I've spent the last few weeks getting acquainted with new music (the Berlin + Boxing Day hauls) and reacquainted with old music (the long overdue filing of most of my CD's into space-saving binders). I've learned that Branca rules it, Talk Talk's "Laughing Stock" is no "Spirit of Eden", Rhythm and Sound have done it again, As One's "21st Century Soul" delivers the Detroit techno soul goods, Fennesz's "Live in Japan" rocks your universe, Vertical Form is a hit-or-miss label, and so on.

And Pluramon's "Dreams Top Rock" is NOT all that. After reading mountains of praise about beautiful guitarscapes, post-shoegaze gossamer, the rightful follow-up to Loveless, etc., my heart started beating faster and I searched all over Berlin to no avail. Finally, I found it back home, and it's good, but ... come on people.

The five CD random play method has been my listening proceedure of choice during the last couple of weeks. I've been playing one game with it in particular, let's call it the Similarity Game for lack of a better title. Example: I put in CD1 of Aphex's "Druqs", along with work by Bochum Welt and Eight Frozen Modules (plus two other discs which aren't part of the game). When I mashed all of their work together in the random play format, a) on initial listen, I started to forget who is who, b) upon checking the liner notes, I noticed that I the BW and EFM stuff better, causing me to wonder what happened to Aphex Twin's glory years. Who needs Aphex when you have BW and EFM -- they're doing far better impressions of classic Aphex than Aphex is himself these days.

Similarly, Pluramon shared space in the carousel with the "Projekt 100 : The Early Years 1985-1995" compiliation. Stunning, synth-as-guitar-drone material (mid 90's Dubstar also did this well, but in a completely different style, of course) went blow-for-blow against "Dreams Top Rock". Pluramon's album is far more than a curio, it's an inventive experiment that blends guitar, glitch, and the long-forgotten Julee Cruise and it succeeds most of the time. But it's certainly not a classic. As far as being "what MBV should have done after Loveless", Bowery Electric's "Beat" and Third Eye Foundation's "Semtex" have already covered that ground quite nicely.

As for the real thing -- is an Oscar nomination on Kevin Shields' horizon? If Elliot Smith and Eminem can get nominated, then why not Kevin? I'm strongly rooting for "Lost in Translation" for this year's Oscars. Kevin performing on the Oscars would be one of those Surreal Moment You'd Never Imagine You Would Ever See, kind of like Kraftwerk on the MTV Europe Video Awards.