Cool Stuff For Cool Lifeforms: October 2022

I didn’t do a September edition of Cool Stuff because I don’t write articles in September. Never have and never will. That’s just a little fact about me. For October 2022, we have some especially cool stuff, including some television, a little bit of music, and a book. And all of the stuff is extra cool to make up for missing last month. Aren’t you lucky?

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It’s weird to think of them this way, but the members of Gilla Band are perfectionists. Yes, they’re loud and chaotic and their singer kinda can’t sing (but in the best way possible), but it’s all meticulous. Their sound is essentially unchanged through three LPs, yet each album still feels unique and fresh. The same ingredients, but three separate dishes. And it only works because they are perfectionists.

They build their songs out from drums and vocals, creating songs that feel skeletal until waves of noise burst from their guitars until bass devours the space like it’s a movie monster eating an entire city block. There’s rarely a melody. The music itself is more texture than discernable notes. The drumming is persistent. All of this should result in something formulaic at this point except for one thing — perfection. No note or beat or lyric is wasted. There’s no filler here — not in tracks and not in arrangement. They distill each moment into the purist version of their sound, unrelenting and bordering on psychosis. Each and every moment is perfectly placed. That’s pretty rad, right?

If you ever woke up and said, “I love The Books, but I wish they rocked more,” then do I have the album for you? It’s called Paste, and it’s from the band Moin. And they have created an album full of weird, ominous vocal samples and hypnotic post-punk. The star here is percussionist Valentina Magaletti, who is simply one of the best drummers in rock. Every song moves along the surface of her percussion like continents moving along plate tectonics. That is to say, the movement is constant but it never rushes. With sampled vocals replacing a traditional lead singer, the drums sometimes operate as the lead, guitars, and synths clearing the way for the vocal inflections of the snare and hi-hat. I don’t even know what that fucking means, but when you listen to the album, it feels like the drums are speaking to you, and you want to decode what they have to say.

I usually avoid recent bestsellers because I’m a pretentious asshole (I prefer to read popular books after everyone else has stopped caring about them), but I’m glad I checked out this one because it has it all. It’s composed of several stories across many centuries that are all connected by a fictional found text called “Cloud Cuckoo Island”. This shit is made of stories branching historical fiction, contemporary fiction, fantasy, and sci-fi, all tied together by a forgotten Greek classic found in 15th-century Constantinople. More often than not, the stories in this book are heartbreaking, but instead of wallowing in each of their tragedies, the characters choose to go on and choose a path of optimism that borders on religious faith. That’s what makes this novel really hit. We live in a world that seems hopeless at times, yet the only sane thing to do is choose to go on with the belief that things will get better eventually if we just wait out the bad. Anthony Doerr breaks our hearts so the small triumphs his characters experience feel that much grander.

Pantheon handles uploaded consciousness better than any other book, show, or movie on the subject, somehow handling the concept on both a micro and macro level simultaneously. It shows both the real-world emotion of someone you love being uploaded into a network and the worldwide implications of such a technology. It’s usually fairly difficult to handle subjects narrow and wide at the same time, but this show manages to do it by having the micro and macro plots be one and the same. The characters dealing with all the issues around uploading are also the ones who have an impact on what uploading would mean to the world at large. By combining large-scale and personal plots, we get both the exhilaration of watching these characters trying to change the world, all while real, personal stakes are on the line.

At the heart of the story is a complicated glitch that causes uploaded consciousnesses to decay over time, akin to degenerative disorders like Parkinson’s. And due to the personal nature of the story, fixing this bug feels less like sci-fi “we gotta save humanity from the technology of our own making” and more like a race to find a cure that will help characters you grow to love over the season’s 8 episodes. It’s hard to make a series about corporate conspiracies and big tech feel personal, but Pantheon never loses sight of humanity even when a good chunk of the show takes place in a virtual world. There are a billion big ideas and concepts in this show, yet it’s always about the connections between people who love each other or grow to love each other. That’s pretty cool for a sci-fi show.

I won’t say much about For All Mankind because it’s already a popular show, but I have to bring it up because it’s also the best show currently on television. If you don’t know, it takes place in an alternate history where the Soviet Union lands on the moon first. And then the entire path of space exploration changes from there. This show is filled with big, shocking moments and heart-fucking personal moments. Just go watch it. It’s amazing, and you already got Apple+ to watch Ted Lasso and Severance. Maybe use it for the actual best show. Bad Sisters is on there, too, and that’s also pretty good. There you go. That’s a bonus rec for October 2022.

Okay, that’s enough for you. Remember that if you like something, tell people about it.