August Record Club - current event nominatiions

Acid Bath - Paegan Terrorism Tactics (1996)
Houma, LA sludge/doom act

Low Res - Approximate Love Boat (1998)
The concept behind this instrumental electronic album: extraterrestrials surreptitiously record reams of music and sound from Earth but on the return voyage the files are accidentally deleted. This is their attempt to recreate them. Relevant to our age of streaming consolidation and increasing loss of physical media.
 

Now is the time to succeed.

Ministry, "ΚΕΦΑΛΗΞΘ" (aka Psalm 69: The Way to Succeed and the Way to Suck Eggs)

David Bowie, Blackstar. Bowie’s death at the beginning of January 2016 is often given as the moment the wheels came off of everything in our society, so why not go back to the end/beginning?

Talking Heads, Remain in Light. I actually thought of this one because of the cover—making those computer-generated portraits of the four, overlaid on their faces as masks. The product’s very rough, the process very computationally and energy-intensive—I don’t think it’s accurate to say it’s a distant ancestor of generative AI but computer illustration—the thing that threatens to be forced out by gen AI—was at a similar place then as now (eta: oh there’s something new with Eno out too). There’s definitely something “recognizable” about the proto-globalized free-association that was put into the music’s composition, there’s the merger of consumerism and the subconscious in “Once in a Lifetime,” if the songs have messages they’re ambiguous, positive or negative depending on your position or what you want to take from them, all very familiar feelings on the internet today.