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

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.)

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

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

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.