Carl Hagmann

Today I release into the world a set of 23 songs completed over the course of the past year. Between a baby boy underfoot and an ever-expanding role for data science at work in Perlu and SEO, I’ve seriously neglected this blog. Instead of offering a Best of 2018 list of other peoples’ music, here are my best of 2018. Before you dive in, heed this couplet: From my head to your ears, embrace the noises, some are weird.

If you’re curious what’s in store for America in 2017 and beyond, or aghast at the accusations of treason and blackmail flying around the Trump transition team, it’s worth studying up on Vladimir Putin. President Putin is the man Trump publicly admires so much that he’s willing to gainsay the entire US intelligence apparatus in order to give Putin cover for a massive disinformation operation in the 2016 election. The Russian state-controlled media is the model for Trump’s alt-right buddies at Brietbart, which continually sows seeds of doubt about mainstream news and anyone taking a stand against Trump. I hate to say it, but I won’t be surprised if, within two years, there is a major terrorist attack that Trump uses to frighten and militarize America even further while abandoning our commitments to Europe and the Middle East.

This album has it all: Tight riffs, odd-time signatures, moments of clarity and peacefulness mixed with impossibly heavy tribal rhythms. The middle song, Fire is the End Lesson, reaches peak Neurosis with its complex and interwoven rhythms giving way to a big broad sinister melody. I always have high expectations for Deftones albums and Gore does a good job of pushing the boundaries of what a Deftones song can be. Magma, I can’t listen to this record on repeat and I’m not left wanting more afterwards.

Following the election of Donald Trump to the American presidency, many liberals (myself including) are struggling to understand what went so wrong that Hillary Clinton could lose the electoral college to Trump. There’s plenty of blame going around, from the FBI and Wikileaks’ death-by-a-thousand-leaks, to Hillary’s own inability to convince working class Democrats to like her enough to go vote, to the fact that a populist authoritarian figure is more energizing than a polarizing establishment figure urging continuation of the current administration. I noticed that “Dear Liberals” was trending on Twitter, so I queried tweets containing that phrase over four days, November 8-11. On election night, the fact that Trump appeared to win elicted a collective “FUCK” from tweets containing “Dear Liberals.