Boys of summer

OK, I think I've had my Sparks fill for now. Just in time to celebrate the new album by perennial 'blague fave Windsurf, whose retro-futurist cosmic beach jams never fail to take me to a place of sonic bliss. This is the title track of their latest, and though the video has been around a while, I can't help but not share it, so deftly does it capture that jumbled, subjective '80s mutation that is at the heart of their aesthetic. I really can't get enough of this stuff.

My way on the highway

If I'm not careful, I'm gonna exhaust all my summer signifiers before we even hit July. Ah well. I'm hitting the road for the year's first weekend upstate, and that means getting prepped for sundazed happiness. It also means driving music, and picking tunes for that never gets old.

Violens - Der Microarc

Looking up at the sky some more

When the weather suddenly says "summer", music inevitably follows. My mind goes to songs for laying in the grass looking up at the big blue. Here's one from a score that a youngish David Byrne did for Twyla Tharpe's Catherine Wheel dance piece. I have to say, for all of Byrne's tastemakerly stature these days, he really had a groove in that Eno/Remain in Light period that he has never come close to achieving in the decades since. I do applaud his bicycle advocacy however.

David Byrne - Ade

Looking up at the gauzy sky

Drone-y type music comes in 2 general varieties. There's one kind that makes you keenly aware of the terror of forever, where the sense of endlessness actually creates an unbearable vertigo, and you just desperately want to to believe there's some kind of life outside that frame. And there's the kind that gently helps you disengage from your sense of time, opening your ears to a world of space and all the textural, unhurried pleasures that brings. This tune doesn't conjure either extreme, but it is a nice n' poppy easygoing approximation of the latter. Healthy, jaunty fare for well-functioning transit systems.

Lotus Plaza - Jet Out Of The Tundra

Hits of sunshine

Is it trite to get all summer song-y when the heat comes to town? And woodland-y on top of that? Maybe, and who cares. Here's some music for romping around under canopies of leaves, sunlight flickering between the sturdy trees, a little stain on the brain. How about a double shot?

The Impossible Shapes - Florida Silver Springs
The Impossible Shapes - Fulgent Fields

Into the woods

Safe in the arms of workday air-conditioning, I'm free to entertain my delusions of being an expert camper and nature-wanderer. I can forget inconvenient truths like allergies, my short attention span for dirt, and a mortal fear of sleeping near fire. But fictitious camping trips need real songs, and here's one I'd crank in the car, or at least while packing. I don't know much about these Wye Oak folks, but I dig the bong hit n' run dreaminess they've got going here. Also, I really like album covers where people are pointing at things.

Wye Oak - Warning