Filed under: band stuff

Hey all, Brendan here! The buds on the trees outside our kitchen have just shown up in the past few days, and yesterday was the first windows-open-all-day day of the year. The city hasn’t so much creaked back to life as it has settled into cautiously buzzing relief from the snow-shit piles on sidewalks everywhere. Meanwhile the city has been repainting the columns holding up the train tracks near our block, and there’s been huge, clamorous machines up and down the street, thundering away and muscling pedestrians off the sidewalk. They too are starting to go the way of the snow-shit piles, leaving a new coat of paint in their wake. Happy spring.

I’ll be getting back to writing here this season, but first, a quick update: We’ll be playing our last show for a little while on April 12th! In a reversal of the typical band’s seasonal rhythm, we’ll be taking the summer months off to write some new tunes and get the next album together. We’ll have a few things to announce in the meantime, but 4/12 will be our last show for a bit!

Naturally, we’ll be at the illustrious Hart Bar, playing with Chaser, Rope Trick, and Cometa Negra – a stacked bill! Please do come out.

Also, Calley’s main band Star Card will be playing at Hart Bar the day before, right on their birthday. I’ll be on drums as usual. We’ll also be banging out our last set for a bit while we spend the next little while working up some new material. Come to both!

That’s all for now! I’ll be getting back into writing here pretty shortly, and we’ll also have some non-album recordings announced in the coming months, so don’t turn that dial, etc.

Be well & take care of each other.

-B

a website that feels like walking down a dirt road deep in an evergreen forest, and it’s so quiet that your steps are the loudest thing you can hear. the brook contentedly murmurs somewhere deeper in the woods. you know you’ll find it soon.
the brook swells as you approach. it breathes in as you do, slowly. you may bide your time wading, feeling the water’s current excuse-me-pardon-me its way around your ankles as it races downstream. the brook breathes out as you do, slowly, like you’ve earned it.

Filed under: band stuff

(originally posted to Substack)

I’ve been digging Ethan Iverson’s missives here on substack. Those first five Bad Plus albums from ‘03 to ‘08 each had my music friends and I rapt when they came out during our early 20s. (It’s very precious, that kind of experience with someone’s work—following it as it comes out. There is simply no way to replicate this experience of being along for the ride of another group or artist’s trajectory in real-time, hearing them make sense of the same world you’re living through at that moment. Digesting an entire discography is one of my favorite ways to listen to music, but it’s just not the same.)

Here they are, hammering away at Physical Cities, 6 months before a recording of the tune was released. As kids we watched this tour, slack-jawed and dumbstruck, like some law of physics was being defied:

Anyway, I was enjoying a bit of Trane worship from Iverson just now, knowing that he’s more than a couple orders of magnitude more knowledgeable about the subject than me, and digging his account of these Miles/Trane bootlegs. Coltrane being One Of My Main Guys, I am always here for it, and I too will run my mouth about the holy man with anyone in my circles who’s also caught the bug.

The thing is: pound for pound, I don’t have a ton to say on the nuts and bolts of the work itself. I have not worked through any of his pieces, hell I don’t even play jazz. (Listen: I sometimes get a rep among non-jazz-guys for being a jazz guy; this is patently false, much as I wish it were not. I am not being modest—I simply do not have the shit together, end of story.)

One thing that I do carry from my student years, though, is a considerable appreciation for instrumental music in general (mostly from listening and reading history books on my own time, not so much from harmony class). But here’s the thing: I’m a rhythm guy, I kind of can’t do harmony for shit. I’m good for keeping whatever wacky temporal situation moving without much thought—odd time, polyrhythms, non-pulse-based rhythmic situations, weird subdivisions, metric modulation, imitating tape loops, all fine—but my harmonic material is honestly mostly intuitive and quite naive. It’s fine by me, but it does mean that listening to Coltrane is as standing colorblind in front of a Rothko¹.

Like sort of, though. Most music has a few kinds of gifts to give. Some, pardon me, has more.

Coltrane and his work on Earth was something that looked upward. Much of it was, in all ways, towards God. Not as in Christian radio, which is categorically the worst shit you’ve ever heard in your life (although he did come to have a church founded after him). More like devotion to practice—to a practice.

That upward and outward looking quality in his music is audible–you can literally hear it. It is contagious, ecstatic, unbelievable, deeply motivating.

Iverson is worth quoting at length here about these Miles/Coltrane bootlegs from their last tour together:

Some people think Miles sounds great on this tour. He is definitely in good form in general, but I personally think he is playing too long. My speculation is that Miles is forced into offering extra choruses because he knows what is about to happen.

The whole band knows, and the whole band is afraid:

After Miles stops playing, Coltrane is next.

By this point, Coltrane was wearing full regalia. He had it all together, from bebop to the songbook to the blues, and was ready to launch into more exploratory terrain. The band of Davis, Kelly, Chambers, and Cobb was merely state-of-the-art. Coltrane was past state-of-the-art and into the next phase.

On this European tour Trane frequently begins his solo by continuing with whatever idea Miles finished with. To me this scans as humble offering, a way of congratulating his boss: “Sounds good, Miles!”

After that brief name check, Trane enters into a new trance state of otherworldly virtuosity. Nobody played more saxophone anywhere, ever, than Trane on this 1960 Miles tour. Even his own music as a leader to follow isn’t quite like this, for he will have a band of innovative equals and the larger responsibility of delivering the John Coltrane message. On this 1960 Miles tour Trane is still a hired gun—and he isn’t trying to keep the gig, either.

It does not take much at all to hear what he’s describing:

Anyway, this actually wasn’t meant to be a Coltrane post as such. (See, though?). I was thinking about this joy of proximity to greatness that I feel around this stuff.

In time, I’d really like to deepen my understanding of the subject—of harmony in general, of Coltrane’s work, of Monk, Bartók, Debussy, Mingus, Bach, et. al. I’m not sure I’ll have time in this life to offer Giant Steps the years that it asks. But it would be nice.

I’d like to go deep on a lot of stuff, but you can spend a lifetime on analysis, produce no work of your own, and still not cover all the ground you want. You gotta choose how you spend your time.

Still, there is yet a pleasure in simply being in the presence of extreme depth, of taking it in and seeing how far into it you can see. There is great joy in getting close enough to these records to sing parts of them, and in understanding that to listen is to approach an ocean. So much the better when you can see others wading further out, telegraphing the view from inside their diving suits.

It is a pleasure to wade in and try to grasp the deep end, knowing that there’s no way to see all the way down just yet, but dunking your head in and squinting all the same. The stretch is the point.

And the stretch is immensely helpful in keeping oneself going through the punishing and embarrassing indignities of the musician’s life. It reminds you that wherever you’re at in your craft and career, however far you’ve waded out, these folks have swam out much further and found that it’s been good all the way out. It reminds you that music is not a waste of one’s time, it’s a practice older than money, older than law, older than the written word. And that’s some shit right there.

“There is never any end. There are always new sounds to imagine; new feelings to get at. And always, there is the need to keep purifying these feelings and sounds so that we can really see what we’ve discovered in its pure state. So that we can see more and more clearly what we are. In that way, we can give to those who listen the essence, the best of what we are. But to do that at each stage, we have to keep on cleaning the mirror.” -John Coltrane

Thanks for reading.

¹ (Not that Rothko changed painting the way Coltrane changed jazz. But color was pretty much Rothko’s thing. And while Trane’s thing was transcendence, his path out of it was through harmony, not around.)

This album has really been a jolt for me, and has had me rethinking my whole listening situation. God, where to start.

It’s such a soundy record. It reminds me of how little time and space I have carved out in my life right now for focused hi-fi listening. A lot of my listening time is a) while I’m working on stuff at my desk (high fidelity, but half attention), or b) while I’m on my way somewhere (full attention, but earbuds intermittently drowned out by the city unless I’m listening to pop or band music at near max volume). So like, I don’t really have a lot of time or space right now to just luxuriate in music like this. It’s fucked up.

There’s an anxiety and a neurotic urgency in knowing this and stumbling on a record that has all the signifiers of something I know I’d be really into. It’s spare, weird, ambiguous, dark, sensual, both a cold wind and the glow of a night out. I see reviewers mention Photek as a touch point—which, yes, but somehow torn and smeared, made strange.

Part of me keeps reaching for this record over the past weeks just because I haven’t really fallen for a whole album—not really—in a long minute. I’d really like to. My listening habits have been all breadth and no depth these past few years. Part of the deal with grownup life I guess. Fuck that!

There’s a lot of rhythm in this record, but you pretty much can’t nod your head to it. One reviewer says it sounds like he’s rewriting the laws of physics. That’s one way of putting it. To me our waking world of cyclical, pulse-based rhythms feels strongly implied rather than stated outright, and we’re left wandering through this dreamlike collection of, I almost wanna say “propositions,” or I don’t know, echoes of dance music. (The guest vocals from Voice Actor do a great deal to push it further in that direction. If you didn’t catch her four and a half hour release [?!] Sent from My Telephone in 2022 it’s never too late.)

I don’t really hang out in dance music, but I def lurk a bit and love to catch occasional outliers like this. This one’s really hitting for me right now. Out on Modern Love.

listen on youtube

A unique and delightful and really very wholesome recording of some old melodies and tunes for the kantele, a Finnish zither instrument. In 1916, a folk music researcher set out to record Teppana Jänis, a blind kantele player in his 60s who supported himself by playing at dances, schools, and by going door to door. Those sessions yielded 14 wax cylinders and 22 transcriptions.

By modern standards, wax cylinders are pretty unlistenable, sending the music they’re storing into a kind of dormancy. So another kantele player, Arja Kastinen, gathered the recordings and transcriptions, learned the tunes, and put together an album that weaves together the original recordings with her own from 2020.

What you hear in these tracks is the songs themselves flipping back and forth between a modern recording and one from a hundred years ago—same tempo, key, dynamics, etc. Sometimes the two recordings will even play on top of each other for a bit before one or the other takes the foreground again. It’s a really beautiful and profound effect. I can play this album over and over.

listen on bandcamp

Filed under: band stuff

(originally posted to Substack)

Hey all. After a real busy November, we’re settling into a chill December here. Receive has a couple shows this month, but mostly we’re getting on with writing the next album, as yet untitled.

1. Public engagements
2. Maybe I’m a music reviewer now?
3. That’s quite enough

ONE: TWO SHOWS THIS MONTH

Firstly, we’re playing on Thursday the 18th with our bud Gilah and Ded En. Our first time over at Sleepwalk, just a few blocks from our studio space. Tickets are here if Dice is your thing. Come thru!

The next day, we’ll be over in Long Island, playing a Ballpark Figure show at Lithology Brewing, with There Are No Tigers, Screaming from the Gallery, Anna Altman, and Book Spirit. Very stoked for this one!

TWO: SOME THINGS I’VE BEEN INTO

Carrier – Rhythm Immortal

This album has really been a jolt for me, and has had me rethinking my whole listening situation. God, where to start.

It’s such a soundy record. It reminds me of how little time and space I have carved out in my life right now for focused hi-fi listening. A lot of my listening time is a) while I’m working on stuff at my desk (high fidelity, but half attention), or b) while I’m on my way somewhere (full attention, but earbuds intermittently drowned out by the city unless I’m listening to pop or band music at near max volume). So like, I don’t really have a lot of time or space right now to just luxuriate in music like this. It’s fucked up.

There’s an anxiety and a neurotic urgency in knowing this and stumbling on a record that has all the signifiers of something I know I’d be really into. It’s spare, weird, ambiguous, dark, sensual, both a cold wind and the glow of a night out. I see reviewers mention Photek as a touch point—which, yes, but somehow torn and smeared, made strange.

Part of me keeps reaching for this record over the past weeks just because I haven’t really fallen for a whole album—not really—in a long minute. I’d really like to. My listening habits have been all breadth and no depth these past few years. Part of the deal with grownup life I guess. Fuck that!

There’s a lot of rhythm in this record, but you pretty much can’t nod your head to it. One reviewer says it sounds like he’s rewriting the laws of physics. That’s one way of putting it. To me our waking world of cyclical, pulse-based rhythms feels strongly implied rather than stated outright, and we’re left wandering through this dreamlike collection of, I almost wanna say “propositions,” or I don’t know, echoes of dance music. (The guest vocals from Voice Actor do a great deal to push it further in that direction. If you didn’t catch her four and a half hour release [?!] Sent from My Telephone in 2022 it’s never too late.)

I don’t really hang out in dance music, but I def lurk a bit and love to catch occasional outliers like this. This one’s really hitting for me right now. Out on Modern Love.

Teppana Jänis, Arja Kastinen – Teppana Jänis

A unique and delightful and really very wholesome recording of some old melodies and tunes for the kantele, a Finnish zither instrument. In 1916, a folk music researcher set out to record Teppana Jänis, a blind kantele player in his 60s who supported himself by playing at dances, schools, and by going door to door. Those sessions yielded 14 wax cylinders and 22 transcriptions.

By modern standards, wax cylinders are pretty unlistenable, sending the music they’re storing into a kind of dormancy. So another kantele player, Arja Kastinen, gathered the recordings and transcriptions, learned the tunes, and put together an album that weaves together the original recordings with her own from 2020.

What you hear in these tracks is the songs themselves flipping back and forth between a modern recording and one from a hundred years ago—same tempo, key, dynamics, etc. Sometimes the two recordings will even play on top of each other for a bit before one or the other takes the foreground again. It’s a really beautiful and profound effect. I can play this album over and over.

Claire M Singer – Gleann Ciùin

Given the explosion of interest in recent years of composers writing for church organs, one throughline in most of the recordings I’ve heard is a kind of stern, sound designy, “new music” vibe. Do not get me wrong, I love it. And, I understand: This instrument carries some of the heftiest cultural weight than an instrument can. Messing around with it in a modern, secular context can require some drastic reframing, not just in the writing itself, but even in the recording techniques—our traditional perception of the sound of this instrument is the actual literal sound of whatever church it’s built into. To write music that is no longer toward God feels like a wrenching of the instrument from its spiritual and literal home. (Fine by me, but it is what is.)

So, it’s nice to hear something that feels like it’s taking a different direction with that reframing, that assumes it as a starting point, even. This album, out on Touch, feels like it sits well on the shelf next to Azusa Plane, Sigur Rós, Celer. It is deeply sweet music, the kind that I imagine being somewhat at odds with the new minimalists and sound artists. Never one to refuse dessert, I really dig this record.

THREE: ALRIGHT ALRIGHT

Thanks for reading all this. Hope you’re all keeping warm and are set to have a chill holiday.

take care,
B

Given the explosion of interest in recent years of composers writing for church organs, one throughline in most of the recordings I’ve heard is a kind of stern, sound designy, “new music” vibe. Do not get me wrong, I love it. And, I understand: This instrument carries some of the heftiest cultural weight than an instrument can. Messing around with it in a modern, secular context can require some drastic reframing, not just in the writing itself, but even in the recording techniques—our traditional perception of the sound of this instrument is the actual literal sound of whatever church it’s built into. To write music that is no longer toward God feels like a wrenching of the instrument from its spiritual and literal home. (Fine by me, but it is what is.)

So, it’s nice to hear something that feels like it’s taking a different direction with that reframing, that assumes it as a starting point, even. This album, out on Touch, feels like it sits well on the shelf next to Azusa Plane, Sigur Rós, Celer. It is deeply sweet music, the kind that I imagine being somewhat at odds with the new minimalists and sound artists. Never one to refuse dessert, I really dig this record.

listen on bandcamp

I’m halfway through this book now. I first encountered this story via the 2020 film adaptation, which I recommend very highly. (It’s the only full-length directed by Jóhann Jóhannsson, who you know as the score composer for Mandy and Arrival). The movie was adapted from a 1930 British novel, written as a 250 page future-history book spanning hundreds of millions of years. Its first pages recounting the 20th and 21st centuries are delicious for what the author can’t know will happen (WWII, computers). Thereafter it’s delightful for it’s total lack of grounding in anything other than deep time. You turn the page and he spends scarcely a full breath on the ends of cities, continents, species of mankind. I love how humanity as a whole is treated as the central character, going through rise and fall after rise and fall. This book is pure flight.

wikipedia

If you don’t know Nils from Sleepytime Gorilla Museum and Idiot Flesh, you are in for a treat diving into that world. Sleepytime has been back for a minute now and the live situation has always been top tier. But meanwhile, Nils has been plugging away at a broadcasting project of his own, named after an Idiot Flesh album from the early 90s: The Nothing Show.

I’ve been listening through the shows in order – a mixture of biography & oldhead tales, interviews with friends who do cool things & think cool thoughts, and readings from his favorite books (Foucault, Lispector, Burroughs, et. al.). As gifted an orator as he is a composer and singer, each episode is a joy, and I find myself reaching for my pen and notebook several times per episode, eager to garden the page myself. Definitely check out the Patreon.

This was a little minute ago now but seeing Charles Curtis play was a delight. Like probably many others, Curtis’ solo cello work hit my radar through his work with Éliane Radigue and the 2LP set that Saltern put out in 2020. (Come to think of it that album may be how I was put on to Terry Jennings as well, whose tunes I’ve been deeply enamored with for some years now.) Anyway the show was great. It was one of the last hot nights of the summer, and the audience was packed into what looked like a sculptor’s studio near Washington Square Park. The program was Feldman, Wolff, Lucier’s Glacier, and Alison Knowles’ Rice and Beans for Charles Curtis. The Lucier piece stood out for me (one twenty minute glissando, let’s fucking GO), and I see there’s a nice video of him playing this piece a decade ago, but obviously seeing it on a screen surrounded by a bunch of distracting shit is way different than sweating it out in silence with a sold out room full of people. A gift.

Altogether, these findings are leading us to an extraordinary conclusion: Whales may possess a communication system more intricate than our own, one that possibly predates human language by tens of millions of years.

Could do without the “guys, give AI a chance” stuff, but it’s fun to learn of Project CETI‘s existence.

ny times / archive.ph

Star Card's first full-band missive, and my first recording as a drummer.

Filed under: band stuff

(originally posted to Substack)

One of the occupational hazards of growing older is losing touch with feelings like wonderment or curiosity, and that goes double for our current collective hell era. Even given the utter grimness of present day life in America, there must be some small amount of room, somewhere, for such things. I’ve been thinking about the dimensions of that room.

I was going to wait on this one and write about something else instead, but Calley and I just watched Topology of Sirens, and that set a few thoughts in motion for me. The whole thing is on youtube for free, and it’s really good – a delightful movie about a person who discovers a collection of microcassettes, which lead her on a strange trail that points both onward and inward. It is perhaps the most gentle mystery film I’ve ever seen. And, being a story in part about weird instrumental music, it was doubly easy for me to let in, as someone who spent a couple decades working on that music. I don’t want to spoil the experience of figuring out how to watch it, but it is a really nice one. You should check it out.

About halfway through, I started thinking about this abundance of curiousity in the movie, and this lack of awe or amazement. A slow burner, it spends a lot of time lingering on beautiful things. But crucially, no one is falling to their knees in reverence of beauty here. There are no tears or dropped jaws. In their place, there’s just a lot of watching and listening.

It makes me think that, the same way we often confuse inspiration with motivation, I think I’ve also come to confuse wonderment with awe, or amazement. One feels easy to cultivate, whereas the other seems to want to arrive on its own terms.

Meanwhile, I just spent a few days with the bud Andrew Weathers, recording and performing as Tethers for the first time since 2018. We came into these sessions without much of a plan, but with fifteen years of collaboration behind us, we weren’t too worried. We’ve both gone through a number of different creative phases in the time we’ve been hanging out and working together, and we’ve both collected a few past lives in that time as well. It’s a deep thing to have those kinds of friendships, and I think that’s reflected in the music.

In my own creative trajectory, I’ve recently backburnered instrumental music, favoring band life and songwriting. One major shift in this process has been that listening feels totally different. Obviously it’s crucial to listen to your bandmates, but… it’s different from the sculpturesque process of building weird instrumental music.

As Cas, the protagonist of Topology, moves through the film, she spends a lot of time listening, and it reminds me of how so much of the “experimental” (I hate that word, it is not true) music that I’ve concerned myself with over the past twenty years has involved a great deal of very intent listening, oftentimes more than it’s involved playing or writing. In a lot of these musical scenes, playing can be just an excuse to listen more.

When I think back to times in my youth where I carried the most wonder with me, it was also caught up in awe and amazement. Awe seems to become more difficult to cultivate as you get older, because you (ideally) just experience more stuff, and (hopefully) develop a wider and deeper framework for understanding and dealing with the stuff you come across. Awe and amazement seem to have a lot to do with expanding yourself to contend with the unfamiliar. Wonder, by contrast, feels more like letting things pass by or through you. When I think of wonder, I think of holding curiosity. It’s the range between “Huh.” and “Huh?” You know?

And that’s something I’ve personally watched slip away a little bit with age, perhaps as I’ve coupled it to and conflated it with the feeling of “Whoa holy shit oh my fucking god wow!!” I feel like as the latter has waned naturally, I’ve accidentally allowed the former to do the same. (No matter, it’s easy to pick back up, like a practice routine.)

Since AW was only in town for a few days, our recording time was limited. We worked quickly on getting ideas for tracks down, taking care to refine each tune only just to a point where we felt like we’d be able to finish it remotely, then moving on.

One piece was based on this Lydia Davis poem, Notes During Long Phone Conversation with Mother:

for summer     she needs
pretty dress    cotton

cotton               nottoc
             coontt
             tcoont
                         toonct
             tocnot
             tocton
      contot

We came up with this track pretty quickly, starting with a very simple idea:

1. Choose four notes each that will correspond to the letters C, O, T, and N.
2. Play those notes in the order dictated by the words in the poem.

We tried a take, playing in rhythmic unison, and sure enough:

On it’s own it was fine enough, but in the context of the other tunes we were recording, this one sounded uncommonly carefree, light, like walking to the store or something. Nice, but not quite there yet.

We then tried playing in unison for only two words, and otherwise rhythmically drifting apart from each other. Sure enough, that sounded a little better, but it still needed a little something before we could set it aside and be confident that we’d be able to finish it from different time zones.

We tried slowing the recording down. Now we’re talking:

It’s still gonna need a little something, but we decided this was a good save point. It was clicking.

I had written myself a note last month to write something about wonder this month, but I didn’t really have a thought ready to go right then. It took a month of daydreaming during my commute, saying the word out loud, and staring into space about it before anything came together. I’m glad to have spent my time this way (slowly), and feel like that’s a pretty good way to get better at making things. Daydreaming, a little at a time.

talk soon,
B

Filed under: band stuff

(originally posted to Substack)

I mistakenly wrote December in the subject line just now. A funny gotcha about transitioning from making stuff privately to being a musician out in the world is that it feels like living in two or three seasons at once sometimes, and I find myself talking like it’s already spring before the winter solstice has even hit. Part of me wonders how long it’ll be before I can feel grounded in the present again – then again, maybe just as well.

Anyway it’s a blessing to be busied with one’s own projects, so lfg:

1. Out and about
2. World of trash
3. Back in the AW universe
4. A few things I’ve been into
5. Closing

ONE: TWO RECEIVE SHOWS THIS MONTH

We’re back at Hart Bar on the 15th, then LIC on the 19th. Hope to see ya out there!

TWO: STAR CARD TRASH WORLD IS GO

Meanwhile, Calley’s other band Star Card (with me on drums) is finally putting out our first full-length on the 14th! It’s out on the illustrious Already Dead, on cassette and digital. There are a couple tracks out already, and you can hear them on ampwall or bandcamp or even the popular military AI tech investment app spotify.

Trash World is also somehow the first published music Calley and I have both worked on, despite playing together most days of the week for the past few years. Wild!

ICYMI, check out the video for Flowers, made by Zia Hoskins:

Plus, we’re doing a release show over at Gold Sounds to celebrate. You should come.

THREE: A REISSUE, A SHOW

Ten years ago I played a few guitar and koto parts on this album for my bud Andrew Weathers, called Fuck Everybody, You Can Do Anything. It’s getting a well-deserved 10-year anniversary reissue treatment now from Debacle Records out in Seattle, so hell yea to that. Give it a listen.

Meanwhile, AW is making the hike over to NYC for a very rare Tethers set, as part of Freak World 3D on the 8th and 9th. We play on Saturday night, around 8:30 or 9. Tethers sets tend to happen once or twice every like five years or so, and it’s always very special. (While he’s here, we have some time booked to work on that next Tethers record that we started in 2018.)

FOUR: ITEMS OF INTEREST

This post/email is long but I told myself I’d start talking about things that have moved me recently, so here are a few:

Olaf Stapledon – Last and First Men

I’m halfway through this book now. I first encountered this story via the 2020 film adaptation, which I recommend very highly. (It’s the only full-length directed by Jóhann Jóhannsson, who you know as the score composer for Mandy and Arrival). The movie was adapted from a 1930 British novel, written as a 250 page future-history book spanning hundreds of millions of years. Its first pages recounting the 20th and 21st centuries are delicious for what the author can’t know will happen (WWII, computers). Thereafter it’s delightful for it’s total lack of grounding in anything other than deep time. You turn the page and he spends scarcely a full breath on the ends of cities, continents, species of mankind. I love how humanity as a whole is treated as the central character, going through rise and fall after rise and fall. This book is pure flight.

Nils Frykdahl – The Nothing Show

If you don’t know Nils from Sleepytime Gorilla Museum and Idiot Flesh, you are in for a treat diving into that world. Sleepytime has been back for a minute now and the live situation has always been top tier. But meanwhile, Nils has been plugging away at a broadcasting project of his own, named after an Idiot Flesh album from the early 90s: The Nothing Show.

I’ve been listening through the shows in order – a mixture of biography & oldhead tales, interviews with friends who do cool things & think cool thoughts, and readings from his favorite books (Foucault, Lispector, Burroughs, et. al.). As gifted an orator as he is a composer and singer, each episode is a joy, and I find myself reaching for my pen and notebook several times per episode, eager to garden the page myself. Definitely check out the Patreon.

Charles Curtis set hosted by Blank Forms

This was a little minute ago now but seeing Charles Curtis play was a delight. Like probably many others, Curtis’ solo cello work hit my radar through his work with Éliane Radigue and the 2LP set that Saltern put out in 2020. (Come to think of it that album may be how I was put on to Terry Jennings as well, whose tunes I’ve been deeply enamored with for some years now.) Anyway the show was great. It was one of the last hot nights of the summer, and the audience was packed into what looked like a sculptor’s studio near Washington Square Park. The program was Feldman, Wolff, Lucier’s Glacier, and Alison Knowles’ Rice and Beans for Charles Curtis. The Lucier piece stood out for me (one twenty minute glissando, let’s fucking GO), and I see there’s a nice video of him playing this piece a decade ago, but obviously seeing it on a screen surrounded by a bunch of distracting shit is way different than sweating it out in silence with a sold out room full of people. A gift.

FIVE: ALRIGHT

At last, we are caught up.

Last month I was saying I would do a paid-subscriber post on the 15th of each month, but I think instead I’ll just post everything for free – anything else feels weird. I set this month’s post on Sparklehorse to free, so it’s readable to anyone wandering through now. This month’s post will be too. Cool.

OK, thanks for reading all this, and hope to see you out there.

talk soon,
B

Filed under: band stuff

(originally posted to Substack)

I meant to get this out a few days ago, but maybe I’ll settle into a bi-weekly routine as I get deeper into this thing. In any case, here’s our first paid subscriber post, something I’ll try and do mid-month, in between the regular stuff that I usually send out aroud the 1st.

As a first volley, there’s this tune we recently finished for a Sparklehorse tribute comp that should be out some time in 2026 – Cow, off Vivadixiesubmarinetransmissionplot. It’s our first recording as a full quartet!

MP3 at the bottom of the post, but I wanted to write about the experience of living with this music for 27 years, and how that experience was shaped by physical media. It’s a winding path that brings to mind that funny dollar bill tracking project from the early 00’s, and it’s one of the types of musical experiences in life that I personally treasure the most.

1998, and My Eccentric Friend

In high school I had this friend, Josh Goldberg. I’ve since heard that he passed from contracting a gnarly infection while living as a monk deep in the mountains, outside the reach of modern medical care. To be honest, though, I can’t recall who it was that informed me. We hadn’t kept up in the intervening years, and our friend groups went their separate ways after our youth, so it’s difficult to verify. Such is the winding nature of memory. (Josh, if I’ve got it wrong and by some miraculous coincidence you’re reading this, thank you dude. Would love to say hey.)

In high school, long before monkhood, Josh was an eccentric dandy, even by the standards of my own industrial-goth-slash-hacker-kid high school group at the time. When I first met him in 9th grade, he had cornrows and a well-worn Sepultura shirt. Some months later, he fell deeply into the fashion of the late 90’s swing revival, and started showing up to school in zoot suits, his nü metal Petco-bought wallet chain now replaced by a thinner, fancier one. A new haircut unerneath the big hat with the feather, the walk with the snap, the whole nine, overnight. (And yes, it was as appropriative as the cornrows.)

Some months later still (and it must have been months, because the next year I would move and transfer to another school), he pivoted again to full candy raver. This was probably much more of a lifestyle change for him, as raves were really a scene, whereas swing and nü metal were more of a monocultural thing that was simply in the air. I was too much of a nerd-slash-rocker to hang at raves, but I would see him at school in, once again, full regalia: the bracelets, the neon, and of course, the JNCOs.

Josh and I were buds, the kind of friendship that can only be shared between loud and annoying young boys. Some time during his candy raver phase, he handed me a CD with no case – “Hey, do you want this? I’m not into it, but I think you shouldn’t throw CDs away, because someone else might like the music.”

Sure, I said. It was a copy of Vivadixie, my first encounter with Mark Linkous’ music.

Living with Music in Your Home

I played it once or twice, and it was fine, but kind of passed me by. I had no liner notes to contextualize the music, had never heard of the band, and search engines were not really a thing yet. It sat in my CD binders for some years, being played here and there. A strange, spare album of extremely close singing over guitars, static, feedback, broken toys, answering machine messages – punctuated by a few loud, driving rock tunes. It spoke the language of the day, but like any heartfelt expression of a whole person, it stood out as a weird anomaly. Lyrics like “sleeping with metal hands in a spirit ditch” and “scream across the lawn with fire in her hair, millionaires come tumbling down the stairs” quietly imprinted on me a sense of surreal, grotesque strangeness that I’ve come to search out in the arts ever since.

Over time, and with the repetition of seeing it in my collection, I put it on more, and grew to like it, the way I liked The Bends or Primitive Radio Gods or Throwing Copper. But in contrast to the polished and manicured feel of top 40 bands (no shade), Sparklehorse had this shuffling gait about it, like you were just hanging out with one person, relatively unmediated by industry. I came to love this album, and in return it shaped a corner of my artistic propensities.

These feelings, and the creative trajectory they wrought in me, would not have been possible if I had encountered this music in a streaming format, or if the music had not lived in my home, an object for which I had to find a place on a shelf. In a streaming format, it would not have been gifted to me, and I would probably have done what I do with much of the music I encounter now: listen passively while I do other stuff, semi-unconsciously categorize it, and go about my stupid little day waiting for something to catch my ear.

In place of that experience, I have memories of listening to Sparklehorse on road trips with friends along the California coast, of diving deeper into the catalog, of learning the tunes and trying to cop the lyrical writing style.

People who grow up with streaming will probably have some analogous experiences to this as they age, but it’s a format that definitely renders this kind of experience impossible – that of living and contending with the music.

A few More Signposts Along the Road

• 2010: A struggling depressive, Mark Linkous takes his own life, at age 47. As a struggling depressive myself at the time, I feel a lot of feelings about that, having bonded with the music deeply. Five years later, pitchfork publishes a very nice, lengthy article about him. There ought to be more of them.
• 2014: I take a small web gig for someone who worked on some of the Sparklehorse records – not so much a reminder for me that the records exist, more of a minor interaction that makes them somehow more real to me.
• 2019: At 36, after 15 years as a noise musician, I’m hard at work on a first album of songs, better late than never. Anura’s Deluge would come out a year later, after several months studying Mark’s lyrics and transmuting them into permission to write my own in a similar fashion.

Which Leads Us To…

Calley can confirm or deny but I think it went like this: One day Jackson wore a Sparklehorse tshirt to Star Card practice. “Yo, nice shirt!” said the fortysomething to the twentysomething. The four of us gushed about Mark’s tunes for a bit, and somewhere in the midst of it, Jake mentioned that he was putting together a Sparklehorse tribute compilation for his DIY label, and that Star Card should do a track. Um, duh.

At some point while working on this track, I made the faux pas of volunteering Receive to do a track too. Jake was gracefully amenable to it, and so we got to work on Cow. It came out pretty quickly:

I imagine there will be some more encounters with this music in my life, and that’s nice to consider. This cover is the quartet’s first attempt at seeing if we can actually work together in this context, a naive wobble toward the album we’re presently tackling. I find it very endearing in that way. Plus, great song.

Keeping the Pilot Light On

It is not a controversial opinion that Spotify are really bad people doing really bad things to the arts, and if you’re reading this, we’re probably on the same page there. I would add that streaming as a general format could be described the same way, and that the things we’ve gained (superficial access, scorecards, social currency) are far outweighed by the things we’ve lost (human experience, context, memory, dignity, a living).

While we wait for the years to have their way with these corporations, and for the next thing to come along, I don’t wish to yell at clouds (all the time), but I do wish to keep a certain pilot light lit with my oldhead stories, and document the uniquely profound effect that living with music can have on a life.

Anyway, thanks for reading all this.

-B

Filed under: band stuff

(originally posted to Substack)

And so, it’s come time for Receive and Star Card to have their separate mailers, now that they’re both up and walking around on their own. Calley and I both had some feelings about this, but agree that it makes good sense. They’re also starting their own substack, and subscribers who’ve been to a show or know us IRL are probably on that list already. Still, couldn’t hurt to check it out!

Meanwhile, I’m going to try messing around with the format – something more than the “Hello, come to a show, thanks,” missives I’ve always been dissatisfied with. I’ll start with this TOC-style list that I’m stealing from the newsletter of game designer Tim Hutchings (maker of really cool games like The Thousand Year Old Vampire and A Collection of Improving Exercises):

1. An IRL Engagement
2. Notes on Getting Album 2 Together
3. RIP Ozzy / In Defense of Late Career Entries
4. Thanks

ITEM 1: We have one (1) show this month

We’re back at Gold Sounds on Monday the 20th, with Split Silk, Gre/ay, and Heaven Through Violence. It’s $12 advance ($12.36 apparently??), or $15 at the door. It would of course be lovely to see you. I’ll be trying out a fancy IEM system I’ve put together, so you can watch me take them out halfway through the set when I realize I’ve some tweaking to do to the system still.

ITEM 2: LP2

Meanwhile, Receive is getting to work on our second album, and we’re simultaneously in the early, middle, and late phases of getting it together.

Late phase: A few songs are already written, and we’ve got the assembly line going with tracking them: Randy is tracking drums in his space down the street from Headless HQ; Brie is tracking bass at home and at Headless; Calley and I are doing the guitars and vocals on top. This part is pretty boring, but after 15 years of wackadoo experimental music, I’m enjoying the blessed routine.

Middle phase: A lot of these tunes are in progress, and some of those we’re working through at practice, while others are being tinkered with in the DAW. This phase is also somewhat routine, a sometimes-blissful-other-times-intense bit of creative legwork.

Early phase: The fun, messy part. I think of it as a kind of scrapbooking. It involves collecting areas of interest (dada, the surrealists of the 20th century), accounts of dreams (flying in an airplane carrying the ocean, making peace with dead family, cleaning a field of mud), ideas / titles / random words (“incline,” “ever,” An Index of the Seventy Three Things, “what if we designed the album cover like one of those classy book covers from Verso or Ugly Duckling”). I’ve learned over time that if I want to survive the middle phase, I have to really load up on stuff in this phase. It feels a bit like setting buckets out to collect rainwater.

Weird bonus phase: I’ve been keeping one eye on the extra-musical stuff that I conjured up and wrote down during quarantine in the early ‘20s. That was kind of when Receive started, and I ended up amassing a huge stockpile of weird divinatory stuff – card interpretation stuff, animal symbolism stuff, even weird esoteric color-cosmology stuff. I never know how to talk about this stuff since it’s kind of far out, but it definitely feeds into the music pretty heavily in a subtle way. Maybe I’ll find a way to get into it here at some point.

ITEM 3: On Ozzy, Late-Career Throwaways, and When Quality Becomes Inappropriate to Discuss

An old middle-school favorite came up on random in my headphones recently: Ozzy’s I Just Want You, off of 1995’s Ozzmosis. I don’t know of anyone making a case for this late-career entry being particularly underrated, but it’s a special one to me, and I think it rips.

It does seem somewhat of a throwaway track – a “gimme,” as Calley calls them. And I can hear that in it. At the same time, to me it’s also moving and carries a great deal of personal meaning, now amplified by the Ozzman’s passing. RIP a true king.

I was 12 when this tune was on MTV. I lived with a single mother afflicted with schizophrenia, unbeknownst to either of us. It impaired our lives in many ways, but she functioned highly enough to keep the household (and my schooling) going. Years later she would be rendered a ghost by her affliction, but at this point she kept our lives afloat, however oddly.

Meanwhile, I had discovered rock and roll by this time, but not so much my mother’s rock and roll. While she played Sabbath and Talking Heads and Hendrix records around the apartment, I was playing Soundgarden and Radiohead and Nirvana in my headphones. More than anything I attribute my disinterest in her vinyl collection to the production – the tunes didn’t sound loud enough compared to what the younger generations were making, and I hadn’t yet learned how to listen for much other than forcefulness.

But, seeing Ozzy’s contemporary singles on MTV and hearing them on 93.7 FM next to my favs was enough to get me to pick up the CD, which got a lot of rotation through my teens, and became a deep-cut-favorite of mine thereafter. My mother and I never bonded over this album specifically, but when I hear it now, I think of her in a way.

I lived with her until I was 14. Now in my 40s, my mother as I knew her then exists only in memory. There are precious few signposts along the trails of those memories, Sabbath being one of them. Mom loved Sabbath, the first metal band.

Fast forward some years and now it’s me making the loud stuff, with my share of peers and collaborators. While we don’t always share creative or technical concerns, one commonality we have is that in each project we undertake, we all reach a point where we come to the conclusion that there is such a thing as “good music,” and that the particular project we’re working on does not fall into that category. This sentiment – “it’s no good” – is regular enough to set your watch by, and strong enough to halt the movement of mountains.

If you’re reading this you probably already know who The Shaggs are, and you probably already know that they were reunited in 2017 to perform at the Solid Sound Festival, curated by Wilco. At the fest they were accompanied by musicians who studied their original, famously idiosyncratic recordings at length, and who painstakingly recreated the unique (i.e. out of tune, out of time, etc.) arrangements of each song as they were recorded in the 1960s. When presented with these arrangements, the Wiggin sisters were confused and disappointed that their mistakes weren’t corrected. On their own songs, they now relied on cues from the accompanying musicians for when to come in. By all accounts, they did not have a great time, but acknowledged that “everybody seems to like [the music] the way it was.”

–

When you ask a musician or listener what they mean by “good,” they’re likely to give you a list of descriptors – compositional, technical, vibey, emotional, spiritual, social, whatever. These descriptors will probably all sound very nice, but it’s worth remembering that they will only truthfully describe maybe 70 or 80% of this person’s own favorite tunes. So, how ‘bout that other 20 or 30%?

I’m as guilty of calling things good or bad as anyone, but I would say it’s just nice to keep in mind that pretty much no one experiences music or culture on a purely technical level, and language like “good” belies that fact. There’s plenty of times I’ve connected with something on the basis of feeling like “that’s some good music right there.” But, just because something is in tune and on time doesn’t make it resonate – that’s all just dressing for the stuff underneath.

I think I prefer to describe that which gets music to stick with us in terms of the experiences we have with it (or those it brings to mind), rather than the qualities it may have. Sometimes those experiences are private and interior, sometimes they’re communal and shared, sometimes they’re remembered and reconstructed, sometimes they’re ongoing and endless.

I like this way of relating to things people make. Maybe it’s not the only way we experience this stuff, but take this aspect away, and you sure lose an awful lot.

Anyway, don’t even get me started on Bowie’s late period.

ITEM 4: Thanks

… for reading all this. Hope to see you out at a show.

cheers,
Brendan

Aboard the first shipbound expedition to the Thwaites Glacier in Antarctica, writer Elizabeth Rush puts her ear to this massive body of ice to listen for the messages embedded in its shifts and shatterings. But can something so large, so vast, so ancient, ever really be witnessed up close?

https://emergencemagazine.org/essay/glacial-longings/

Over the course of his prolific and varied design career, Jens Quistgaard created a series of peppermills for Dansk Designs. Taking the dispersal of salt and pepper as the jumping off point, JHQ’s designs are a meditation on the possibilities of shape for a common household object. Intriguing and fantastical, the variety of forms expands the vocabulary of functional design, calling on an array of familiar references: chess pieces, tools, clocks, toys, as well as natural and botanical shapes. These peppermills, otherwise known as “table seasoners”, evoke tiny household sculptures, powerful individually, but most compelling when grouped and viewed in sets.

https://www.quistgaardpepper.com/

It happened here.

https://www.todayintabs.com/p/what-would-you-do-617f

“Stream of a stream” is an ongoing gathering of streams. Each stream sound is captured with an underwater microphone and uploaded to the cloud. There, the sounds of the streams — the natural flow of water — metamorphose into a steady, continuous flow of data transmitted over the internet.

https://streamofstream.info/

An annual publication for exploring the vast poetic web, featuring essays, musings and a directory with the personal websites of hundreds of designers, developers, writers, curators, and educators. Published since 2025.

https://internetphonebook.net/

you don’t have to be a creator to have a website! some potential reasons you could have a website:

– to let people know where to find you
– to blog and write all your serious and silly thoughts
– to share your favourite things (movies, music, videos, pictures, links, wikipedia articles, animal facts)
– to store things you don’t want to forget (resolutions, goals, ideas)
– to display your resume (if you want to go profesh)
– just because you can!! who says two or three companies have to own your soul on this big and beautiful internet of ours!!

https://kayserifserif.place/posts/2025/what-should-i-use-to-make-a-website

Over the weekend, tons of people went to one of the No Kings rallies taking place across the country. And that means one thing: another round of tedious protest discourse.

You get this kind of thing every time there’s a big set of demonstrations, or even a small set. The protests are meaningless! They’re going to change everything! They’re too liberal and safe! They’re too anarchic and scary! It’s what T**** wants! It’s what he doesn’t want!

I hate this conversation. It is boring and repetitive and pointless. So I decided to write my definitive, one-time-only thoughts about what protesting is really about, and how you should respond to it.

https://www.discourseblog.com/p/what-protesting-is-really-about

I don’t know what kind of person I would be without records. Regardless, the era of recorded music started fairly recently. Many of us may have grown up around elders who could remember the way things were before. When I look at the moment we’re in now, and consider the possibility that we may be about to witness that kind of paradigm shift for ourselves, my feelings are complicated.

https://jaimebrooks.substack.com/p/this-is-what-youll-pay-for

When the New Abrasions EP was released in 2024, the cassette version used quite a lot of tape, due to the fact that the entire EP was dubbed onto each side of the tape. The sticker on the shell read, "PROGRAM REPEATS ON SIDE B." However, listeners who flipped the tape over would notice that the B side sounds nothing like the A side. What they would hear was forty seven minutes of blown out footprints of sound – clicks, pops, wind shadows, humid expanses of blank space. Still, listeners who paid close attention may have noticed that the tracks on the B side each contain traces of their A side counterparts – a melody here, a bird call there – as though the songs had become a remote transmission, otherworldly, screaming faintly through the veil. What was heard on the B side was known internally to the band as the Dust Version of the album - each song smeared, deteriorated, made strange. These versions use the same audio as their A side counterparts, but have undergone various processes of degradation and distillation. The result is like a book left out in the weather, rained on and sunbleached a hundred times over. These are still the same songs from New Abrasions, but quite destroyed, faded, unraveled into scraps.

Right now — perhaps this very second, even — we need to regain an ability to ask basic, reorienting questions: Where am I right now? What am I doing? Where are the others who can help me? Who are my neighbors? How can I be a neighbor to others? What’s going on in the world and how to I get out in the world to join in? Is what I’m reading harmful to me? If so, why do I feel a desire to harm myself?

https://www.late-review.com/p/the-eternal-present

Is America ghosting the rest of the anglosphere?

https://jaimebrooks.substack.com/p/notes-on-the-canzukian-schism

A million easy pieces.

https://askmolly.substack.com/p/crumble

https://fliparealcoin.com/

“The self is not a stream,” Critchley writes. “It is less a seamless flow than a series of jumps and starts that flicker into intense alertness before sliding back into inactivity or boredom. It is a discontinuous series of episodes, an amalgam of blips, pauses, stalls and restarts.”

https://lindseyadler.substack.com/p/we-tell-ourselves-stories-in-order

ScanOps is based on Google Books accidents in which software distortions, the scanning site, and the hands of the ScanOps employees who digitize the books for Google are visible. Through reframing these images of obscured text as photographs with an accidental depth, the technologies and processes used are emphasized.

https://andrewnormanwilson.com/ScanOps.html

https://maxread.substack.com/p/the-zizians-and-the-rationalist-death

Already Dead Tapes turns 15 this year! Celebrating the way we usually do, with a massive compilation album featuring a whole slew of our favorite artists. 'Now That's What I Call Already Dead' is a nearly 90 minute mixtape featuring 21 artists spanning experimental, folk, harsh noise, hardcore, electronica, dreampop, drone, sludge, and just about every other genre under the sun. Out January 31st on limited edition cassette and Bandcamp, first single and pre-order are live! We're beyond stoked to bring you new music from: Slurred Oath, Enemy Zero, Heavy Heavy Low Low, Clone Stamp (FKA Complainer), Cop Funeral, Sh!tomato, Jay Howard, Sloopy McCoy, Spotted Dick, Mezzanine Swimmers, Sobbing Honey, Peopling, Human Adult Band, Michael Potter, F--- Lungs, Painted Faces, Ian MacPhee, Matt Robidoux, Nandele, Receive, and The Binary Marketing Show. We hope you enjoy the music and are eternally grateful to all of our artists and supporters for helping us make it to this milestone. Here's to the next 15...

https://www.tree.fm/

A title drop is when a character in a movie says the title of the movie they’re in. Here’s a large-scale analysis of 73,921 movies from the last 80 years on how often, when and maybe even why that happens.

https://www.titledrops.net/

my dear friend was kind enough to offer me a place to stay during, what was supposed to be, a 10-day-long visit to Rotterdam to see my pals. a laundry room at the place they were renting. the war started 3 weeks before my flight to the netherlands. in march, after 2 weeks on the road and a different reason to leave, i got to my destination, and the short-term-stay little laundry room turned into a place i called home for a year and a half. to be specific – 527 days.

https://odetoalaundryroom.site/

I know I’m late to the Ethel Cain party but goddamn. I’m reminded of the first time I heard Harsh 70s Reality – not in style or content so much as in form: treading in the deep end for most of an hour-plus, with an occasional song thrown in there to keep things grounded. Unlike Dead C’s deep-fried free rock zoners though, Perverts is gently, sensually horrifying. Sex and Death, front and center.

listen on spewify

So fun. I burned through these books so fast.

https://s-n-d.si/

Tech whoppers the world over are obsessed with eternal life. But, argues Professor John Tregoning of Imperial College, scientific research increasingly suggests that the music we love can have a huge boost to our immune system and health

https://thequietus.com/opinion-and-essays/black-sky-thinking/hope-sings-eternal-can-listening-to-music-help-you-cheat-death/

I’ve lived here off and on all my life and I don’t think LA will ever be the same again. I know it won’t be, though we will pretend as soon as possible. The moment we can, and we’ll sell film the rights to that. Keep our pretenses in your hearts.

https://harmonyholiday.substack.com/p/this-city-will-not-stop-burning

This wiki serves as a guide to the endless blank canvas that is Your World of Text.

https://yourworldoftext.wiki/YWOT_Wiki

My approach to this creating on this website is either a form of radical self-empowerment or the symptoms of depression. I think it’s the former, but honestly don’t know. I definitely was depressed from my previous internet habits, and this site is either a product of that or reaction against it. The best thing I can do is check in each time I’m online and ask if I’m happy, if my approach is still something that feels good, and if so I’ll keep doing it. I find this process good for battling sadness in general, and great for designing websites.

https://coolguy.website/introduction/

There are exactly 2 ways Spotify can be useful to small indie artists: (1) as an unpredictable marketing channel, and (2) as a barometer for your audience growth achieved in other ways. It is not something to “work on” outside of occasional marketing activities.

https://bgreen.lol/accepting-the-spotify-problem

https://emergencemagazine.org/film/aralkum/

https://non-user-events.computer-feeling.xyz/

Filed under: personal blog

Like a really long time. Like since the late 90s.

Lots of stuff has changed during that time, both on screens and IRL — plus the veil between the two worlds has thinned dramatically.

People don’t really make personal web sites any more. Or, I suppose some do, but it’s more of a niche thing. Maybe it always was. In any case, it’s something I’ve always enjoyed deeply, since before social media was a term.

Building and maintaining a personal web site often feels like gardening — stuff grows and withers over time, and you get to watch it slowly change shape with the seasons. I find it to be a really wholesome thing.

Anyway, hey 👋

I spend a lot of my time lately playing in bands. Mostly I lead a loud weird band called Receive. We sound like this, and we look like this:

Then, I also play drums in my girlfriend’s band, Star Card. We sound like this, and we look like this:

I’ve always thought of computers as a fun hobby – one that’s also made me a living for almost half my life now (I’m 42). It’s been crazy watching computer culture change over the course of my lifetime-so-far, from fun youthful counterculture to far-right spiral-eyed cesspool. But despite that, computers are still a fun hobby.

Slowly, I’ll keep adding things to this site, as a way of reminding myself of this.

https://departuremono.com/

https://www.mandy-barker.com/casette

https://www.davidcastleton.net/byron-polidori-vampire-villa-diodati-vampyre/

https://ncase.me/remember/

https://cohost.org/mcc/post/178201-the-baseline-scene

By all rights, Singularity theory should have faded back into obscurity for another decade or so. But nearly simultaneously with the dual crashing-and-burning of metaverse and crypto came the rise of techno-futurists’ last great hope: generative AI.

https://emilygorcenski.com/post/making-god/

Nestup is an experimental markup language for musical rhythms. It’s specifically designed to break away from a fixed musical grid.

https://nestup.cutelab.nyc/

While we’re not saying that Bandcamp is going to disappear into nothing (MySpace is still around after all), we think it’s perhaps prudent to download your albums from Bandcamp and store them offline. You never know – that’s all we’re saying.

https://linuximpact.com/bandcamp-support-is-faltering-download-your-music-now/

I’m not saying that software is terrible, though. On the contrary, people do amazing things. I was just glad not to be fighting NULL.

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/689943-_why-the-lucky-stiffs-printer-spool

A little more than 969 years ago—on July 4, 1054, to be more precise—the light from one of the universe’s most energetic and violent events reached Earth: a supernova, or exploding star.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/see-jwsts-spectacular-new-view-of-the-crab-nebula/

Maybe the passing of the web can at least be the prompt we need to stop pretending that our relationship with technology is anything but window dressing.

https://www.aaronland.info/weblog/2023/11/11/therapy/

"An amazing journey through the the sonic ethers of planet earth....it feels like the world itself was singing..." – Terry Riley, June 24, 2023 On June 24th, 2023, to celebrate Terry Riley's 88th birthday, ContaQt and MIT Sounding presented a global telematic event that resonated – literally - worldwide. At the stroke of midnight EDT, a diverse community of 88 individuals, spread across 60 locations in 23 countries and 6 continents came together online to play music with one another, live and in real-time. With no pre-recorded material, no click tracks, no safety nets or contingency plans, together they performed Poppy 88, a collective composition arranged by Evan Ziporyn, inspired by - and based on - Riley's 1968 recording, Poppy Nogood and the Phantom Band The livestreamed concert pushed the boundaries of virtual telematic performance, showcasing the transformative power of artistic collaboration combined with smart technology to transcend structural and geographical barriers. While previous live telematic performances have involved larger ensembles, with groups of musicians clustered in 2-12 transmitting stations, this performance distinguished itself by originating from a significantly larger number of locations, 60 in all. This creative repurposing of technology is very much in the spirit of Terry Riley’s original piece. In the 1960’s, Riley utilized tape loops – originally a DIY ‘hack’ of reel-to-reel - to create distant canonic layers of melody: his ‘Phantom Band.’ For this performance, in 2023, the ensemble similarly repurposed the inherent limitations of streaming audio – i.e., physical distance and varying data rates – to conjure similarly complex layered textures. This global virtual event brought together musicians from Athens, Berlin, Brussels, Dublin, Istanbul, New York City, Pretoria, São Paulo, San Francisco, Tokyo, Toronto, Warsaw, and more. From Mallacoota, in southeast Australia, to Raufarhöfn, in northeast Iceland, and 58 other locations in between, musicians from a wide range of genres and backgrounds used Audiomovers’ ListenTo to stream their sound to Wawken, Saskatchewan, where Canadian composer/sound artist Jeff Morton mixed and retransmitted their sounds back to them – and the world – in real time. After watching the performance from Mito, Japan, Terry Riley himself joined the livestream to greet the musicians, expressing his profound appreciation: "It felt like the earth itself were singing. You are my community." Listening to the recording almost a year later, he added: “A year has gone by since I last heard it. It is an amazing journey through the sonic ethers of planet Earth. So many awesome musicians were involved. Also, the technical support was amazing without which it could never have happened. I am deeply honored and moved by the efforts of all my music brothers and sisters who contributed their efforts and artistry to make this almost impossible dream a success!"

Netlabel OGs Audiobulb have released a double-cassette compilation of remixes & covers of tunes by Erik Schoster AKA He Can Jog, including one by Anura. Erik is an old bud from the pre-streaming-era internet music world. We went on to form the noise duo some years later, but we first met through early-00’s internet music – a different scene than it is today. At that point the vibe was something like , , , “folktronica”, and . It was a cool sound & a cool scene, and I’m stoked to hear that echoed in this comp. My track is a cover of , off his 2008 classic . Originally a laptop-beat kind of sitch, I transcribed the tune and played it on guitars, drum machines, onde magnétique, and glockenspiel. It’s a very cute & catchy tune, and was real fun to learn and play. The rest of the comp is delightful as well, and boasts an impressive roster of fabulous musicians from the Audiobulb family and beyond.

On deck for Full Spectrum Records is the release of Eulogy for Land, the latest work from long-time spiritual brother of the label Brendan Landis’ Hey Exit project. After many, many years of correspondence and playing shows with the FS artist family all across this great land of ours, this is somehow the first material he’s ever submitted to us for consideration. We think it was worth the wait, though, and we are pleased to present this expansive set of elemental guitar music for life on a dying planet. Recorded in the bygone era of 2019, Eulogy was conceived as a meditation on the climate crisis. Struggling to comprehend what was shaping up to become one of the worst fire seasons in California state history – Brendan’s home state – and what has come to be known as the Holocene mass extinction event, he set out to create a piece that honored this epochal death-event that we are somehow, unbelievably and absurdly, simultaneously both living through and perpetrating as a species. Brendan took cues from traditional styles of funeral music from around the world to craft this five-part work for unaccompanied baritone guitar, acoustic guitar, and contact mics, recorded in one uninterrupted take. Instead of presenting an hour of scorched earth sonics and harsh noise, though, Eulogy for Land rests gracefully in repose; a stately work of blackened blues that reminds us to remember that when we talk about land, we also talk about all the living things that are on it, in it, above it, around it.

Just after the mp3 codec was developed, but before streaming technologies got up and running, a rich underground of bedroom musicians from all over the world were churning out singles and EPs on various forums and servers. They often used tracker software that allowed them to share songs as MOD files (smaller than an mp3 for slow connections, plus, remixable). The sound of these scenes was loose and playful, and the communities that sprung up around them involved nearly zero commerce. It was a special time for both the music and the platform. Stairs EP is a collection of short instrumental tunes that, for me, evoke the feel of that time and place.

Some extra tracks from the Anura sessions that didn't fit on the album. More of a post-rock thing.

A gentle pair of quarantine recordings.

– Rachael Pollack, description of the Knight of Wands

– Rachael Pollack, description of the Four of Swords

– Rachael Pollack, Six of Swords

– Rachael Pollack, description of the Queen of Swords

Nine songs somewhere in the downer pop / shoegaze zones.

"In some ways the Tower is the most complex of all the trumps; its more subtle meanings are at odds with its obvious ones. Like the Devil its divinatory meanings usually derive from the obvious. It usually refers to a period of violent upheaval (either literally or psychologically), the destruction of long-established situations, the break-up of relationships in anger or even violence. "Because the card carries such furious significance many people recoil at the sight of it. The reaction raises the vital question of how to regard the Tarot's more fearful images. We must learn to use all experience, the Tower as well as the Lovers. When the Tower appears it is necessary to remember that it can lead to freedom; the explosions are clearing away some situation that has built up intolerable pressure. They can lead to new beginnings. "To say that the Tower's appearance usually signifies difficult experience it not to insist that the deeper meanings will never arise. The card can mean a flash of enlightenment, particularly if such enlightenment replaces a limited view of life. Only the reader's intuition and experience, as well as the hints from the other cards, can indicate the specific meaning." – Rachael Pollack, description of the Tower

Culled from a few hundred session files, Teen Trax is probably the most charming, fun music I've ever written. It mostly came about in the days of pre- or early-social-media internet, in my teens and early 20's. None of these tracks were ever published beyond mp3s posted to LiveJournal or CD-Rs given to friends. Most have never really left my hard drive. (A small number of them are more recent, but to me have the same spirit as these early tunes.) A few of these are quite overwrought, but it's mostly very playful, naive music. One thing I kept thinking of while putting this collection together was the immense number of hours that went into all these tracks. This was where I cut my teeth on production, melody and harmony, arranging, recording – so many things. It's always a trip coming back to one's early work, and I'm glad to see it finally taken off the shelf. Teen Trax is a lot of music, and while compiling it, I was aware of how tedious these archival, hard-drive-dump releases can get. Close as I am to the material, I made sure the cutting floor was about three times larger than the final cut. I also performed some emergency mixing and arrangement surgery on certain tracks, and remastered everything. What you're hearing is an archival release that's been polished and arranged just so. Hope you like it. The LP is the main course, containing the most complete, catchy material. The EPs are each a collection of b-sides, miscellany, segues, sketches, ephemera. EP1 (lo) is more downtempo, easier to put on quietly. The tunes on EP2 (hi) are more aggressive, up front, and brightly colored. Special shoutout to Will Silver who drew the video game art by hand back in the day on his G3 clamshell laptop. (Come to think of it I recall him loaning me the same machine for all-nighters at a back table of the local Denny's, where many of these tracks were written. Suburbs, baby!)

Culled from a few hundred session files, Teen Trax is probably the most charming, fun music I've ever written. It mostly came about in the days of pre- or early-social-media internet, in my teens and early 20's. None of these tracks were ever published beyond mp3s posted to LiveJournal or CD-Rs given to friends. Most have never really left my hard drive. (A small number of them are more recent, but to me have the same spirit as these early tunes.) A few of these are quite overwrought, but it's mostly very playful, naive music. One thing I kept thinking of while putting this collection together was the immense number of hours that went into all these tracks. This was where I cut my teeth on production, melody and harmony, arranging, recording – so many things. It's always a trip coming back to one's early work, and I'm glad to see it finally taken off the shelf. Teen Trax is a lot of music, and while compiling it, I was aware of how tedious these archival, hard-drive-dump releases can get. Close as I am to the material, I made sure the cutting floor was about three times larger than the final cut. I also performed some emergency mixing and arrangement surgery on certain tracks, and remastered everything. What you're hearing is an archival release that's been polished and arranged just so. Hope you like it. The LP is the main course, containing the most complete, catchy material. The EPs are each a collection of b-sides, miscellany, segues, sketches, ephemera. EP1 (lo) is more downtempo, easier to put on quietly. The tunes on EP2 (hi) are more aggressive, up front, and brightly colored. Special shoutout to Will Silver who drew the video game art by hand back in the day on his G3 clamshell laptop. (Come to think of it I recall him loaning me the same machine for all-nighters at a back table of the local Denny's, where many of these tracks were written. Suburbs, baby!)

Culled from a few hundred session files, Teen Trax is probably the most charming, fun music I've ever written. It mostly came about in the days of pre- or early-social-media internet, in my teens and early 20's. None of these tracks were ever published beyond mp3s posted to LiveJournal or CD-Rs given to friends. Most have never really left my hard drive. (A small number of them are more recent, but to me have the same spirit as these early tunes.) A few of these are quite overwrought, but it's mostly very playful, naive music. One thing I kept thinking of while putting this collection together was the immense number of hours that went into all these tracks. This was where I cut my teeth on production, melody and harmony, arranging, recording – so many things. It's always a trip coming back to one's early work, and I'm glad to see it finally taken off the shelf. Teen Trax is a lot of music, and while compiling it, I was aware of how tedious these archival, hard-drive-dump releases can get. Close as I am to the material, I made sure the cutting floor was about three times larger than the final cut. I also performed some emergency mixing and arrangement surgery on certain tracks, and remastered everything. What you're hearing is an archival release that's been polished and arranged just so. Hope you like it. The LP is the main course, containing the most complete, catchy material. The EPs are each a collection of b-sides, miscellany, segues, sketches, ephemera. EP1 (lo) is more downtempo, easier to put on quietly. The tunes on EP2 (hi) are more aggressive, up front, and brightly colored. Special shoutout to Will Silver who drew the video game art by hand back in the day on his G3 clamshell laptop. (Come to think of it I recall him loaning me the same machine for all-nighters at a back table of the local Denny's, where many of these tracks were written. Suburbs, baby!)

Arterial came about while I was sorting through deep archives of old tracks, sessions, songs, files, sketches, scores, field recordings, sounds. Cataloging old hard drives of unfinished and abandoned material was a project that took me a year or so, and I ended up with about 600 discreet projects in all – ranging from exploratory coding sketches in CSound all the way to finished albums of songs that I’d simply shelved and forgotten about. Some of the tunes in the archives went back to the early 00’s, others were from months prior. It was a huge vault, and the cutting room floor saw about two thirds of this material get swept up and re-shelved. Still, that left a couple hundred tracks to be kicked out into the world to fend for themselves. Arterial is part of that. So many nights in my teens and early twenties were spent on tracks like these, up late with a G3 clamshell laptop and PlayerPro or Reason 1.0, just learning how to write. Finishing them in 2019 was a much quicker affair, having a few compositional templates in mind and applying them to a broad range of raw material. Oftentimes two or three sketches would end up transposed and quilted together into a single track. Overall I’m quite fond of how it came together. It’s a strange thing dealing with such a huge amount of old material. Not just a creative exercise, but also a weird compression of memories, a photo book cut up and reassembled out of order, no longer a time capsule but a weird kaleidoscopic memorial. The album is best heard as either background noise or a headphone journey. Disc one comprises tracks 1-12. Disc two, tracks 13-22.

A cover of the first tape, from 2015. That year, I had put together a live arrangement of Else for guitar duo, and was playing it around town with Norihiro Kikuta. Since then, I'd always wanted to rerecord that EP properly (the original is kind of a lofi mess). Last spring I was putting together a noise-table setup, and figured playing through Else suite on synths would be a good way to break it in. So, this can be thought of as a cleaner re-do of the original Else tape, using synthesizers instead of guitars.

Retiform is a longform, semi-composed piece for guitar and electronics. The takes here are each single performances with only one or two edits. In them, I'm playing through Greg's 8-channel custom broken-cassette-player system. The piece itself is divided into sections, planned out after previous takes were recorded and listened to. There's an alternate take at the end, one with more gradual transitions that are harder to define. This take is presented as a single track.

Flows between extra harsh zones, murky swamp vibes, and melodic material, kind of reminiscent of , but more active. It Will Be Far From Here It was recorded over a few recent sessions with a new noise table setup I've been working on.

An unprocessed recording from a webcam located 34 miles off the coast of North Carolina.

A CD-length collection of six instrumental pieces for various combinations of guitar, voice, synthesizer, field recordings, and weird audio processing techniques. These pieces were written between 2009 and 2018, in California and New York, wherever I was living at the time. They're collected here for a kind of interiority they share. Most of them involve multiple instruments, but they're all solo pieces, in a way. 151029 was recorded in Queens, 2015, using guitar + field recordings of my block. 180822 was recorded in Brooklyn, 2018, using vocals + a few pedals. 090913 was recorded in Berkeley, 2009, using guitar + synth + samples. 170821 was recorded in Brooklyn, 2017, using guitar. 111209 was recorded in Brooklyn, 2011, using synths. 090709 was recorded in Berkeley, 2009, using guitar + processing.

A collection of pieces based on Vomir's HNW concept – "no ideas, no change, no development, no entertainment, no remorse". I was interested in finding the edges of what can constitute stasis, and how much change can actually happen in a piece before we no longer perceive it as one static sound. 0 of 0 isn’t really something to be listened to in one go (though I won’t tell you how to live your life). It’s more like an installation piece. You just sit with it for a bit at a time. Open Pieces: The loud ones. Open like a faucet, or the throttle of a car engine. Pulse Pieces: These use repetition of a single sound with a beginning and an end to create stasis, rather than a continuous sound with no temporal features. Membrane Pieces: These ones feel to me like the sound has two layers - a membrane on top, and another pushing (seeping?) through it. The membrane "looks" uneven up close, but if you unfocus your eyes it quickly becomes uniform. Evolving Pieces: These pieces ask how long a transition must be before stasis is no longer perceived. Small Pieces: A pleasant ending after all this mess. Closed Pieces: Barely there. Most speakers will not play these tracks at all.

Guitar through custom 8-channel broken cassette loop system.

A collection of gloomy instrumental pieces written with stillness in mind – a few shades darker than usual.

Advection is a pretty light, airy affair – a trio of instrumentals made in a beta version of VCV Rack over a couple weeks in the summer of 2018 (you can actually still hear the low-CPU pops that characterized the beta, ha). I was listening to a lot of Laurie Spiegel and Keith Fullerton Whitman at the time, and catching the synth bug in general. Parallel to these interests, I've always been very taken with the music of windchimes. Over the years, I’ve played duets with them, tried to mimic their rhythms on guitar and other instruments, and even taken a few stabs at recreating their grammar in CSound or Max, all to varying degrees of non-success. Modular synths have always seemed like a fun route to get closer to windchime music, but the price tag has always been a deterrent for me. Once I found VCV Rack, it seemed like a much simpler proposition. After a couple weeks of plugging stuff into other stuff, I put together three separate takes on the music of windchimes – the first track bearing the least obvious resemblance to its inspiration, and the third, the most.

A pair of mid-90's downer pop / alt rock b-sides. Just me, singing and playing guitar.

An album that starts off busy but then yawns into West Texas emptiness, nothing but horizon in all directions, an hour and a half of pure dusk.

Side A is a lively instrumental jaunt – balloons, PVC pipe, sheet metal, drum machines, you get the idea. Side B features David reading stories from magazine #25 (c. 1981), with accompaniment from yours truly. Definitely the most obscene thing I've ever released.

Roughly sixty recordings of Erik Satie's Gymnopédie 1, layered atop each other, and timestretched to the length of the longest recording (about six minutes). Includes bonus 30-minute version, plus arrangement for 80-piece orchestra by Evan Ziporyn.

A 40 minute piece for solo unaccompanied baritone guitar – one take, no loops, no overdubs. RIYL the sound of nothing, in every direction, forever.

Twenty one tracks of blistering grind-or-whatever, clocking in at about three and a half minutes – gone before it arrives. Bonus Nine Inch Nails cover on the B-side.

Taken for Granted was improvised simultaneously in Brooklyn / Oakland on the full moon of July 19th, 2016, with no monitoring between the two sessions, and no temporal edits to the final mix. Tall Fields was recorded with both of us in Brooklyn, on March 29th, 2017, based on an arrangement from October 2016.

The Cutting Pitch EP (and its predecessor, ) was conceived around a favorite writing exercise: Come up with 30 ideas (that don’t suck) in a single session. I wanted to make music that would imply, rather than assert. My goal was to conceive of 30 ideas and give them each proper, respectful treatment: Form each idea fully, title them meaningfully, record good takes, mix and master the release as I would any other. Each track was to feel like looking through a keyhole into the world of a song you couldn’t hear. Compared to Lens' summery, upbeat feel, Cutting Pitch was a decidedly colder affair – though no less playful. Same idea, but this time stern, psychedelic, otherworldly. (Yes I was listening to a lot of black metal at the time.) I asked myself: How far could I stretch out an idea in this format before it stopped implying a song? The answer is probably somewhere in these tracks. As it happens, I never did elaborate on any of these tracks, preferring to think of the collection as a whole piece – finished, in a way. There’s a quote from that page out of Thelonious Monk’s notebook that says, "Don't play everything (or every time); let some things go by. Some music just imagined. What you don't play can be more important than what you do." Cool.

A trio of longform pieces for guitar and synth. About sixty minutes of oceanic instrumental music, recorded over the summer. "156. 'Why is the sky blue?' –A fair enough question, and one I have learned the answer to several times. Yet every time I try to explain it to someone or remember it to myself, it eludes me. Now I like to remember the question alone, as it reminds me that my mind is essentially a sieve, that I am mortal. "157. The part I do remember: that the blue of the sky depends on the darkness of empty space behind it. As one optics journal puts it, 'The color of any planetary atmosphere viewed against the black of space and illuminated by a sunlike star will also be blue.' In which case blue is something of an ecstatic accident produced by void and fire." - Maggie Nelson, Bluets

A collection of songs from seven inch records and compilations released over the past couple years. Drifts between hazey shoegaze and sludgey harsh feels.

The Lens EP (and its second installment, ) was conceived around a favorite writing exercise: Come up with 30 ideas (that don’t suck) in a single session. It has a relatively summery, upbeat sound, and it’s probably the only work of mine where you can hear any kind of jazz influence (a tradition that’s deeply important to me as a listener and practitioner of spiritual music, but from which I maintain a respectful distance in my own work). I wanted to make music that would imply, rather than assert. My goal was to conceive of 30 ideas and give them each proper, respectful treatment: Form each idea fully, title them meaningfully, record good takes, mix and master the release as I would any other. Each track was to feel like looking through a keyhole into the world of a song you couldn’t hear. As it happens, I never did elaborate on any of these tracks, preferring to think of the collection as a whole piece – finished, in a way. There’s a quote from that page out of Thelonious Monk’s notebook that says, "Don't play everything (or every time); let some things go by. Some music just imagined. What you don't play can be more important than what you do." Cool.

A sizable collection of ambient instrumentals for guitar duo.

A sixty-six minute and six second tape of instrumental guitar downers. This album turned out to be a bit of a goodbye to the world of improvised music for me. I had started getting my head into songwriting territory, but I still had years of this rather alien music in my fingers, freeform and feral as anything. At the time, I was digesting as much of the Loren Connors catalog as I could get my hands on, and also had a lot of Stars of the Lid on repeat. I wanted to collide these things, but avoid making a collection of ambient tunes, and instead keep it on the trajectory of Fahey and short-form American guitar instrumentals. The result is a hearty collection of songs with wildly varied processes of construction – some recorded in a single take, others composed and painted together in the DAW; some blasted apart or blown out using broken tape machines and pedals in the studio, others the product of long, strange chains of digital signal processing. In my personal life, I was in a pretty gnarly place mentally and emotionally. I cried a lot while making this music. It was a lot of late nights with tape machines and various studio tricks, a lot of long walks home from the studio, listening to the evening’s mixes, processing multiple layers of grief that I didn’t yet understand (inasmuch as we ever do). In the end, The Bitter Scent of Light was one of the most satisfying and true time capsules I’ve fashioned within my little creative labyrinth. When I listen back, I can still hear the hills, valleys, rivers, swamps of it all. It feels good to have this not only as a document for myself, but also as an album to share on its own merits.

A pair of slowcoreish / shoegazey songs.

A half hour of instrumental music for baritone guitar, similar in vibe to the first tape. It was recorded in a single session in May, not quite improvised but not quite composed, celebrating a creative / spiritual birthday of sorts. "So writing is the method of using the word as bait: the word fishing for whatever is not word. When this non-word — between the lines — takes the bait, something has been written. Once whatever is between the lines is caught, the word can be tossed away in relief. But that’s where the analogy ends: the non-word, taking the bait, incorporates it. So what saves you is writing absentmindedly." "What I’m writing to you is not for reading — it’s for being." – Clarice Lispector, Água Viva

A mix made for MfP.

A 20 minute EP of short pieces for guitar.

A handful of funereal instrumentals to observe the reluctant beginning of spring.

Live set on Josh Landes' show Infinite Distortion.

Taking various folklores and symbolisms surrounding the salamander and its relationship to fire as a jumping off point, Caudata is a considered exploration of extreme sounds and emotions. These extremes are presented not as countering or neutralizing one another but as necessary opposites, defining and occasionally balancing each other.

A continuation of the threads started on Yes They Said So: acoustic/electric, murky/crisp, shortform post-rock, with a bit of sludge / doom metal vibes to round things out.

A pair of heavy, melodic tracks – too aggressive to call ambient, too soft to call noise. Layered guitars, field recordings, long-tone singing, contact mic abuse.

Quiet, glacial miniatures for mostly-solo baritone guitar.

Acoustic / electric guitar and koto compositions, noise miniatures, field recordings.

A sharp set of one-shot guitar pieces. Airs for acoustic guitar on side A, electric guitar + mixer improvisations on side B.

It Breaks utilizes an exciting new recording process whereby a live performance is recorded directly onto a pane of glass, after which the resultant audio haze is carefully cured, scraped away, and reassembled just so.

A potpourri of early miscellany, recorded 2009 - 2012.

entropic post-coital papacy ritual, dank pond moss reflections and shrunken head chatter tenderly eviscerate a hallowed ground of cracked earthen thrones. inner miasma of dung beetle lifecycles and botched paganism filtered through a crumbling lattice of luminescent foliage

Two remixes from Yeah We Get Along.

Sac's track is an edited amalgam of live recordings. Hey Exit's track is an etude for solo, unprocessed, electric guitar.

Burned CD-R with booklet, packaged in hand-painted string. Listening to CD and reading booklet requires destroying the package. You get to keep the button though.

Hey Exit's first recording. A meditation on persistence.