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A Series of P.O. Boxes

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For all the writing I’m suddenly doing about nostalgia and memories, my memory is terrible. I’m amazed by people who instantly recall faces or specific events from their teenage years as I can barely remember any of that. It’s frustrating. This frustration popped up again as my friend Jeff, who drove us the five hours to see the Butthole Surfers, wonders why I didn’t mention the pre-dawn speeding ticket. Simply, I don’t remember it. I mean — I know it happened, especially now that he brings it up. But it’s not a part of my brain cargo. That slot is empty.

That makes writing about events from my past a little tricky. I guess that’s the case for all of us, as, often unintentionally, we tailor our memories to fit a present story. It’s Kris Kelvin‘s dilemma and his downfall (you should watch Solaris, either one will do). I suggest starting a journal to document your days if you haven’t already. I’m bummed I didn’t start until a couple of years ago.

The present story is the post office. I have many memories of the post office. They’re bubbling to the top as I read with frustration about what that institution is going through. Much of the world’s happenings have caused me (and probably you) incredible sadness and distress over the past months. But I have a strong and personal connection with the post office. It’s responsible for much of who I am and how I cultivated that identity. So, yeah, I’m pretty bummed out right now.

I opened my first post office box when I was sixteen. All you needed to get a P.O. Box was a driver’s license, so, in my world, one quickly followed the other. Living in Central Louisiana in the late ’80s, my internet was Factsheet Five and the classifieds in Maximumrocknroll. That’s where I found punk rock pen-pals, weirdos with photocopied zines, mail art deviants defacing postcards, and experimenting artists encoding noise signals on cassette tapes. I needed a place to receive these subversive materials without alarming disapproving parents. The post office came to my rescue. I’ll go as far as to say that the post office saved my life.

I’ve had a P.O. Box ever since. Every time I move, one of the first things I do is visit the post office and fill out that application. It’s like I have a timeline of my life marked by each of those boxes. I still remember the numbers for some old ones (not bad for someone with a shitty memory). Each box had a primary purpose, different from the one before. That P.O. Box timeline becomes a signifier of what was important to me at that point in my personal history. 

The first box was about connecting and ‘finding the others.’ Discovering who I was and if there were people in the world sharing these strange interests. It turns out there were.

I opened my second box at the beginning of college, where I was still connecting and figuring things out. But I also remember The Village Voice appearing in the box weekly. I’d pour over the ads for the live music coming through the NYC area and dreaming about being in a place where I could see all of that. To me, that box was about the future and its dreams.

Things got complicated with the third P.O. Box. I moved to Florida, grabbed a box, and got involved with the college radio station. It’s a long story I’ll write about someday, but I helped lead a protest movement against the corrupt faculty managing the station. As they employed me (I was the music director), I had to do my activism in secret, distributing leaflets and petitions to be returned to an anonymous mailing address. This unidentifiable P.O. Box drove the faculty crazy — I know they suspected I was behind it, but they couldn’t prove it. 

One day, in the heat of the radio station scandal, I checked my mail at the post office. There was a slip for a certified letter. I took this to the counter, and the postman told me I had to print my name and sign to receive this mail. Of course, the sender would receive this form with my name as a receipt. This was obviously sent by the suspecting station management. No thanks, and nice try! 

My fourth P.O. Box was in downtown Orlando. I opened a record store — Bad Mood Records — and the post office was directly across the street. Incredibly convenient. That was also when I co-founded the Eighth Dimension label and started DJ’ing professionally. So this box was all about receiving vinyl — tasty 12″ promos from across the globe. Every couple of weeks, I faxed out a short store newsletter to all my favorite record labels with my Q-BAM top 10 chart. My phone bill was out of control, but it was worth it. Most days, there were at least a couple of records arriving at my P.O. Box.

In the early 2000s, I moved across town, which meant a new post office and P.O. Box. I started my music publishing business, so I was using my P.O. Box to receive contracts, notices, and other legal papers for the first time. Grown-up stuff. This post office also makes me think about the Great Recession, as I helped support myself by selling off my vinyl collection through Discogs. Ten years before, I went to the post office every day to see what records got sent to me. Now my daily visits were about sending records off. 

These days I have a P.O. Box that’s only used for business. You’ll find it listed at the bottom of my email newsletters. I visit it maybe once a week (and even less now due to lockdown). I don’t necessarily think that’s entirely due to the internet and online communication. Yes, this newsletter might be a mailed zine at a different time. But all these trappings of adulthood — the permanent home address, the decreased need to seek new connections, the DJ’ing career that’s now in the past — have made my post office visits infrequent. But I still get a thrill when I open the P.O. Box’s tiny door and there’s something surprising waiting for me.

So, that’s my little love letter to the US Postal Service. I know a lot of people that could write their own. And many of those people also love music.

The chaotic state of our postal system comes at an especially bad time for the music community. Without in-person visits or merch tables on tours, record stores and artists rely on the USPS to get records and other physical paraphernalia to fans. Media Mail is a godsend here — one can send a record anywhere in the USA at a slower pace for a reduced price. Media Mail was how I mailed the vinyl I sold through Discogs, and it was remarkably dependable — I rarely ran into problems with delays or damaged goods. I’m betting Media Mail is a nightmare right now.

The demand for physical music formats — vinyl, CDs, cassettes — has increased alongside growing dissatisfaction with streaming platforms. Artists make more of a profit, and fans feel supportive of their favorite artists. There’s also a desire for something tangible to hold — representing membership in a cultural movement — that’s absent from digital music. The resurgence of ‘legacy formats’ is a compelling narrative in the modern music industry, an unexpected trend that’s welcomed a lot of analysis. In a new interview with Damon Krukowski, Bandcamp’s Ethan Diamond says, “half of the sales on Bandcamp at this point are for physical goods.” That even surprised me.

What happens to this aspect of fandom with a crippled postal service? Without Media Mail? What happens to record stores and Discogs sellers and vinyl labels? Book stores and other indie sellers are in the same boat, too.

It’s essential to consider the impact the US Postal Service has on maintaining small businesses and independent endeavors. I don’t want to live in a world where only corporations can afford to ship using expensive privatized services or, in the case of Amazon, their own shipping infrastructure. That’s one of my fears about what happens when we come out of the pandemic: a lot of the framework that supports independent business will be gone.

Here’s a good Twitter thread on what we can do to help the USPS. Some of the top posts’ info is a little dated as this is a quickly developing situation. Scroll down a little for some concrete things you can do. And here’s a useful page for ‘How You Can Help Save the US Postal Service’ from the fantastic art site Hyperallergic.

This post was adapted from Ringo Dreams of Lawn Care, a weekly newsletter loosely about music-making, music-listening, and how technology changes the culture around those things. Click here to check out the latest issue and subscribe.

Talking Backward

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I encountered Kramer through his band Bongwater, and his production work with Galaxie 500, Low, Daniel Johnston, and many others, all recorded at his Noise New York and Noise New Jersey studios. Kramer’s label Shimmy Disc was a trove of curiosities and, yes, treasures — a label as distinctive as Factory and early 4AD but perhaps even more surprising. The identifiable sound of Kramer’s production (those drums, that reverb) balanced an unpredictable and eccentric A&R taste. Shimmy Disc was a paradox because, when buying one of the releases blind, you sorta knew what it would sound like without having any idea what you were getting into. The genre or style of each record was a mystery until the needle touched the vinyl.

I’ve been fascinated by Kramer’s activities for a long time. Perhaps even more now that he’s living Florida and has established his Noise Miami studio. If I had a band, I would totally take advantage of the fact that Kramer is a four-hour drive away.

I was excited to discover an interview with Kramer, conducted by the writer Rick Moody, on the Believer Magazine site. Then I was disappointed to find out the interview is only three questions long. But that disappointment was short-lived once I realized Kramer answered those three questions with over 10,000 words covering his music story’s early years. And what a story it is — Kramer is an excellent writer, and almost every paragraph is gripping. I’m in for one of the top pledge tiers on Kickstarter if he ever decides to self-publish a memoir.

Kramer’s long answers to the first two questions are terrific and filled with entertaining stories. He talks about his early touring band experience with psychedelic trooper Daevid Allen and the band Gong, and then his entrance into the avant-garde, rubbing shoulders with the likes of John Zorn, Karl Berger, Tom Cora, and (hilariously) Ornette Coleman. In an episode of my newsletter, I discussed a long-form interview with Jim O’Rourke. This second part of Kramer’s interview is like that — it’s ridiculously rich in recommendations and rabbit holes. There’s also lots of folksy wisdom, such as this nugget: 

Never expect your heroes to be fine people. It’s far better to expect the exact opposite. Then you can be thrilled to death when you meet someone who treats you just as you would treat them. Hang on. Hang on just a little bit longer. You’ll meet good people. Eventually.

Kramer is such a great storyteller. Reading this piece had that feeling of a novel you can’t put down. Mesmerized under Kramer’s spell by the first two sections, the third question shook me back to consciousness. Rick Moody asks, “How did you meet Butthole Surfers, and what was it like touring with them?” No doubt, this ride was about to become a roller coaster. 

I find it challenging to explain the Butthole Surfers to anyone who didn’t see them in the ’80s. I saw them twice in 1988, and the effect — especially that first show, with Flaming Lips opening no less — was life-changing. They weren’t the same band for me once they went from two drummers to one, which is a hipster-y “before they were cool” thing to say, but that really did change their sound. During the time I saw the Butthole Surfers, there wasn’t any comparable band. Maybe that video of Throbbing Gristle doing their last concert at Kezar Stadium comes close, at least in intensity. But it’s still a different animal.

The first time I saw the Butthole Surfers was the second ‘real’ concert I ever attended. Someday I’ll tell you my first but now’s not the time. I grew up in Central Louisiana, remember, and we didn’t have many concerts. Well, there were a few — Elvis played our town a few months before he died. But I didn’t go to any live shows throughout my pre-college years. Then I got talked into a road trip to see the Surfers in Houston. That’s a five-hour drive, folks — I just double-checked as I find it hard to believe that we used to drive five hours each way for a concert. It was the first of many of these drives.

I remember not being that excited to see the Butthole Surfers. I thought they were some comedy punk rock act (years earlier I wouldn’t have been that off base). But I read about the first Flaming Lips album in The Bob, bought it, and loved it. I got in the car to see them. 

The Flaming Lips were terrific. Their now-infamous visual show was pretty low-tech back then. They turned on multiple fog machines, creating a thick white cloud on the stage. And then the band played with a bright light behind them, dark shadows within that cloud. We never actually saw the group. When they finished, I remember thinking, “That was the weirdest thing I ever saw.” I had no idea that it would move a notch down to the second weirdest thing in about 20 minutes.

Remember how I said it was difficult to explain the Butthole Surfers? I’m not going to try. There’s a bootleg recording of the concert here, but that’s only half the story. The sounds they were making were unreal — Gibby’s vocal manipulations alone, via the SPX1000 and a digital delay unit, blew my mind. Add the visual overload happening on that stage with the backward projected movies, the cymbals on fire, the eye-patched topless dancer (it’s true) — I wasn’t the same after all of that.

The audience added to the surreal scene, repeatedly climbing tall speaker stacks and jumping tens of feet into the crowd. I never saw mayhem like this before. After the band finished their encore, Gibby came back on the stage and yelled at someone in the audience to approach him. Gibby bent down and exchanged harsh words with this individual. He suddenly pulled a bottle out from behind his back, smashed it over the guy’s head, and walked away.

I’ve thought about that moment a lot. What was it about? Was that guy okay? How could the band get away with that? And then this Kramer interview revealed the secret to me over three decades later:

Gibby clamors back onstage and runs behind Paul’s guitar amp, only to emerge a few seconds later with a large plastic box which I immediately recognize as a case of breakaway bottles we’d been lugging around Europe for weeks … breakaway bottles look like real bottles, but they are actually props made of sugar to be used in theater, film, the circus, etc… you can smash them against someone’s face and no one gets hurt.

There you go. 

I saw the Butthole Surfers again in Houston less than eight months later. My friend David joined me and shot this gorgeous 8mm footage, recently digitized and uploaded to YouTube: 

David writes about this footage and his experience filming it here. And I’m with the YouTube commenter on the show — I’m pretty sure it’s December ’88 at Ensemble Hall, not Numbers (which is where I saw them the first time). But I digress.

When you drive five hours to see a concert you want to make the most of the experience. That’s partly the reason why we used to smuggle tape recorders and 8mm cameras into the shows. We also always tried to blag our way backstage after the concerts. My friends and I all volunteered at the college radio station, so we often used the trusty “we’re here to interview the band” ruse. It worked more often than you’d think.

And we made our way backstage at this second Butthole Surfers show. I remember Gibby towering over a flock of adoring punkers, grinning maniacally as they shouted his name: “Sign this for me, Gibby!” I wandered into a side room, and King Coffey, one half of the drumming duo, was sitting alone. I sat down and struck up a conversation. The Ensoniq EPS sampler was released that year, and we talked about that. King had purchased one, and I wanted to know all about it.

After a few minutes, I decided to do some actual radio business. I pulled out my recorder and asked King if he’d do a ‘radio ID’ for my show. That entailed King saying who he was and then ‘you’re listening to …’ followed by the station’s call letters. He asked me for the station info. “KLPI in Ruston, Louisiana” I replied. King told me to hold on for a minute, and he sat back, deep in thought.

I couldn’t figure out what King was doing as he was visibly making some sort of calculation in his head. Then he quickly leaned forward and said, “I’m ready — start the tape!” I held my recorder to his mouth, and he says, “This is King Coffey of the Butthole Surfers, and you’re listening to KLPI in Ruston, Louisiana, which backward is …” And then he spouted a couple of seconds of nonsensical gibberish.

We laugh, I thank him, and then my friends and I get in a car and drive five hours back to Ruston. 

A couple of days later, I go to the radio station to transfer my recording to ‘cart.’ If you’ve seen WKRP In Cinncinatti, then you’ve seen Johnny Fever take what looks like an eight-track tape, stick it in a slot, and a commercial or radio ID plays. Pre-digital, that’s what radio DJs used. The cart was always cued to the beginning, playing the audio at the push of a button. And, for some reason, to get my recording on the cart, I first had to transfer it to reel-to-reel tape.

I successfully transferred King Coffey’s routine to reel-to-reel, and I readied it for the cart. His fake ‘backward’ talk got me wondering … nah, there’s no way. But the thing about reel-to-reel tape is you can flip a switch, and the tape plays backward. So I listened to the tape in reverse and — you guessed it — King actually did say the station call letters, city, and state backward. Perfectly. It sounded like I was playing it forward. That band made my mind reel even days after the show.

It was about fifteen years later that I picked up Michael Azerrad’s essential history of the US ’80s independent music scene Our Band Could Be Your Life. There’s a chapter on the Butthole Surfers, and, casually, Azerrad throws out the trivia nugget that King Coffey has the unusual ability to translate any sentence backward accurately. 

There you go.

But this is about the Kramer interview, which you should now go read. It’s kind of a love story — a love for music, adventure, and adventures in music — and Kramer closes the piece with these words about the Surfers:

I will love these people long after I am dead. And of that death, thanks in great part to my months alongside them in 1985, I will not be afraid.

This post was adapted from Ringo Dreams of Lawn Care, a weekly newsletter loosely about music-making, music-listening, and how technology changes the culture around those things. Click here to check out the latest issue and subscribe.

Tony Wilson’s Three-Way Proposition

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Lest we forget, Factory Records impresario Tony Wilson was a digital music pioneer. Marking 13 years ago today since his untimely death, The Guardian profiled Wilson’s ill-fated start-up, Music33. This venture was an online MP3 store, launched three years before the iTunes shop (but, to be fair, a couple of years after eMusic). 

Wilson approached the majors, but they wouldn’t get on board. If you remember, the prominent record labels were, at the time, adamantly opposed to download stores and even more resistant to unbundling songs from their albums, a built-in feature of Music33. “People want to buy songs,” Wilson insisted. He did enlist some cool indie labels like Skam (home to Boards of Canada), Mark Rae’s Grand Central, and Blood and Fire. The latter was a dub/reggae reissue label that I adored and had no idea until today that Simply Red’s Mick Hucknall was partly responsible. 

Music33 didn’t go well, ahead of its time like a lot of Tony Wilson’s endeavors. Download speeds circa 2000 didn’t cooperate, users had to redeem their purchases via passwords, and the management of micro-payments was impossible. Music33 was doomed to fail. 

In just a few years, technology solved all of those problems for Music33’s successors. But there was one idea Wilson had that didn’t carry over to our modern paradigm. From The Guardian piece: 

Wilson conceived Music33 as an online record store. The price of a song would be split three ways – 11p apiece for the website, for the artist and for their record label. Wilson felt, as he told me in 2000, that “these shits” – the labels – “saying to the artists: ‘You can have so much per cent’ can go screw themselves.”

The three-way split is an intriguing proposition. That arrangement strongly favors the artist as, after recouping, the artist also gets part of that label split — or all of it, if self-released. That’s in addition to a mandatory third of the total proceeds. Of course, the artist would need to be in direct contact with the store to get her 1/3 share which is problematic. But, as we’re dreaming here, imagine that neighboring rights organizations like SoundExchange handle the artist’s portion. That direct relationship for artist payments already exists with SoundExchange, and gathering performers’ royalties from downloads (or streaming) isn’t that far from what the organization already does.

What if Music33 had taken off and set the tone for the structure of download payments, evolving into the standard rates for streaming payouts? With artists guaranteed to receive at least 33% of streaming royalty, today’s landscape would look quite different. 

Update: As I tweeted, songwriters and publishers would still get the short end of the stick in Music33’s alternate timeline.

🔗→ ‘You’ve been smoking too much!’: the chaos of Tony Wilson’s digital music revolution

Kosmiche Clicky Keyboard

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I’ve got a few quickies for you and then some music news. 

First, I’ve officially entered the clicky keyboard club. Mechanical keyboards have tempted me for years, and this Kickstarter campaign finally inspired me to take the plunge. My Keychron K8 arrived today, and this post is pretty much the first thing I’ve typed on it. I’m doing a lot of writing and thought a more physical keyboard — with clicks and noise! — would help inspire and lead me frequently into ‘the zone.’ It’s too early to say. I’ve heard some people can’t get used to these keyboards, and it is larger in height than I’m used to. I’m using a palm rest, which helps, but it’s still going to take effort to get acclimated. But so far, so good — the feel is impressively tactile, and I love the keys’ noise. The fancy backlighting makes typing feel special, too. I’ll report back once I get some serious use out of this thing.

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Here’s a fun piece about John Cage’s expertise with edible mushrooms. Well — he was an expert most of the time as there’s that dinner where he unintentionally poisoned his guests. If you know about Cage but didn’t know about his mushroom obsession, then you’ll find this paragraph fascinating:

In one particularly famous episode, in February 1959, Cage appeared on the Italian television program Lascia o Raddoppio (Double or Nothing) and won five million lire (something like eight thousand dollars) by being able to name 24 white-spored agarics — edible mushrooms — that were mentioned in the Studies of American Fungi field guide. Cage listed them in alphabetical order and then bought a Volkswagen bus for his partner, choreographer Merce Cunningham, and a piano for his home in Stony Point.  

There’s a new two-volume book — John Cage: A Mycological Foray — that details Cage’s mad mushroom skills though his writing and essays by others. It looks lovely.

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Speaking of lovely-looking books, Craig Mod — who might be responsible for my favorite email newsletter — has self-published a book based on his incredible Eater article, I Walked 600 Miles Across Japan for Pizza Toast. I know the title of that article is baffling but, seriously, give it a read if you haven’t. This new book is titled Kissa by Kissa, and it expands on the article with lots of new graphics, photographs, and text. It’s obviously a labor of love and looks fantastic. Even more fantastic, Craig coded his Kickstarter-style platform to raise money and sell it from (he jokingly calls it ‘Craigstarter’). It’s open-source and downloadable from Github. Labels and recording artists take note — you could use this to do a PledgeMusic (ugh) style fundraiser for your next album right from your site. (Update: I see the book sold out. Congratulations to Craig! I imagine it will be online in some form in the future, like his ‘digital book’ Ise-ji: Walk With Me.)

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Brian Eno. Laurie Anderson. Nitin Sawhney. Simon McBurney. These four brains got together (on Zoom) and had a conversation about listening. It’s terrific. And Eno’s lockdown beard is impressive.

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My bit of music news is about Gemini Revolution. The brothers Dedric and Delaney — from the cool Kansas City combo Monta At Odds — lead this project. We call Gemini Revolution their ‘alternate timeline band.’ I’ve just released their rad new album Supernova Remnant on the 8D Industries label. Earlier today, I described this album to a friend as “kosmiche-styled space jams, ambient builders, and textured dream-droppers.” I won’t back down from that description. Have a listen in the player below, and if it strikes your fancy — it should! — then please head down to Bandcamp where the album is downloadable at the special price of ‘name your price.’

The Limits of Experimentation

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The absence of a significant musical trend or cultural movement so far in the 21st century: I’ve attributed this to a lack of territorial isolation in that movements (artistic and cultural) would spring out of ‘scenes’ that existed locally but not globally. Now that we have constant connectivity, this separateness is rare, and thus so are movement shifts.

There may also be an element of technology involved, and not just in the advances of global connectivity. Technological progress has created musical trends and genres; think of the increasing number of audio multi-tracks and how that begat Sgt. Pepper’s or Pet Sounds. Or of the fuzz guitar creating psychedelia, the drum machine and sequencer creating electronic dance music, etc.

We can look to film as a guide. There’s a dramatic difference in movies produced in the ’70s versus those in the ’60s and in movies shot in the ’60s compared to those in the ’50s. Many people, especially the young, in the ’70s, would have a hard time watching ’50s movies as they seem old-fashioned. The shift in style and look is pronounced. There are aesthetic differences, too — subjects that were taboo at one time became commonplace decades later, for example — but often, technological developments that influenced the culture inspired these changes.

Think of Jean-Luc Godard and the jump cut. An editing technique that was so radical at the time of Breathless is commonplace in film and TV (and YouTube) now. Godard made it revolutionary because cinema, as a developing art form, still had areas left to explore. As time moves forward, the technology of the medium is no longer one of limitation. 

Another example is the brilliant Russian Ark, an ambitious 2002 film created in a single long camera shot. Digital filmmaking was new, and the hard drive space available to the cinematographer dictated the ‘single shot’ running time of Russian Ark. Compare this to Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope, meant to look as if it is a long, single-shot movie, but throughout, there are several sneaky cuts. The length of a roll of film limited Hitchcock as he had no access to hard drives, but this did not make Rope any less radical in its era. Now, the single-shot film is commonplace — a technique used and overused by modern filmmakers with an almost unlimited amount of digital storage space at their disposal.

Limitations of a medium breed experimentation as the artists push and explore what is possible. With limits removed, this experimentation takes other forms.

Thank Me In Ten Years

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Last night I watched the new documentary about The Go-Go’s. The doc shares the name of the band, and I don’t know why that apostrophe is there, but it’s there, and it drives me crazy. Another thing that drives me crazy is when bands don’t evenly share songwriting credits (and, in turn, publishing royalties) and end up acrimoniously splitting up. Yes, one person may write all the songs. But that person didn’t come up with that drum part or that bass guitar riff, and the song wouldn’t be the same without those. 

This is a prime example of long-term thinking, as bands that swallow their pride and share songwriting credits are the ones that stay together for a long time. Just ask U2 — which you might find surprising as they’re known for having a singer with a Jupiter-sized ego. But U2 splits their songwriting credits four ways.

If you need further convincing, listen to this interview with REM’s Mike Mills on Brian Koppelman’s The Moment. Mills was a principal songwriter in that band from the beginning. And he explains that it took a lot of coaxing to get him to share songwriting credits on his songs equally with his bandmates. In retrospect, he’s thankful he did as he owes this to REM’s long career and continuing friendship.

And the other side of the coin — The Police.

If I were a band manager, this would be the first thing I’d tell any new band I took on: share your songwriting credits and share your publishing. Thank me in ten years.

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In today’s issue of his fantastic newsletter, Joe Muggs shared this video of Kraftwerk in 1973 publicly debuting Wolfgang Flür and his homemade electronic percussion. Says Muggs:

You can see the transformation happening in front of your eyes from the psychedelic band they were to the true, technology-centred Kraftwerk: even the outfits are mid transformation, smartened up but not quite the uniforms that would define them. Only months after this, they would record the Autobahn album.

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I had my first long conversation with a COVID-19 survivor. It feels like I should have spoken to many others as I’m here in Florida where things are, uh, not cool. It probably says a lot about the effectiveness of my sequestration. Anyway, I did not realize this friend caught the virus at the end of March. We’ve only chatted briefly online since then, understandably not the place you’d want to bring up the subject. In a phone call, he revealed his illness, and I was full of questions. Yes, it was 14 days of hell — it’s nothing like the flu, folks — but he was lucky and recovered. Even though he feels 100% most of the time now, he told me that there are moments when he feels unusually out-of-breath. He’s athletic, so this happens sometimes (but not all the time) when he’s doing sports-like activities. That’s scary, and I feel bad for the professional athletes who may not perform at a high level after recovering from this illness. Anyway, it was an illuminating conversation — hearing about the virus first-hand made it much more ‘real.’ If you know anyone who has had COVID-19, I recommend having an inquisitive chat if they’re willing. 

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Friend of Ringo and fellow Butthole Surfers fanatic Richard Norris — he of The Grid, Beyond The Wizard’s Sleeve, and a myriad of other projects — has announced a new album titled Elements. Richard describes it as fusing “warm analogue synths, widescreen ambience and pulsating, subtly changing sequencers, creating a hypnotic, mesmerising work.” It’s out on September 4. I haven’t bought a compact disc in a while, but if I did buy one, it would be Elements. The CD has the most gorgeous packaging. Here’s the first track (and the first element), offered as a preview: “Earth.”

The Perfect Playlist

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I revisited this NY Times article from two years ago and it got me thinking about the personal playlist (or, maybe as we used to call it, the ‘mixtape’). The gist: Composer Ryuichi Sakamoto couldn’t stand the music played in his favorite restaurant so he offered to custom-make his own. The original music wasn’t terrible — it was “thoughtless,” lacking any context suitable for the restaurant’s environment or its food. It sounds like Sakamoto spent a lot of time creating the perfect playlist, and it’s one that changes every season. I wonder if he’s still doing it.

The author of the article has some thoughts about the qualities of a perfect playlist:

I would prefer that music not seem an afterthought, or the result of algorithmic computation. I want it chosen by a person who knows music up and down and sideways: its context, its dynamism and its historical and aural clichés. Such a person can at least accomplish the minimum, which is to signal to the customer that attention is being paid, in a generous, original, specific and small-ego way.

Replace ‘customer’ with ‘listener’ and this becomes an attractive argument in favor of human curation.

🔗→ Annoyed by Restaurant Playlists, a Master Musician Made His Own

Surviving Spotify’s Future Landscape

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There’s a lot of chatter about Daniel Ek’s recent interview with Musically’s Stuart Dredge. There are more than a few nuggets to dissect, but this one is getting the most attention:

“There is a narrative fallacy here, combined with the fact that, obviously, some artists that used to do well in the past may not do well in this future landscape, where you can’t record music once every three to four years and think that’s going to be enough,” said Ek. […] “I feel, really, that the ones that aren’t doing well in streaming are predominantly people who want to release music the way it used to be released …”

As Liz Pelly has explored on The Baffler, Spotify seems intent on influencing artists to tailor their music to benefit the platform. Yes, some point out that in past decades artists used to release 1 or 2 albums every year, so what Ek proposes is nothing new. But the difference is that artists now almost solely rely on touring for income. It’s impossible for most acts to frequently take months off to record a succession of albums without dire financial risk. No doubt you’ve heard the common refrain that bands used to tour to promote album releases, and now it’s the other way around. 

PRS’s Tom Gray illustrates this using The Beatles as an example. The Beatles stopped touring to concentrate on their studio work and, to Ek’s satisfaction, released a lot more than an album every few years. It’s doubtful a 2020 Beatles could do the same. Without touring income, they would be in the hole. Here’s Tom’s take (click here to read the full thread):

Tom’s numbers get a little fudgey — studio costs and such don’t need to be that high these days — but the point stands. The Spotify age is not kind to bands that camp out in studios. (The streaming model is even crueler to those who write songs but don’t perform, but that’s a whole other harrowing tale I’ll save for another time.)

Damon Krukowski challenges Ek’s statement by looking at current Spotify earnings from his former band, Galaxie 500. Krukowski points out that the band hasn’t released anything in over 20 years so, by Ek’s reasoning, they shouldn’t do well in ‘this future landscape.’ But they get more than one million streams a month. That’s pretty good, right? God knows I wish my catalog got half those monthly streams. 

You might think those numbers put Krukowski and Galaxie 500 in the musical middle class. Instead, those streams amount to about $1250 per band member a month. Here’s Damon (click here to read the full thread):

The concern isn’t what Ek refers to as the ‘top tier’ artists. Those are doing fine. The top artists have always done fine. And, for a variety of factors, they can (for now) live off Spotify royalties and the other compounding advantages of fame and exposure. The problem is the disruption of music’s middle class. This sector relied financially for most of this century (so far) on touring. And with COVID-19 in the air, the absence of touring and the diminished value of recorded music creates a crisis. Music’s middle class was already disappearing — in 2021, it could be gone entirely.1Be sure to put a pin on the idea that this disappearing middle class is reflective of income disparity in our society at large.

That’s what this interview — and Bob Lefsetz’s defense of Spotify — glosses over. Of course, wildly successful artists, with tens or hundreds of millions of plays a month, make good money from streaming. And it’s disingenuous to imply that artists complain because they feel entitled to the same. I can confidently speak for most artists that we just want an opportunity to earn a living through our music. Opportunity is not entitlement. Even though an artist’s ‘middle class’ was always precarious, there’s very little chance now to make it work. 

The implication from Ek is — and he’s not that far off — in the eyes of Spotify, you’re either a superstar or an unknown. The insult is Ek saying that the latter position is mostly the artist’s fault because she’s a Luddite who’s not “putting the work in.”

(I’m reminded of this insightful quote from author Nancy Baym: “It’s amazing to me to see how so many careers, in music and beyond, have shifted such that it’s no longer enough to do the work. Now you have to do the work of making sure everyone is seeing that you’ve done the work.”) 

But I’m not placing all the blame on Ek, streaming, and the Napster guys who let this genie out of the bottle. All of that became inevitable as soon as the first ones-and-zeroes were digitally encoded on a compact disc. But as listeners and recording artists, we play a part by accepting the notion that Spotify is unavoidable and necessary. Yes, I believe that Spotify is not going anywhere. And I doubt they’ll change anything except notch their monthly price up a dollar or two in a few years. What it’s essential also to understand is we’re not obligated to play along. 

As concerned recording artists, we don’t necessarily need to remove our music from Spotify (though, if you do exit the platform, good on you). The key is to treat streaming as the entrance of a marketing funnel to lead potential fans to our sites and mailing lists. Let’s look at it as if it’s radio. Radio in the US egregiously doesn’t pay a royalty to performers, but performers still allow their music on the radio as it’s an entry for new listeners. But they never say, “You should only listen to my music on the radio.” 

Or as a more musically-inclined Tyler Durden might say: “The first rule of Spotify is you do not talk about Spotify.” Only post links to your site or a store like Bandcamp. Seriously — there is no reason to send your fans to Spotify. The distant hope that the company will return the favor by adding your song to one of their big playlists is a broken motivation.

As listeners, we have a responsibility, too. I frequently write about the seductive appeal of streaming — I know I can’t resist effortlessly accessing an album or band that I just learned about. But we should also support the artists we enjoy by directly purchasing their music, ordering their merchandise, and signing up for their mailing lists. It’s not that difficult, and these gestures mean a lot to the artists. And, like musical Tyler, we should spread the word by posting to our favorite artists’ websites and Bandcamp pages, not Spotify players. 

We’ll all benefit the sooner we start thinking of Spotify as an occasional sampling tool instead of a go-to listening necessity. Let’s happily hand the platform over to the ‘top tier’ with their frequent releases and domination of playlists. It’s evident from the interview that’s who Ek has in mind for his company, anyway (besides Joe Rogan, of course). 

Oneness of Juju’s Music for the People

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I’m having a deep listen to Strut’s new reissue of African Rhythms 1970-1982, a collection of classic tracks by Oneness of Juju. The Richmond, VA, based band is led by saxophonist/flutist James “Plunky Nkabinde” Branch, with its roots in the early ’70s avant-garde jazz community of San Francisco and the NYC loft scene. As part of the former, he met and collaborated with South African exile Ndikho Xaba who introduced Plunky to the concepts and philosophy of African music. Inspired, Plunky incorporated these concepts with his jazz influences and developed a ‘music as devotion’ mindset. He brought these ideas to New York, where he worked directly with Ornette Coleman and Sun Ra. A move back home to Richmond stirred more ingredients into this already flavorful stew as Plunky sought to build a music for the people: 

“In the Richmond, Virginia, area, there was not as much of a market for avant-garde jazz as you might think,” Plunk says with a laugh over the phone. “So we incorporated some R&B elements, and a drummer playing a drum set, and a guitar, and added a female vocalist. We had to meet our audience halfway. We started bridging this line between R&B and funk and avant-garde jazz. I was conscious of trying to find an audience for the message we had in our music, and trying to serve the community and make a living, which is how we ended up with this convergence of styles.”

Richmond’s vicinity to Washington, DC, allowed frequent performances by Oneness of Juju in the nation’s capital. DC’s audiences were receptive to the diverse stylistic palette the band offered. Plunky thinks this is because “all these embassies and people coming from all over the world for various reasons … different parts of their culture were based in DC.” And these performances often took place at protests rather than concert venues, exposing a political subtext to Oneness of Juju’s cultural mixture. Again, the band sought to provide the music of the people:

”… all of those dudes, Gil Scott, Chuck Brown, Oneness of Juju, Experience Unlimited, a big part of what we did in those days was not just parties and nightclubs, but also participating in demonstrations. There were any number of other community-based activities in the public parks; summer-long festivals and weekly concerts that all those acts would participate in. They started out as street concerts and would get thousands of people to come out. And music was the drawing card.”

Plunky’s mission to deliver his people’s music continues to this day. Since the beginning of The Strange Times, he’s given impromptu concerts on the porch of his Richmond house nightly for neighbors who require musical relief.

African Rhythms 1970-1982 is a spirited listen, its songs moving effortlessly from funk, afro-rhythms, disco, rock, spiritual jazz, and in between tangents. The supercharged disco of the Larry Levan favorite “Every Way But Loose” will probably ring a few bells, as will the undeniable classic “African Rhythms,” famously sampled and reworked by none other than J Dilla. I’m also taken by the collection’s ‘unreleased version’ of “Bootsie’s Lament” which sounds not too far off from a lost Sun Ra Arkestra nugget. Percussive jazz workouts like “Sabi” are also here and extraordinary, as is the slow, night jazz of “Space Jungle Funk” — a classy instrumental made strange via some wild stompbox effects on Plunky’s saxophone. 

In its physical form, the collection is a triple vinyl album, featuring over two hours of music. Despite the variety of sounds and influences, these 24 tracks distinctively belong to Oneness of Juju. Listening from beginning to end is an illuminating and coherent journey — you can hear Black music’s history and its future steps. Uplifting and combative, audacious and resilient, African Rhythms 1970-1982 is the music of a turbulent past and suitable — while optimistic — for our stormy present.

🔗→ Oneness Of Juju Were The Collision Of Jazz, Funk, African Music And The Avant-Garde
🔗→ Oneness of Juju: How an Avant-Garde Jazz Group Created A Cult Classic in the Black Arts Movement

The Soundabout

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I’m thinking a lot about how listening creates spaces, both shared and solitary. In the Strange Times, with no concerts and shuttered venues, you might think isolated listening is the only game in town. But, unexpectedly, live-streaming is opening up new opportunities for a shared listening experience, and I’m not talking about the facsimile of hanging out with distant Zoom-mates. 

If there’s one thing live-streaming is bringing back, it’s shared listening in our homes. I thought about this last Thursday when I caught Rishi from Elephant Stone live-streaming from his basement. As I listened, I scrolled through the top bar in Zoom, checking out the other attendees. Many had their kids, family, and friends enjoying the stream with them. Eventually, Caroline joined me in our video square, snow-white cat in tow, and we listened together as Rishi rocked out on sitar.

I know we still (sometimes) watch television shows together, but we’re focused on the music in this case. The video might draw us in, but upon our arrival, the image is an afterthought. We’re silently listening, paying attention to sound, occasionally breaking the spell to comment in the ‘chat’ stream on what we’re hearing. In a way, it’s a replication of meeting at a nightclub (though a coffeehouse is more apt) but only with our family and closest friends.

We’ve all seen those vintage photos of the family crowded around the radio, presumably listening to audio theater — but sometimes it’s music that’s holding their attention. And in pictures from the ’50s and ’60s, we see a gathering of teenagers, one placing the record on the turntable while the others gaze at the album cover or dance around the bedroom. Listening was only private if no one else was around. One could wear headphones (now appearing comically oversized), but there was no mobility. Headphone listening could pass for teenage rebellion if the family were also in the room, but mostly it was awkward.

The transistor radio — and, to a degree, the car radio — allowed the music to travel as the immediate surroundings changed. This movement created the first personal soundtrack, though other people could pop in and out of our movie (in the licensing world, the phrase ‘interstitial music’ refers to music that all the characters in a scene can hear). Then, of course, the cassette and the Walkman added a new way to listen — a genuinely private listening experience. We choose the music, and we choose where we want to go with it. The combination puts us inside the movie, shifting the soundtrack to our inner lives.

The Walkman (briefly called the Soundabout) debuted in most places outside of Japan in 1980. The early versions were bulky and — in a misunderstanding of how the device would change listening — came with an extra headphone port for a friend. A button paused the music and activated a microphone so the paired listeners could talk to each other. Sony jettisoned these features once it was clear users preferred to listen on their own in sonic isolation. 

In a way, the Walkman and its successors aren’t too different from a psychedelic device, like an audio Dream Machine, altering a state of awareness and heightening perceptions of the moment. Music production had already gotten trippy thanks to a chemically-enhanced counter-culture and studio-as-instrument innovations. Once the music appeared in the middle of one’s head with a wider-than-wide stereo field, things got extra-groovy. As we wander about, the brain’s penchant for connecting images with sound adds meaning and color to the more expansive music. 

In the academic paper Make a Sound Garden Grow: Exploring the New Media Potential of Social Soundscaping, the authors cite a 1993 quote from writer William Gibson: “The Sony Walkman has done more to change human perception than any virtual reality gadget. I can’t remember any technological experience since that was quite so wonderful at being able to take music and move it through landscapes and architecture.” The paper continues:

As William Gibson suggests, the Walkman was a revolutionary technology when it was released in 1979 that allowed people to impart a personalized soundtrack over shared public spaces. The Walkman was a significant departure from another popular mobile technology of the time: the boom box. The boom box made private tastes public by merging the music one listened to with the shared sounds of a public space. The Walkman, on the other hand, made possible a more private form of listening.

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I remember a time in New York City in the mid-90s. I was walking the avenues with a friend who made especially jarring sheets-of-layered-noise slow techno. He handed me the headphones to his Walkman so I could check out a new track. The music began filling my head with all these textures and brutal sound blasts. Then we turned a corner, and suddenly we were at the edge of a crime scene — yellow tape everywhere, smoke hugging the pavement, men in dark uniforms excitedly talking on radios. I wasn’t sure if we were supposed to be there — it seemed dangerous. And the music instantly became a part of everything around. It was the glue combining the whole of my perception at that moment. We passed the scene right as the track ended. I took the headphones off, looked at my friend, and said something like, “whoa.” Twenty-five years later, that’s still one of my most potent and memorable music moments.

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Walkman-adjacent means of listening — today’s earbud activities — seem ideally suited for social distancing. Amanda Petrusich, writing about the approaching ubiquity of headphones four years ago, predicted:

It seems possible, though, that we are slowly reconfiguring music as a private pleasure—that, in fact, all pleasures, soon, may be private. We are all the lone stars of secret films, narrated by and in our own minds, and we seek out music that validates that position: separate, but forever plugged in.

That may have been our trajectory. And beyond facilitating an intentionally isolated experience, earbuds acted as a stay-six-feet-away signal. In co-working spaces, I used headphones to imply, ‘I’m hard at work.’ The seat next to me often remained empty. Headphones on walkers, joggers, and public-transported commuters keep the inquisitive, bothersome, or flirtatious at bay. Headphones became an extension of ‘the bubble,’ a signifier of our personal space.

I know that we’re often not walking around with headphones in our homes — though I occasionally do, don’t judge — but one might think social distancing signals the apex of private listening. But we could have easily anticipated the need to experience things together once again. Staying home for months accentuates the lack of concerts or nightclubs or even a chance encounter with a great song in a retail shop or through the window of a passing car. I don’t know about you, but I’ve found myself listening to — and commenting on — music with family, partners, and friends in my ‘social pod’ more than before. I’m not talking about interacting with music through things like Tim’s Twitter Listening Party. That’s fun and fabulous and, yes, another form of shared listening that feels kinda radical. Besides Twitter parties, I feel like we’re starting to listen together again, live, and in person. I admit the concept is subtle, and you might not notice that it’s happening. And it’s not just through enjoying live-streams together. Our lockdown-inspired shared listening feels new, distant from that family engrossed in radio theater, but operating in a similar momentary environment. 

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The music critic Amanda Petrusich, who I mentioned above, also thinks a lot about the spaces we create by how we listen. Back in 2010, she was interviewed for NPR under the Get To Know A Critic banner. The correspondent asked, “What’s your ideal way to listen to a record?”

… it’s true — some music is easier to type to, and some music rewards repeat listens in different ways. My knee-jerk tendency is to want to listen to music on vinyl, through headphones (no earbuds, never earbuds), all alone, with the lights turned off (in other words, the way I listened to music when I was fifteen), but I fight that whenever possible, because it’s really not fair. Music doesn’t function that way; it needs to breathe.

If I’m stuck on a record review, I’ll put something on my iPod and ride around on the subway for an hour, listening on my headphones. I think almost all music sounds better on the subway or in a moving car with the windows rolled down. Or I’ll go for a run with it — there’s no better way to get inside the rhythm section of a song than by running to it. It’s not always practical to implement, but I do at least try to think about where and when something was meant to be heard.

I like the idea of thinking not only about why we listen, but also where and how. We’ve all got favorite songs for specific environments and situations — playlists we make for driving or studying reflect this. But it’s also useful to think about how listening technologies affect one’s perception of songs, whether its headphones or shared speakers or a platform like Spotify. Inevitably these combinations color music and invite context. Deep listening (which I’ve talked about before) requires intentionally tuning these variants, increasing opportunities for meaning and connection. However, surprises that fuse with an unintended soundtrack — like my NYC crime scene episode — can offer the most powerful associations.

This post was adapted from Ringo Dreams of Lawn Care, a weekly newsletter loosely about music-making, music-listening, and how technology changes the culture around those things. Click here to check out the latest issue and subscribe.