With the weight of end-of-year listmaking behind me, I'm back to listening to some older stuff ... such as a CD-R I put together from earlier in the year containing a bunch of artist that I loosely looped together under the spectre of "minimalism". There's hip-hop (Sensational), techno (Motor), psych-drone (Charalambides), and a bunch of S3/Spectrum stuff. That new Charalambides record, "Joy Shapes", somehow ended up here instead of with the rest of my 2004 stuff. That album has been in the back of my mind all year, but I just didn't get around to listening to it that much. It certainly fits in well with the tone (drone?) of most of my top 20. Revisiting it now, I'm reminded that I love it in small doses (20-30 minutes worth) but over an hour and a quarter, the point has been made for me and I start becoming restless. The Tom Carter and Bardo Pond collab has a similar effect on me -- interesting sounds and moods, but the succession of fifteen minute tracks feels too samey after a while.

Not so for the Spectrum material. This stuff hasn't aged a bit, in fact, and the psych-moaning of "Mechanical Man" beat Animal Collective (and their ilk) to the punch ten years early. "Lord Don't Know My Name" and "True Love Will Find You in the End" continue the fine example of "Playing With Fire" by keeping the chord change and note counts low, and "Waves Wash Over Me" is a fine four-word summation of those five particular minutes. And it got better -- Sonic soaked his music in soul a couple of years later and made one of the 90's best albums.