Image: Raf Simons Isolated Heroes (via Raf Simons Redux)
First playlist of the year: 'Revelations (first movement)'.
Here's where this all comes from:
Bunny Sigler - Shake Your Booty : as sampled by Kanye West for Pusha T
Burial - Come Down to Us: one of the best tracks of 2013 (late pass)
Carcass - Incarnated Solvent Abuse: I rediscovered Carcass after rediscovering Matthew Barney's work and remembering an interview with Björk where she said the only time she and her husband Matthew fought was over the car stereo (Matthew insisted on playing Carcass all the time).
Souge, Kaze, Zoukibayashi - soundtrack for Murakami's Norwegian Wood by Johnny Greenwood. I hope Johnny Greenwood makes more soundtracks this year: his own compositions for 'The Master' and his extended versions of that work are such powerful pieces. (And a great soundtrack to subway rides.)
Michel Rubini: his vampire soundtrack for 'The Hunger' was used to score Rick Owens' latest runway feat.
ceo - Whorehouse: I still miss this guys's previous band (The Tough Alliance), but this is a great new, weird, wobbly track
Lou Rawls - lifetime monologue: produced by the great David Axelrod, whose work is never far at the KNOTORYUS household.
Charles Mingus - Revelations (first movement): I picked up a second hand copy of a Mingus biography when I was in London recently, so I decided to school myself in his music first. This track inspired the whole playlist, really.
Shoolboy Q - Man of the Year: great track, nothing more needed
David Shrigley - Don'ts: "Don't climb inside old freezers in the junkyard, don't put your nephew in the microwave, don't try to swim to the island, don't shut your eyes while you're driving, don't stab people with dirty syringes. There is no such things as a metal frisbee. And above all: don't train scorpions." It's that last sentence that made this track pop back into my head. I was reading Norman Mailer's "Ancient Evenings" about ancient Egypt and there's an anecdote about the Egyptian Goddess Isis (You know, the tattoo below Rihanna's boobs) training scorpions to protect her husband Osiris. Isis' followers, Pharao's wives and priestesses, who would train scorpions to sit still on all seven orifices of their bodies. Great party trick.