The Quixotic Engineer

It’s time once again for a Musical Box post, where I condense a month’s worth of personal recommended listening. However, this month I’ve handed the reigns over to my friend Navneet “Nav” Alang. Nav writes about technology, identity, pop culture and the Internet at Scrawled In Wax. I’ve been a big fan of his blog for quite a while now, and am thrilled that he graciously agreed to guest-blog.

Here are his top picks for this month:

As a regular reader of The Quixotic Engineer, I always look forward to the monthly Musical Box posts – so it’s quite the honour to get to do one myself! My thanks to Matthew. Without further ado, here are some of my recent musical faves.

Mark Kozelek has been making music for over twenty years, first with Red House Painters and most recently with Sun Kil Moon. I loved Sun Kil’s first disc, Ghosts of the Great Highway, and looked forward to their most recent release, April, with a great deal of anticipation. It was worth it. “Moorestown” (above) does a lot to showcase the bittersweet ache at the core of Kozelek’s work, which is littered with tales of love and loss, elation and pain. Fun fact: Kozelek played the bassist of fictional band Stillwater in the film Almost Famous.

I came across Jenny Owen Youngs in a simple 10 or 20 second clip from the second season opener of Weeds. The song, “Fuck Was I” is like much of Youngs’ music: dark, cynical and yet somehow sweet at the same time. It’s an oddly disconcerting yet disarming combination and I’ve literally listened to this track 50 times in the past few weeks. 2005’s Batten the Hatches, which this song is from, is well worth the listen.

Finally, someone combines my love of Indian classical music and long guitar solos! Niladri Kumar has become adept at melding the old and the new and is quickly becoming a rock star in the world of Indian classical, so much so that he has invented his own electric sitar, the ‘Zitar’. This short clip highlights both his virtuosity and capacity to mix rock star flash and classical rigour. Unfortunately, there is much less of Kumar’s more traditional work online, which is a shame as it’s also excellent. If you’re curious, I’d recommend starting with his disc Revelation, which you can hear clips of here.

Finally, in perhaps the most aptly named album I’ve heard in a while, we have From Here We Go Sublime by The Field. It’s spacey, electronic and yet somehow manages to remain remarkably organic and melodic. It’s perfect music for spending late summer evening watching time drift by. The clip here is a fan-made video, but it’s done by the same user responsible for the Girl Talk mashup vids.

That’s it for July, thanks again to Nav and be sure to check out more of his work over at Scrawled In Wax.