The Letter K

[frogworth]

benpeek did it. He gave me K. So I gotta do it now.

K is for:

Kid A, which is the point at which Radiohead started to be really exciting. Easily eclipsing OK Computer, Kid A combines sonic experimentalism (which doesn't, perhaps, match the skill of the electronic artists they admire so much, such as Autechre, but is nevertheless great stuff) with genuinely great songwriting (see "How To Disappear Completely", "Morning Bell" (better than the Amnesiac version). Yay! (Props to them too that even further down the track they commissioned some remixes from Four Tet and Christian Vogel. I hope they continue to get interesting remixes)

kineticfactory, LJ moniker of my good friend acb, and title of a ninetynine song.

Kisses. Kissing is nice. Who doesn't like kissing? People might say they don't like kissing, but they're just dumbasses. They're probably 6-year-olds or something.

James Kochalka, who has a book called Kissers, is a delightful comics artist, whose work takes on more depth as you read more of it. His Sketchbook Diaries go up daily here.

The KLF. Many, if not most, people probably don't realise how great the KLF were. They're probably perceived as a one or three-hit wonder, which they certainly were, but there's a huge amount of depth to their work when you start looking into all the remixes and alternate versions, plus when you realise that Jimmy Cauty was there with the Orb at the start of the whole ambient techno movement, and so on.

Kruder & Dorfmeister have done some of the most wonderful remix work of any artist in the last 10 years or so. Their own work is fairly thin on the ground, but that's ok. Of late I haven't heard a lot out of them, and they've gotten a bit too much into house (especially Underground Resistence) for my taste; when they toured the other year and played at the Enmore Theatre it was rather disappointing - just a long DJ set, playing some old faves but then descending into repetitive house for far too long. Still, I have a great fondness for them.

Kafta, or kofte, or other variant spellings. Yummy Middle-Eastern sausage/rissole type stuff which I enjoy making and eating in all sorts of forms.

Saul Kripke, a pre-eminent philosopher and something of a genius, with whom I suspect I disagree on most issues. A direct descendent from Wittgenstein on various topics, which no doubt is partially the source, since Wittgenstein can be partially blamed for some of the similar rubbish spouting from the Continental philosophers. *heh*

Etgar Keret, a wonderful Israeli author whose contemporary fictions are sometimes fantastical, sometimes just odd, always moving... He gets in, apart from anything else, because I am restricting myself to K last names, so that Ken Macleod and Kelly Link only get mentioned in passing, despite being very special too.

Klezmer, the music of my ancestry, important to me along with gypsy and jazz, as much as various forms of electronica, post-rock, indie, pop, rock and classical. I was aware of it through late school, but only really discovered how cool it can be some years later, as I took up with various muso friends who were forming klezmer & gypsy-related bands like Monsieur Camembert, and started playing with them and writing klezmer-inspired tunes myself.

That's 10 entries, and explanations about why they're important. I'm meant to get you to reply and ask to be given a letter, but by now you've probably seen someone else doing it too. I'm not that keen on propagating memes. But what they hell, go ahead if you like.