My favorite favorite favorite album of the year was Hanazono, the enchanting and hypnotic fourth album from Japanese folk siren Satomimagae. It was basically just guitar and Satomi’s voice, which echoed and reverberated, often in layers, shifting like light and fog, expressing buried passions and shifting emotions. Its gentle power took me deep into a colorful forest of self, near the intersection of Nick Drake and Mazzy Star. On “Houkou” she sang in English: “Looking for someone to follow / Through an empty hole / They move onward / Outside the comforting night has faded away / But you can’t feel it / You aren’t able to sense it / You cannot feel it / The heat inside them.” The song came with a wild and dreamy stop motion animation video by Nonowe Akihito.
I’d been pushing to get started with the documentary about our old activist group, and we set a date for our first shoot. But my old comrade turned out to have some hidden micromanaging tendencies, and things quickly started unraveling. A couple weeks and several uncomfortable zoom meetings later I had no other option than to drop out.
It took two years for Lucinda Chua to follow up the rapturous stillness of her Antidotes 1 EP, and the four songs Antidotes 2 were equally spare — just her spectral vocals, a soupçon of piano and wisps of strings for texture. She sounded like she was singing from inside a dream and the flutter of her butterfly wings surely caused hurricanes on a faraway continent. She reminded me of a half-speed, minimalist Sade, and her quality control was ridiculous, each of the eight songs she has released a cherished keepsake.
I’d been talking to a young Latino guy that looked hot in a wrestling singlet, and one night he texted me that he was laying on the floor of the shower and wanted to come over. Could we meet up somewhere first I asked, and it turned out Akbar had just re-opened, with COVID precautions, like you had to keep a mask on and be escorted to a table before you could drink. My friend Terry was doing the door and we all compared vaccines and joked about them being on the same team because they had both gotten Moderna. The young man was cuddly, delicious and a great kisser and I was surprised I had the willingness and wits to put down a towel down before the final act. And before the month was out my fantasy bestie Tirzah put out “Sink In,” a dizzy, circular song in which “I am sinking / For that feeling … Gonna let myself, gonna trust again, gonna show that I’m okay.”
A falling in love song basically. Not that I was, but I was being shown that I was okay and ready… for something hahaha.