Music
Four Tet: There is Love in You
Ah Four Tet, king of the click, or pop click, clique, off the beaten blip of a tick...tock...dock? or sundry sampled warble, or what can I say? tough transition there for a while, ashes rising from the 2000 dot com crash, a reemergence from lazy house Dj-ing - when every Autechre release was so lauded and scrutinized, and people faux feigned an interest in Libeskind style architecture?…ha…I was digging the classic compositions of Four Tet (Kieran Hebden) and Aphex Twin, Mouse on Mars and Prefuse 73. Well…if uninitiated, god, maybe Tet's sound now is actually a bit retro (or re...de...fined, no apologies) - if not, it's a fucking warm bath (which incidentally I should do, now, take a bath, cause I can't keep any more info in my head....ha, "the first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers"...I do remember that - almost mixed up Four Tet with Boom Bip, one of their remixers for a sec, similar, also quite good, whatevs, music is good. FT deserves better than I can pen.). -C.M.

Music
Shining: Blackjazz
Could say this is like the bastard step child of Albert Ayler or Miles Davis Bitches Brew era and um… Opeth? but it's something even weirder. I hate that I downloaded it too 'cause the album art is worth the admission itself. In brief, looking for something different and have wax to spare in yer ears? Try the darkly frenetic BPMs of Shining and their Blackjazz album. This may not be pure Norweigian Black Metal, but let's praise that blasphemy. -CM

Book
The Lost Books of the Odyssey

Zachary Mason's first novel is a work of some detached genius, really a series of vignettes and imaginative retellings, reinterpretations, and reimaginings of the story of Odysseus, wrapped up and masked as a novel. The stories are not limited to the "lost books" of the Odyssey, the essence of which Mason states in the preface are a translation of papyrus comprising “44 concise variations on Odysseus’ story that omit stock epic formulae in favor of honing a single trope or image down to an extreme of clarity," but rather explore the fates of Achilles, Patroclus, Agamemnon, and Polyphemus the Cyclops, the story in which Odysseus is portrayed as nothing more than a crook and low-rent deceiver who takes advantage of an otherwise, after some initial misunderstanding, gracious host. In "The Iliad of Odysseus," Mason turns the hero into a bard, a feeble man talented at archery but useless at a soldier's close combat, instead slinking away during the apex of battle, inventing lies about himself as a hero along the countryside until the songs he invents eventually return to him. It's a short novel, but Mason's work is well worth the time. -MKL