Once more, dear friends, it’s time for me to remark that time has really flown this year, and that it seems as if I had only written last year’s one of these a couple of days ago.
Yep, 2023 went fast. It’s been a good year in a lot of ways, and absolutely atrocious in many others. The world continues to go to shit, and so I continue in my mission of providing distraction to those who enjoy it (thankfully, a treasured few do) through writing up what I consumed this year, culturally speaking. If this isn’t you, then punch out now. I’m not sure if this one’s going to be as long as previous editions, but let’s give it a whirl, shall we?
Previous versions are here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here if you need an introduction.
Music
I’ve recently remounted the ripped-music horse, and have started moving everything from my (stupid-sized) Bandcamp library onto a local server so that there’s some kind of redundancy built into where it’s housed. This began with a tedious session of per-disk upgrade (3TB to 6TB) in my superannuated Synology NAS, which in turn necessitated days-long filesystem rebuilds (again per-disk) before giving me a bigger space to play in. I picked up a tiny ex-office NUC system, put Ubuntu on it (which involved a lot more terminal and long-forgotten command-line stuff than I had anticipated) and set up Plex to manage the movies already on the server. Eventually, I’ll add an ebook server and centralise my digital consumables there, perhaps with backup to cold storage to avoid dramatic bullshit ever again.
I’ve been using Swinsian to organise the music I tag and copy over. It was quite nice to rediscover it, and it’s since become my go-to application for non-Apple Music listening. (The version available on the website isn’t the latest, mind: the beta versions are excellent and offer much more.) I use it when I’m on the computer (work, mostly) and use Plexamp to play stuff when I’m either lounging around or am out and about. It’s a bit of a clunky solution, but it’s one that does everything I need (and, importantly, scrobbles the all-important data to Last.fm).
I’ couldn’t say that it felt like I listened to more or less music in 2023, but I do feel that I cast a bit of a wider net than I otherwise would. According to my Last.fm account I’m sitting at about 224k scrobbles, which indicates that I listened to roughly 16k tunes over the year. That’s 3000 more songs than in 2022, and 5000 more than 2021.
Here’s how LastWave views 2023.
Statistically speaking (thanks) these are the musical facts of my recent listenings:
- I’ve listened to 2528 unique artists, 21% of all artists I’ve ever listened to.
- I’ve listened to 1660 unique albums, 9% of unique albums I’ve heard overall.
- I’ve listened to 13584 unique tracks, 14% of the unique tracks I’ve heard, ever.
This means I’ve listened to more albums, more artists and more unique tracks this year than last year. And here was I thinking 2023 would be a year of underachievement?!
2023’s top 20 albums by tracks played:
The Beatles: Anthology Box Set; Various Artists: Krautrock: Music For Your Brain; Various Artists: Nuggets: Original Artyfacts from the First Psychedelic Era 1965–1968; Various Artists: Nuggets II: Original Artyfacts from the British Empire and Beyond 1964–1969; Various Artists: Trash Box; Shiro Sagisu: EVANGELION:1.0 YOU ARE (NOT) ALONE. (Original Soundtrack); Jeroen van Veen: Minimal Piano Collection; András Schiff: J.S. Bach: Das wohltemperierte Clavier; Martin Jones: Debussy: Complete Piano Music; Pierre Boulez: Bartók; Jeroen van Veen et al: Minimal Piano Collection Volume X-XX: Compositions for 2 to 6 Pianos; Ryoji Ikeda: Dataplex; The Beatles: Live at the BBC; The Beatles: Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (Superdeluxe Version); Various Artists: People Take Warning! – Murder Ballads & Disaster Songs, 1913-1938; Oneohtrix Point Never: Rifts; Various Artists: Fonotone Records (1956-1969); Sun Ra: Singles: The Definitive 45s Collection, Vol. 1: 1952-1961; Tangerine Dream: In Search of Hades: The Virgin Recordings 1973-1979 and The Beatles: On Air: Live At The BBC, Vol. 2.
(Click the links to hear the albums.)
For a more visual overview of what I listened to this year (along with a bunch more albums), cop a load of this, thanks to NeverEndingChartRendering:
(Click to zoom in.)
Similar to last year, it’s collections and deluxe versions of albums that dominate, or albums that feature a lot of tracks in general. I guess it shows just how much I needed to play Ryoji Ikeda to get him into the top bracket: I must admit after seeing an installation of his at MONA during this year’s trip to Tasmania had me a little obsessed. Nice to see that Nuggets is still in my ears, though I must admit that it was pleasant to rediscover John Zorn’s Masada works since the Great Disk Crash: a happy side-effect of Tzadik’s catalogue finally hitting streaming services.
Once again I contributed to Cyclic Defrost only as part of their year-end round-up, for which I submitted some albums and a couple of books. (I’m hoping to write more actual reviews in 2024, but the road to hell etc etc.) The whole list is here, and is well, well worth your time.
Below, I’ve listed albums that I really enjoyed in 2023 (though not necessarily albums that were released in 2023), some of which come from the Cyclic Defrost submission. These stuck in my mind for some reason, so why not have at ’em?
- Khanate: To Be Cruel (also my album of the year because MY GOD.)
- Bill Orcutt: Music for Four Guitars
- Blood Incantation: Timewave Zero
- Illusion of Safety: Organ Choir Drone
- Meitei: Kwaidan (5th Anniversary Edition)
- Paul Motian, Bill Frisell and Joe Lovano: I Have the Room Above Her
- Miles Davis: Big Fun
- Neutraliser: Capsule Bowed Space
- Jute Gyte: Unus Mundus Patet
- Krallice: Krallice.
I’ve also started using my long-dormant RYM account to rate albums as I listen to them, so you can follow along here. (It’s also a great jumping-off point for albums to listen to: check out some of the lists I’ve saved for inspiration.)
Gigs
There were a couple of great gigs on in 2023, and I was surprised at how much stuff we managed to get to, even from the middle of nowhere. And there were some great gigs (Drowning Horse, Extortion and Ironhawk for Dark Mofo was off the fucking hook and stupidly great fun) and some bloody awful gigs (Night Mass at Dark Mofo was atrocious, like a happening organised by first-year Fine Arts students who’d just moved out of home). Which is, I guess, par for the course.
2023 also ended up being the year that I finally saw a Beatle. Yep, we paid through the nose for nosebleeds and saw Paul McCartney on his surprisingly quick-to-eventuate tour through Australia. And look, I’m not going to link video because I think it does a disservice to the show: it’s hard to rank someone like McCartney (he of the dreaded “woo!”) in terms of a regular show because he exists in a curiously rarefied stratum: half of one of the most influential songwriting teams in history. Also, it’s a fact that the guy’s old and his voice isn’t as great as it was even on his last spin through the company. But he’s up there, playing and singing his own stuff (hello, Roger Waters’ miming) with a great band that plays to his strengths. The goodwill generated at these shows is ridiculous, and overrides the occasional weaknesses, I guess that’s the important thing to take home from the shows: it felt like a great time, and with a setlist like this, you’d be a picky fucker to not find your personal banger in there.
I also managed to catch Kraftwerk, who managed to sound magisterial while looking like they were checking email. I’d seen them before, but this show was just as good – they were playing a festival-style set with some longer excursions into jamming, which was a pleasant surprise. I’m into bands that commit to the bit, and in terms of machines making music, these guys are the Gilbert & George of Dusseldorf.
(Eve described them as the Blue Man Group and honestly I can’t shake the image now.)
On the same trip to Sydney, I saw Morrissey. (I know, I know.) It was part of his 40 Years of Morrissey tour, which I assume is some kind of money-in-the-bag trip. While my support didn’t extend to buying his recent albums or any merch (I mean, the only Morrissey merch I’m after is one of those Shut Up, Morrissey bags) I did hit this gig with the proviso that it would be my last time. I am aware this is rationalising support of a man who, in terms of pissing away the goodwill of his fanbase, is the musical equivalent of J. K. Rowling, but I figured that this tour was the most likely chance that I’d see him in good and potentially non-racist form. (Well, conversational intimations of London being “different now” notwithstanding.)
Incredibly, this turned out to be correct. The band was great, the man was in fine voice (and even, shockingly, a good mood?) and I thoroughly enjoyed the career-spanning setlist. He had recovered from his petulant Perth cancellation (because he was listed as a nostalgia act apparently), and would go on to cancel Auckland’s slot the next week, but for one evening it was about the music and self deprecation and I was an arts student again. It was glorious, and I’ll never see him again, and oh, I picked up COVID from the sniffling bloke next to me. So I guess there is karmic retribution to some degree.
My pick for the gig of the year, however, was a local one: Gareth Liddiard playing an acoustic set in support of Strange Tourist. The tour was also a bit of a fundraiser for Liddiard’s bandmate and partner, Fiona Kitschin, who is undergoing cancer treatment, and an attempt to get him out on the road because I imagine being home with Gaz 24/7 is fucking HECTIC.
Anyway, the show was one of the best things I’ve seen in a long while: most of one of my favourite albums was played, with some Fahey-esque extension, as well as some key Drones and Tropical Fuck Storm songs. The banter was good (the interplay with the soundo especially) and the support (Jess Ribeiro) was as wry and talented as the headliner. It was one of those gigs I wasn’t hugely thrilled about going to (not because of the show, but because of general tiredness) that then turned into one of the best musical experiences of the year. A real delight, and once again a reminder that the man is one of the most ridiculously talented lyricists Australia has produced.
Podcasts
As I stopped being Millthorpe’s crossing guy, I had a lot less time to listen to podcasts. I still kept up with Matt Bevan’s If You’re Listening, Behind the Bastards and Kowabana, and added a couple more: Sad Oligarch (about the spate of oligarch ‘deaths’ in Russia), If Books Could Kill (about the deleterious effect of airport bestsellers, but with sass), and the delightfully titled Who Shat On The Floor At My Wedding? (which does what it says on the tin). A bit of a holding pattern compared to other years, then.
Books
Once more, I planned 2023’s reads on the first day of the year. Once more I kept my suggested book numbers in line with the year: 23 for 2023. How did I go? Well, here’s what I managed to cross off the list:
Look, it felt pretty good to see how many things I crossed off. I am particularly proud of the amount of James Joyce I got through, even though Finnegans Wake becomes 2024’s problem (and will likely take most of the year to get through).
Anything I didn’t get through will be added to my continually growing TBR page, where they will be linked when reviewed. If you’re interested in what I read in 2023, you can read those reviews by using this tag.
Through the year I read 63 books, covering about 24,000 pages. This is more than last year by about 3000 pages, though this is probably due to my insistence on reading ridiculously large novels. (The median book size was just over 400 pages.)
My average rating for books this year was again 3.8, so my meh levels are holding steady, Captain. According to TheStoryGraph I have preferred reflective, dark and adventurous books this year.
Using data gleaned from Book Riot’s tracking spreadsheet, I can say that I read mostly physical books (54%), I listened to four days’ worth of audiobooks, and I spent 11 days per book, on average. Fiction made up 86% of my intake, and almost a third of what I read was in translation. Seven books on the list were read as buddy reads through TSG, which is a great way to have conversations about books without the palaver of an actual book club (or Teams call).
Here’s how the reading itself panned out:
The books I really loved this year – from those I read, at least – were, in no particular order:
- Alan Moore: Jerusalem
- James Morrison: Gibbons
- Carlos Fuentes: Terra Nostra
- Cormac McCarthy: Blood Meridian
- Olga Tokarczuk: Drive Your Plow Over The Bones Of The Dead
- Shirley Jackson: The Lottery and Other Stories
- Doireann Ní Ghríofa: A Ghost in the Throat
- B. R. Yeager: Negative Space
- Michael Winkler: Grimmish
- James Joyce: Ulysses (again)
(If you wish to contribute to this part of the write-up, feel free to buy me something from here. Or raid it for things you might like.)
Movies
If anything suffered this year, it was my film intake. I didn’t watch that much, honestly, and a lot of what I did watch was stuff I’d seen before. Fuck, I haven’t even seen Barbie or Oppenheimer yet, though I am planning to rectify that before work picks up again.
Looking at the statistics from the year, I watched 69 (nice) films this year, or 1.3 per week. Of these, 13 were repeat viewings, and only three –Cocaine Bear, Infinity Pool and Insidious: The Red Door – were made in 2023. October to December I watched no films, largely because work was really picking up, so I didn’t have the wherewithal to carve out a couple of hours (or when I did, I spent it reading).
In terms of what I really enjoyed this year? Friedkin’s Sorcerer, Tár, The Menu and Penda’s Fen. I had a blast revisiting the Mission Impossible films and I made further inroads into 1970s Italian horror, which I count as time well spent. Then, of course, there’s this, which defies description.
Hoping to get back into the celluloid swim of things in 2024, mind. Until then, you can check out my diary at Letterboxd for snarky write-ups.
TV
Again with the streaming! It’s been a good year for TV, which seems to sit well with elevated levels of busy. My attempt to watch The Simpsons in its entirety reached conclusion earlier this year, though there’s since been another lot of new episodes reached so I’ve got to dive back in. We’re currently working on Bob’s Burgers which is quite delightful, even if I feel as if I’m simultaneously all the characters.
Otherwise? A bloody great year. We caught up on The Bear which is peerless foodporn TV. An instant favourite which somehow made me actually want to go to Chicago. Past favourite Only Murders In The Building continued its run of being a theatre kid’s dream, with MERYL FUCKIN’ STREEP and company making it appear so effortless. Locally speaking, Deadloch was a whodunnit-meets-lesbian-smalltown-portraiture gem that (once it hit its straps) was a joy to watch. And I finally got around to checking out Succession and fuck me, all the things they say about it are true, even if they do hit a little too close to home.
Games
In writing terms, I didn’t get too much up here about games. I certainly feel like I gamed much less than in previous years, but checking through my log there’s a surprising amount here. Admittedly, the first part of the year featured a bunch of replays (I played all the Walking Dead games in order to get prepared for the final season) but I don’t feel I played anything exceptional this year. There were some fun games, and some great ideas, but nothing really stuck with me in that Yakuza 0 kind of way.
I played:
- The Walking Dead Season Two – Not as good as the first of the series, but still worthwhile.
- The Walking Dead: 400 Days – “Here’s how we introduce new characters: the game”.
- The Walking Dead: Michonne – Excellent character sketch, so-so story.
- The Walking Dead: the New Frontier – Irritating Baseball Man Is Irritating. (Featuring Angry Clem.)
- The Walking Dead: the Final Chapter – The send-off the series deserves. Not brilliant, but satisfying.
- Atomic Heart – IN SOVIET RUSSIA STEAM PUNKS YOU. (Good visuals, average gameplay.)
- Soma – What happens when Alien and Bioshock fuck.
- Shadow Warrior 3 – Fuck this game. A very rare DNF for me: there is a limit to wang jokes, apparently.
- Adios – Excellent short game about what happens when you don’t want to dispose of bodies for the Mob any more.
- Observer – Hey, they put Rutger Hauer in my walking simulator!
- Layers of Fear 2 – Looks great, feels unfulfilling. Still, I’m a fan of the studio.
- Dead Island 2 – Was it worth the wait? No. Was it original? No. Is slicing zombies still fun? Yes.
- Saints Row – I don’t get the hate: this one is pretty good compared to the last few. A bit short, though.
I toyed with a bunch of other games (a benefit of the Game Pass/PSN Plus memberships) including Chorus and The Lies of P, but they haven’t stuck enough to warrant in-depth mentions. I’m currently working my way through Alan Wake (a bit late on the uptake, but yeah), Chernobylite (hello, Eastern European jank!) and am about halfway through the most recent AC game, Assassin’s Creed: Mirage.
My pick for the year?
Look, I’m a basic bitch at heart, and if I can run all over some historical landmarks and neckstab people then I’m happy. While I haven’t finished this one yet, I’m enjoying the smaller scale (it certainly feels like ACIII in terms of laying the groundwork for the next big installment) and I have been really enjoying the fact that the modern story is hardly touched upon (so far at least). The setting – Baghdad – is great, and… it just works. I’m in my happy place.
And of course…
While there’s a lot of shit going on in the world over 2023 I’ve been lucky enough to be able to hibernate, for the most part, and I’m grateful that I’m able to do so. It’s safe to say that our 2023 failures as a nation and as an international community are going to cover us in shame in history’s rearview, and we fucking deserve it.
It’s been a busy year work-wise, as I transitioned out of publishing and into proposal writing for construction: having done the latter for a year, now, I feel much more comfortable and capable. I’ve become an advocate for mental health at work, and while I’m a lot busier in general, I feel as if I’m more focused in terms of things I want to do, both in terms of career and personal bullshit.
(Importantly, I hit the bricks on some elements of my life this year that in retrospect weren’t working and it’s good.)
Life is full of options, and while I know people hate self-satisfied bullshit yearly write-ups as bragging horseshit, I feel it’s important to recognise that hard work has paid off. Life is pretty bucolic in my corner, which is excellent, though I do recognise that both Eve and myself have worked pretty hard to get it to this point. I know that’s rare, but after decades of pushing shit uphill, it’s nice to feel that you’re exactly where you’re meant to be.
(Even if you have to get COVID twice in a year to enjoy it.)
OK, show’s over. Go home. You know I’ll be back on this bullshit at the end of 2024.
See you then?
If you made it this far, who the fuck are you?
Yeah nah. 