Nourished by Time - Erotic Probiotic 2

I remember Verlyn Klinkenborg’s book, Several Short Sentences About Writing, and his observation about transitions in writing. Good writing renders transitions unnecessary. The job of good writing is, above all, the job of writing a good sentence. 

Nourished by Time’s Erotic Probiotic 2 is – far and away – my favourite record made in 2023. I love its simplicity, a feature it shares with Sleaford Mods’ UK GRIM, another favourite from 2023. However, it shares its vocabulary with synth-based R&B unlike UK GRIM’s post-punk. I don’t have the vocabulary to draw a line back from Nourished by Time to some sort of progenitor like I can with UK GRIM. I can’t make informed references to Suicide and Frankie Teardrop, for instance. R&B never appealed to me in that way. Maybe because it never appealed to any of the 3 am music nerds in the boy’s hostel in which I lived as a teen-aged student of chemical engineering. Us straight brown men, mostly introverted, brains with bodies attached. It’s brains with bodies attached that get into reading blogs by other brains with bodies attached about records made by more brains with bodies attached. A lifestyle of trawling forums, seeding torrents, trading SanDisk SSDs. This isn’t the natural home of R&B. There was no D’Angelo or Lauryn Hill playing in those 3 am sessions; no Usher, no Alicia Keys, no Beyoncé. 

We were downstream of mostly white English-speaking online subcultures. Each of these subcultures were themselves downstream of a sort of amorphous Americo-European monoculture. We all thought of ourselves as being esoteric individuals with esoteric tastes. B. specialised in black metal, technical death metal, jazz. S. in: shoegaze, folk. Myself in: post-punk, nineties hip-hop, alternative. Each of us esoteric, each of us unique, each of us the same. 

In the decade or so since, we’ve all grown into truly authentic versions of ourselves. There’s few joys in life greater than seeing your childhood friends become fully functioning adults.