Once again the difficult task of trying to summarize an entire year in a few events. I could start stating that if I don’t remember it it’s because it was not so great, but things are a bit more complex than that. Most of the time the recollection of a distant event is strongly attached to its surroundings, an event it’s not only the thing in itself but a complex amalgam, a spot in the general zeitgeist, fuzzy but somehow also remarkable.
Let me start then with in-house releases. It was an excellent and venturous year for Crónica, lots of new experiments made our editing activities much more interesting. It’s a hard job to pick something out from the music your own label is releasing, once again time is tricky as we listen to the releases with much time in advance. By the time they finally come out they’re already buried under hundreds of other memories, they sort of pop up again as a finished piece of work.
We opened the year with @c’s excellent Up, Down, Charm, Strange, Top, Bottom, a hell of a way to start a highlight list and in its own title a full range range of possibilities. Great releases also from Cem Güney and Gilles Aubry and my own personal favorite from 2008, Pure’s Ification, amazing record in a remarkable cover artwork by Jan Rohlf. Last but not least, a few more label related highlights from Gintas K and Marc Behrens, you’ll have to wait to 2009 to be able to listen to these ones, and the amazing The Torch Press, an unreleased work in progress from Sabisha Friedberg.
Also sound related but as a multidimensional installation, Filmachine, the world premiere of a great piece by Keiichiro Shibuya and Takashi Ikegami at Podewlls’sches Palais in Berlin, as part of Transmediale.08. Also a great live by Keiichiro at Marius Watz Generator.x 2.0 project for CTM.08, the visuals set me back a little bit, but his cellular automata based digital noise was really challenging if not superb. If you are in Berlin, check out the Atak night 4 at CTM.09, on the 26th of January, Keiichiro, Tone, Evala and Pan Sonic are playing. Marius Watz’s The Generator.X 2.0: Beyond The Screen at the DAM, in Berlin, was also a nice exhibition with interesting work on digital fabrication by a plethora of major players in the field, even being the output of a workshop the show was pretty much alright, and as a plus Bruce Sterling was there, too bad I’d forgotten my copy of Shaping Things at home.
Enter the summer holidays’ record. This summer while traveling south for a summer break at the beach we listened a lot to Deutsche Gramophon Recomposed, a 2006 record by Jimi Tenor to Deutsche Gramophon, it was a present from our friend Michael Hudler, its eery but in a charming way, and definitely a highlight in a memorable holiday trip with my family. On a very different level, or maybe not, another highlight from 2008 was a late September great night out, hoping from bar to bar in Berlin with Sebastian Schipper the german director of Absolute Giganten (fame). He is a good friend of my girlfriend and an awesome mate to go out with, we even accidentally run through Julia Hummer (legendary Telsa) at the last bar. It was a hell of night with incredible stories. Looking forward to see Mitte Ende August, Sebastian’s late movie.
Ben Fry’s All Streets tops up as my favorite artwork from 2008, it’s basically a visualization of the lower 48 United States comprising 26 million individual road segments in an image map, a simple concept and a superb result. I would also like to point out the Audience, an installation for the Deloitte Ignite festival at the Royal Opera House by rAndom International with and Chris O’Shea. The playfulness of the piece is simply astonishing.
Didn’t went to the cinema much, but No Country for Old Men was definitely a must in the so-called commercial market. I remember the film as an almost-too-abstract-to-be-popular movie but people seemed to have enjoyed it a lot, maybe it was the haircut. On another angle, in a very strict niche that only Peter Greenway seems to fulfill and that I like to call theatre-better-than-theatre, I was absolutely delighted with Nightwatching, the film is from 2007 but it was only released here in 2008. It was also great to see Generation Kill, a seven-part miniseries created by David Simon (The Wire) for HBO films, unlike my friends I was smart enough to save the last season of The Wire for a rainy day.
I listen to a lot of techno, maybe I’m the only one in the label that does it on a regular basis. Ricardo Villalobos didn’t let us down in 2008, as far as I’m concerned is one of the most creative artists under the techno/not techno genre, his Vasco release and subsequent EPs are, as usual, excellent music. A revelation in 2008, at least for me, was without a shadow of a doubt Matthew Edwards, both as Radio Slave and as Rekids label owner, the entire output of Radio Slave in 2008 is so good that I don’t really know what to point out. Sis (Burak Sar) output in 2008 as also been interesting to listen to. Rekids, Oslo and Ostgut figure as my favorite dance labels of 2008. Still in the dance-floor, I would also like to stand out Dj Koze’s remixes for Matias Aguayo’s Minimal and for Sascha Funke’s Mango, plus of course Dubfire’s Terror Planet remix for Radio Slave’s Grindhouse. I mean, Dj Koze is not only a phenomenal remixer, his Let’s Love on Let’s Love for IRR is probably my favorite techno track of the year.
Didn’t read much fiction in 2008, apart from blogs—some are pretty fictional as well, but I must say that the last William Gibson novel, Spook Country, wasn’t a let down. Maybe not as sharp as Pattern Recognition but still pretty spot on. Even as I spend more than 30% of my days reading and writing it’s curious how little I remember, maybe it’s because of the fragmented nature of what I read, it’s mainly research related stuff so it pretty much feels like an endlessly long book. Oh well, memory is definitely tricky. Well, I’m pretty sure some interesting stuff was left out but the rant is already too long. Thank you for reading and see you next year.