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Happy New Year!! 🎇 🎉 🎆

Here's hoping for a better 2022.

The entry in The Daily Thoreau for Jan 1st includes the following:

"It is for man the seasons and all their fruits exist. The winter was made to concentrate and harden and mature the kernel of his brain, to give tone and firmness and consistency to his thought. Then is the great harvest of the year, the harvest of thought."

I thought that was such a lovely sentiment.

It may be exceptionally mild here (as opposed to the -13° mentioned by Thoreau) but I can certainly take his point. The other seasons are full of much distraction, and certainly would have been more so in his day – planting, tending, harvesting – leaving Winter as an opportunity to focused inwards, to steel oneself against the elements and realise what makes one tick.

Yesterday, I finished reading Selected Ambient Works Volume II by Marc Weidenbaum about Aphes Twin's landmark ambient album. I've mentioned the album previously noting that it was this that caused me to by a CD player back in 1994 when, as a DJ, I was a bit of a vinyl purist.

Reading the book has gotten me back into listening to SAW II having let it drop out of rotation, it really is a good album that has stood the test of time. I thought the book was a bit overwrought in places with superfluous details that barely served as background material, let alone be about the album itself. It was illuminating, however, to read the numerous references to the album in popular culture: TV ads, movies, documentaries, use by dance troupes, etc. It's always weird when something seemingly so niche grows to fill a void that no one knew existed and becomes a force of nature across cultural divides.

While I feel that Aphex Twin largely became a parody of himself (and I haven't liked much of his output post I Care Because You Do) SAW II truly is a classic.

I thought it was about time I added a search function to the Journal; it was an easy enough exercise to copy the Garden search page, change a couple of queries, and make a few layout tweaks. If I'm going to be writing a lot more there it makes sense that I'm able to find things should I want/need to. I've had a 'random entry' feature for a while which is good for resurfacing memories but not specific enough.