheard) and something old (but not listened to for a long time):

• Nat Vazer's Is this offensive and loud?.
• Luna's first album Lunapark, having just discovered the demos.

#Preston #walks #photography #music

This was a post from Cos.

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