8Sided Blog

the scene celebrates itself

And the Heart Grows Fonder

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My eyes are a mess. You probably already know this. Funny thing: I’ve only been admitted to a hospital once — at the age of 12, I stabbed my leg with a knife while building a tree fort on Christmas Eve — and still have all my organs. That includes my tonsils, my appendix, and even my wisdom teeth. I often joke that I’ll probably get hit with everything all at once, as if my maladies have been biding their time. I couldn’t have predicted that it would all go to my eyes.

I’ve always had an outrageous astigmatism, but in my late 30s, the condition graduated to outright keratoconus. Then there’s this double vision, requiring expensive prism lenses on the glasses I wear in addition to the keratoconus correcting contacts. And now I’m dealing with fucking Fuchs’ Dystrophy. I’ve noticed a haze in my right eye that I first chalked up to foggy contacts. But, of course, I live in the armpit of humid central Florida, where fogged-out lenses are a way of life. But then the haze — now resembling a light gauze — became noticeable without my contacts. This state of affairs also made driving impossible at night, as oncoming cars’ headlights made the gauze in my eye burst into an unattractive light show. 

Thanks to a superb new optometrist, the Fuchs’ was identified. She referred me to a specialist who explained the condition would get much worse in no time at all. The two options were a cornea transplant — sorry, nope, for reasons I won’t go into — or a new procedure that involved scraping the Fuchs’ out of my eyeball. Yikes, but okay, sure.

I had this procedure about a month ago. It went smoothly. Supposedly the surgery is just like a cataract removal (if that’s a helpful frame of reference) — I was awake, somewhat sedated, and didn’t feel a thing. It looked like I was watching a stationary version of the light tunnel at the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey as the doctor performed the surgery. 

For the first couple of weeks, my eye felt like an eyelash got trapped on the surface. An awful feeling, especially as this was an eyelash that wouldn’t budge. And half those days, the feeling was accompanied by a faucet of tears. I went through multiple boxes of tissue. I couldn’t read, I couldn’t watch movies, and I could barely look at anything for long.

Now all that is thankfully over, though looking through my right eye is like peering through the bottom of a drinking glass. This fuzziness should fade to normal eyesight in several weeks. And I have to drip exotic eye drops ordered from Japan into my socket four times a day. The drops have something to do with stem cell growth. Unfortunately, they’re expensive and only available in Japan as the procedure performed on me is so new. So I had to order a pack of these eye drop bottles months in advance.

It’s a slow process, and it’s slowing me down. I’m constantly fighting off frustration as I fall behind on projects and work. These past months have felt like a deep pit, from hurricanes creating a wake of chaos to my bout with COVID that turned into weeks and weeks of godawful exhaustion, and then this eye biz. There’s so much I want to do (like post all the time on this blog!), but I feel captured in the sticky web of inconvenience. 

I’m finally prying myself loose. I’m still way behind on my work stuff (and please accept my heartfelt apologies if you’re someone I work with), but for the first time in ages, I’m experiencing motivation. More than anything, I want to write and ramp up my creative output. It’s as if the period of incapacitation has made the heart grow fonder. So I’ve devised plans and goals for this blog that are inspiring. I’ll detail them in an upcoming Ballad of the Blog post.

These months have also been a learning experience and a lesson in not beating oneself up. I’ve had lots of practice with self-blame during these challenges, and I’ve come out the other side more accepting and less debilitated. Anne Helen Petersen had a similar epiphany in today’s Culture Study newsletter, which I highly recommend you read. Ann imagines what her weekend would be like if she had completed all of her work tasks: 

The work would’ve been done. But I’ve already tried that whittled-down version of a life, and it’s not a life at all. It’s a burnout trap, a suffocation, a flattening of self. Sure, I’d have completed all the work, done all the tasks, finished all the laundry. But to what end? And to what future? The next weekend would come, and I’d feel some semblance of control, which I may or may not have been able to carry over into the week. But achieving control is not the same as achieving happiness.

As I advised someone on Mastodon going through a post-COVID struggle similar to mine: “Don’t mentally punish yourself for not being able to get everything done that you think you need to while feeling [exhausted]. I was doing that constantly, and I’m sure it made things worse.” If I gain extra wisdom and a new spark to create that I continue to cultivate, the turmoil of the last several months will have been worthwhile. As a wise person said, “When life hands you Godzilla, build Mechagodzilla.”

Infamous Bathrooms

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Listening After Months in Lockdown → In The Quietus, Daniel Dylan Wray (who claims to listen to five new albums a day) feels that 2020 deadened music’s healing power for him. As the months (and pandemic) dragged on, music only added to the deluge of information (“Pressing play sometimes felt like opening up Twitter …”), and silence was often preferable. Though Daniel still experienced euphoric music moments, a lot of music (or the act of listening to it) felt “draped in sadness.”

Daniel has a theory. His 2020 listening experiences are happening in a singular space — the same place where he’s locked down, living monotonous days, working from home, endlessly worrying. He’s not bonding with music in grungy nightclubs or record shops, or discovering new tunes with friends, or equating albums to time spent on road trips or in unfamiliar cities. Daniel explains:

The process of discovering and experiencing music is intrinsically linked to a sense of place. We all have indelible memories – from the profound to the prosaic – attached to where we were during a musical epiphany or awakening. This year that process has been hacked down to nothing more than sitting in front of a computer screen at home. … Music is a multi-sensory experience, from the sweat and pulse of a club to the stench of stagnant gig venue carpets, and from rifling through fusty charity shop records to perfectly programmed light shows that dazzle the eye as music tickles the ear and chugging smoke machines engulf you. 2020 has robbed music of these other senses.

He has a point. I do equate many of my favorite songs and albums with events, people, or places. And I don’t go out as much as I used to (even before COVID-times), which might be why I don’t have too many current songs with strong memetic connective tissue. 

Music critic Ann Powers writes about similar feelings in her moving new essay Diary of a Fugue Year. Like Daniel, she refers to music as another layer of information to digest. But she also finds that her mindset toward music has transformed after months of lockdown, flavoring the act of listening with a strange intimacy: 

Music makes me yearn for what feels lost: a whisper pushing breath onto my neck, a voice singing loud into a crowd yelling back at it. In my solitude, though, recordings become a lifeline. Spending time with music has never felt more private, a way of both sheltering from and mediating the noise from outside. At the same time, the sound always takes me somewhere; it’s often the only way I hear a stranger’s voice on any given day. See what I’m getting at? Nothing’s got just one meaning. In a year crowded with contradictions, music’s way of enhancing emotion can feel clarifying, or it can overwhelm. Like every other form of information, music is reaching people through static-filled channels, distorted, muffled, feeding back.

We know many new practices will linger after the pandemic: working from home, live-streamed concerts, and telemedicine, to name a few. We might also listen differently, our ears heightened to receive the emotion of the moment. At home, songs will continue to sound much more personal than before COVID-times. And in the wild, music discovery becomes a visceral experience like few others. 

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CBGB Virtual Tour → Experience the grime, grit, and magnificence of CBGB & OMFUG just before shutting its doors in 2006. I was lucky to visit the club in 1991 (Monster Magnet were playing — this was during CMJ Music Marathon), but I could only handle about five minutes as the place was so hot, tiny, and packed. I had a better time next door at the Gallery, where I watched Jad Fair stomp his feet and sing songs a cappella.1He mic’ed the floor so his foot stomps would be amplified. The bemused sound guy spent 10 minutes moving microphones around until Jad was satisfied with the sound of his stomps. This virtual tour is a trip, though. Don’t miss out on the infamous bathrooms. And Unsane were quite strategic with their band stickers, weren’t they? (h/t Joe Livingston)

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Matthew Cardinal – Asterisms → If calming those pandemic nerves is the aim, then Asterisms is the game. Matthew Cardinal, a member of the Edmonton band nêhiyawak (described in the press release as ‘moccasingaze’), pleasingly layers tones and washes of sound throughout his solo debut’s enchanting 43 minutes. There are some things to decipher here — the song titles are dates without years, and it’s not clear if “Dec 31st” and “Jan 8th” are yet to happen or already passed. Maybe these are the days the tracks were recorded, or when best to listen. And the album’s title either references typography or astronomy, both realms where the term “asterism” exists. This fuzziness reflects the music, lost somewhere between past and future, between rigid text-space and intangible star fields. There are hints of melodies that fade in and out of each other, and occasionally a Schulze-esque synth sound will bubble up from the haze. And with nearly half the tracks clocking in at under three minutes, these aren’t elongated, drifty drones, but the shorties also don’t come off as unfinished snapshots. There’s enough variety here to imbue a thoughtful motion to the album, as recalling past days in our lives reveals different colors and fading experiences. Most importantly, Asterisms is a comforting listen, and I happily give in to its spell. Matthew Cardinal has confidently earned his gold star among the busy field of 2020’s ambient exporters. (P.S. Here’s a kaleidoscopic video for “Dec 4th.”)

An Accommodating Tinge of Distortion

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An Update on Bandcamp Fridays → You can’t have too much of a good thing. Since the very beginning of COVID-times, Bandcamp has waived their revenue share on the first Friday of every month. That means after payment processor fees, artists (or their labels, if managing the account) got an average of 93% of the total.

Bandcamp Fridays were a rousing success for everyone involved, not the least Bandcamp itself. Though the company led us to believe these first Fridays ended with 2020, I suspected these events would continue. And here’s Bandcamp with breaking news: 

Although vaccines are starting to roll out, it will likely be several months before live performance revenue starts to return. So we’re going to continue doing Bandcamp Fridays in 2021, on February 5th, March 5th, April 2nd, and May 7th. As always, isitbandcampfriday.com has the details.

Also, in the announcement, Bandcamp rightly points out that fans shouldn’t think these are the only days to buy music and support artists. Normally, “an average of 82% reaches the artist/label” through Bandcamp on a day that’s not the first Friday of the month. That’s still pretty good and remarkably better than those other guys. 

So why have these special Fridays, then? Well, they’re a lot of fun. Bandcamp Fridays remind me of Tuesdays at the record store — new releases came out every Tuesday in the olden times — and fans would line up at the door before we opened in anticipation of their favorite artists’ fresh music. Nowadays, Bandcamp Friday’s excitement carries over to social media. The social platforms come alive on Bandcamp Fridays with recommendations, exclusives from the artists, and praise from fans. It’s a nudge to the broader public that there’s something more than Spotify, that an inclusive music community bubbling with intention and enthusiasm exists in 2020. And because of that, I expect Bandcamp Fridays — or some version of it — to continue well beyond next May.

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In 2021, support people. Screw the brands. → The argument over streaming royalties and how the services don’t adequately pay artists often loses sight of an important factor. If a recording artist releases through a label, that label might take as much as 90% of the streaming royalty pie.190% would be a really bad — but not unheard of — major label deal. Then, there’s the issue of labels that don’t pay at all — whether that’s intentional or due to a combination of laziness and bad accounting. 

In 5 Magazine, Terry Matthew calls out labels that infamously don’t pay artists. Terry mentions classic Chicago house music labels like Trax, defrauding pioneering Black artists like Larry Heard and Robert Owens. But Terry notes a more significant problem: as fans, we sometimes mythologize the labels at the expense of the artists behind the music. We continue to support labels while (often unknowingly) hurting the artists. Here’s Terry:

Too often as an industry, we elevate packaging over product, memorabilia over music, brand over artist. All might be forgivable except the last, because there are real people involved in this, many of them are still alive and still active artists.

Terry’s prescription: Stop fetishizing labels at the expense of artist fandom. Buy releases directly from the artists when you can (via Bandcamp or artist sites). And be aware that the classic record you’re buying might be a dodgy label’s make-a-fast-buck repress.

There’s also a reminder not to get caught up in our beloved artists’ catalogs of classics, ignoring their current output. Many pioneering producers are still making vital music. A lot of it is self-released. The best thing we can do as fans is to follow our heroes as they continue their musical lives, supporting them when we can. 

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Shea Betts – Sea / Sky → This album is the first release from NYC-via-Canada librarian and music-maker Shea Betts. As evidenced by the title Sea / Sky, the album is an ode to both, with the first half inspired by the ocean’s movement while the second reflects the windiness of the atmosphere. Shea tells me that he had “a desire to make a more ‘abrasive’ ambient sound – something more distorted and overdriven than the subdued ambient that I often listen to.” That abrasiveness is anything but, closer to an accommodating tinge of distortion on keyboards that sustains like church organs. This organ-like quality gives Sea / Sky a religious air, an almost worshipful respect for the natural world inhabited by the album’s two subjects. With measured difference, the ‘Sea’ half conveys roughness while the ‘Sky’ portion is lighter and flowing. And the songs in the middle are a combination. “Where the ocean meets the sky,” says Shea. Despite its simplicity, Sea / Sky is expressive and visual — listening in full, with the concept in mind, is movie-like. I imagine a vertical slow-motion camera pan from the water to the clouds. Probably in black and white and dramatically contrasted. Is Béla Tarr available?

Embrace the Genre

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Like end-of-the-year best-of lists, new genre names are something that music fans love to hate. There’s a mixture of disdain for perceived pigeonholing and a failure to keep up with the latest trends — nothing makes a music lover feel older than a new, incomprehensible genre. Then there’s the sub-genre and the micro-genre. Seriously, it never ends. It’s genres all the way down.

Instead of feeling intimidated, I say embrace the genre and all its fancifully named layers. Genre is an identifier, important in pointing the way and gluing together scenes. There was a time that you could walk into an indie record store, look at the clientele, and guess what genres they listened to by how they looked. It’s harder now that genres are less-defined and blur together — which I’ll argue is a good thing. But it’s also why genres are reaching beyond sonic vibes and sounds, increasingly representative of technological innovation, communities, and desired lifestyles. 

If you’re a musician, there’s nothing worse than the question, “What do you sound like?” We shuffle our postures and avoid answering, or vaguely go for something broad like “rock music.” If you look up old artist interviews with me, you’ll see I often responded with “funk,” which was unfortunate. Why can’t we just own our genre — or create our own? Consider the genre as an elevator pitch. It’s a chance to claim a plot of land and plant a flag. 

Here’s how Seth Godin thinks about genre, as explained in his recent appearance on The Moment with Brian Koppelman:

“People who are creatives bristle at the idea of genre because they think it has something to do with generic. It has nothing to do with generic. It’s the opposite of generic. Genre means that you understand your part in the chain — [and] in the process, in the market — well enough to make something magical that still rhymes with what came before. You’ve done the reading. You respect the audience enough that you can’t just show up and say, ‘This is like nothing you’ve ever seen or heard before.’ It actually is where it belongs.”

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It’s fun to look at the birth of genres. The sounds predate the descriptive monikers, often by many years. Traditionally, genres are christened through these sources:

  • An artist or band name. Bill Monroe’s Blue Grass Boys is where we get bluegrass.
  • Song or album titles. Ornette Coleman’s 1960 album Free Jazz and The Maytals’ 1968 single “Do the Reggay” popularized those terms.
  • Compilation album titles. A ‘scene’ is pre-built into the curated collection of artists, such as the now-legendary producers assembled on 1988’s Techno! The New Dance Sound of Detroit.
  • Lyrics. “I said a hip-hop, the hippie, the hippie to the hip, hip-hop and you don’t stop …”
  • Record labels. In the late ’80s, you would’ve called Skinny Puppy something else if Throbbing Gristle didn’t start Industrial Records.
  • Music Journalists. Simon Reynolds is the ninja of the genre name and is still at it. But even before, there was ‘heavy metal,’ applied to music for the first time in 1970 by Mike Saunders, future vocalist of punk band Angry Samoans. Writing for Rolling Stone, he referred to Humble Pie as “27th-rate heavy metal crap.” Ironically, Sauders did not come up with ‘punk rock,’ which was coined the same year in Creem Magazine.
  • Music Executives. Seymour Stein of Sire Records came up with ‘new wave’ to market all these bands he was signing fresh off the stage of CBGBs.
  • The technology. Dub comes from ‘dubplate,’ which is technically a music-delivery format. But dub is hardly ever heard on a dubplate these days.
  • Territory. We can call music from Guatemala Guatamalen music even though the locals undoubtedly have a more specific name. And the ‘western’ in country & western refers to the western US where many rural workers migrated and settled, especially during the Dust Bowl.
  • Radio. Famously, Alan Freed named his radio show The Moondog Rock’n’Roll House Party. Like in many of the examples above, Freed didn’t use the phrase first, but he popularized it.

There’s one more traditional method of genre creation, which I hinted at in the beginning. The artist comes up with it herself. There’s a lot of power in naming your genre as, if you’re successful and others catch on, you become the forebear. Fela Kuti did this with Afrobeat. And Brian Eno did this with ambient music:

“All the signs were in the air all around with ambient music in the mid-1970s, and other people were doing a similar thing. I just gave it a name. Which is exactly what it needed. A name. Giving something a name can be just the same as inventing it. By naming something you create a difference. You say that this is now real.”

Quick side story: in the late-90s, a friend and I often DJ’ed trip-hop records and hip-hop instrumentals with the turntables pitched up near +8. Speed garage was the genre du jour at the time, so we jokingly named our genre ‘speed downtempo.’ It didn’t take off.

But, yes — sometimes a joke or off-handed comment will spawn a genre name. NYC’s DJ Olive came up with ‘illbient’ as a sarcastic response when a journalist asked if he played ambient. And Gilles Peterson famously once joked that his side room at an acid house party was the ‘acid jazz’ area, birthing a repackaged jazz revival. 

Genre is intrinsically tied to the music it denotes but spreads out to other qualities of the genre’s followers. Goth is as identifiable for its fashion as its sound, and close-knit genres like nerdcore are increasingly identified by membership in their communities. 

What’s interesting — with technological developments inseparable from how we interact with music — is the emergence of genres outside of a musical style. That is, the communities or the platforms define the genre, and the music comes later. 

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I want to look at a few recent arrivals in the pantheon of genres to see how defining our music ends up describing so much more. Be warned — many of these sub-genres contain references to other sub-genres. You might get genre whiplash.

Hyperpop

On the excellent Jaymo Technologies blog, Jay Springett writes about the daunting proliferation of genres and how streaming platforms affect genre creation: 

The world is now dominated by microgenres and subcultures, shaping perception of reality via niche hashtags and network effects. For better or worse someone at Spotify finds or makes up a genre name and then populates a playlist with content. The idea that people would be mad about an online genre having a name and coming from nowhere now seems quaint.

Jay is possibly hinting at hyperpop, a genre name popularized by Spotify via the in-house playlist of the same name. The actual sound of hyperpop is debatable and evasive, with many of its elements drawn from vaporwave, an older genre (by a few years) but somewhat more explainable. There’s a Gen Z do-it-yourself aesthetic, and many of hyperpop’s ephemeral stars are in their early teens. Lizzy Szabo, who helps curate the playlist, understands that hyperpop is “an artist and listening community” as much as it’s a musical genre. One thing to notice about that quote: the listeners are included in the definition, powering hyperpop alongside the creators. To participate, throw aside any reservations about a movement dreamed up by a big corporation. 

Glitchcore

Glitchcore shares many of the artists found on the Hyperpop playlist. Its defining sonic trait is the ‘glitch’ — quick edits, stuttering vocals and syllables, things that would have once made us check our compact discs for scratches. Some even take hyperpop songs and add these ‘defects’ for glitchcore remixes. But glitchcore’s difference is in its inspiration and intention. TikTok videos, with visual glitches matching the audio ones, along with bright colors and flashes, are the reason and original platform for most glitchcore tracks. Like how a TV signal popping in-and-out changes the quality of a show’s dialogue, it’s a visual aesthetic influencing the sound. Glitchcore is a genre given shape by a video editing technique mixed with a nostalgia for digital’s early days of jarring imperfection.  

Lo-Fi Hip-Hop

Like hyperpop, lo-fi hip-hop (or lo-fi beats, chill-hop, or, sometimes, ‘music for studying’) gets its name from a curated spot on a streaming platform. In lo-fi hip-hop’s case, these are streaming channels on YouTube playing an endless selection of music usually accompanied by a looping anime scene. A Gen Z variant of ambient music, lo-fi hip-hop is meant to accompany studying, video-gaming, or zoning out. This is another genre that’s expanded its popularity in COVID-times, with the studying girl of the ‘lofi hip hop radio – beats to relax/study to’ channel serving as a lockdown work-from-home companion. The music itself draws directly from boom-bap hip-hop and — for those in the know — the mellow side of ’90s trip-hop, but is more basic, often constructed from interchangeable sample libraries and beat kits. Lo-fi hip-hop is a diluted version of its predecessors, which is why it’s so effective as in-the-background focus music.

Bedroom Pop

Bedroom pop started as ‘what it says on the tin:’ pop music made in the bedroom. Its unexpected ancestor is the lo-fi indie movement of the ’90s, with bands like Sebadoh and Guided By Voices recording albums on four-track cassette recorders. Nothing kept those bands from visiting a studio, but the constraints inherited through four-track recording were integral to their sounds (and brands). 

The bedroom pop aesthetic predates the pandemic but has unsurprisingly grown during months of lockdown. The songs are generally sparser and have an air of intimacy not found in your usual pop. Vocals are often delivered at an ASMR volume instead of belted out. 

Billie Eilish is the patron saint of bedroom pop. She does record most of her music in a bedroom with her brother, though these raw tracks are then mixed in multi-million dollar studios. As you might have guessed, unlike the four-track to the lo-fi bands, the ‘bedroom’ part is no longer essential to this genre. As the bedroom pop artist Girl in Red says, “Pop bangers are being made in bedrooms and bedroom pop-ish songs in studios. It’s more about how it sounds than where it’s made.”

Slowed & Reverb

Slowed & reverb is one of the oddest new genres, its name a play on the seemingly ancient (a decade+ old) hip-hop sub-genre chopped & screwed. Slowed & reverb appropriates other songs, but instead of ‘glitching’ or ‘remixing’ them, the music is slowed down (‘screwed’) and then doused in reverb. Recent hip-hop tracks mostly receive the slowed & reverb treatment but, as an offshoot of vaporwave, cheesy ’80s AOR songs are frequent targets, too. This genre is all about the feelings evoked — listening is like being lost in a fog that’s hazy, nostalgic, dream-like, and druggy. It also tends to turn upbeat songs into melancholic sobfests. 

Because slowed & reverb uses pre-existing songs, you can only find its ‘hits’ on YouTube, SoundCloud, and (sometimes) Bandcamp. The other platforms have copyright barriers, though some producers have gotten away with compiling slowed & reverb mixes and servicing them to Spotify as podcasts. In a recent development, a few artists are now commissioning official slowed & reverb remixes of their singles, so perhaps there’s growth potential after all.

(Are you interested in creating your own slowed & reverb track? There’s an app for that.)

Ambient Television

This is the newest genre on the list, coined by Kyle Chayka in The New Yorker last month. I’m fudging a little as ambient television is not a music genre but a television aesthetic that draws influence from the same well as lo-fi hip-hop. This example shows how, as with glitchcore, different mediums are interacting to create new genres. 

Ambient television follows Eno’s maxim of “as ignorable as it is interesting,” or as Chayka explains, “something you don’t have to pay attention to in order to enjoy but which is still seductive enough to be compelling if you choose to do so momentarily.” These are the new breed of Netflix design shows or, as Chayka pinpoints, Emily In Paris — TV shows you can look away from to read that iPhone notification without feeling like you’re missing anything. 

There are more intriguing ramifications here when thinking about how streaming influences the ways we absorb digital media. Here’s Chayka again: 

Whereas the Internet once promised to provide on-demand access to limitless information and media to anyone willing to make use of a Google search, lately it has encouraged a more passive kind of engagement, a state of slack-jawed consumption only intensified by this past year’s quarantine ennui. Streaming companies once pitched themselves as innovators for offering the possibility to watch anything at any time, but do we really want to choose? The prevalence of ambient media suggests that we don’t.

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Genre-chasing can seem ridiculous. But, as you see, the names we use to bond music together says everything about how we listen. New genres are a commentary on the present culture. And old ones are an archeological dig. As Seth Godin said at the top of this essay, genres help us understand our “part in the chain.” That goes for the fans as well as the musicians. Genres decode the links formed through technology, platforms, fashion, and community. Embrace the genre.

Here’s a music genre list to scroll through. And here’s an interactive genre chart provided by Every Noise at Once. The latter offers audio samples but keep in mind the music is only part of the story. Chances are both lists are seriously behind on all of the new genres, even if they were up-to-date a week or two ago.

SoundCloud’s Phoenix Rises

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It wasn’t that long ago that, along with many others, this blog was contemplating the possibility of SoundCloud’s demise. Yesterday it was announced, via an annual report, that SoundCloud just achieved its first profitable quarter. I’ve always rooted for SoundCloud, so I’m happy for the previously troubled company. 

We can guess at multiple factors for this success. Kerry Trainor’s guidance as CEO looks valuable. As he was previously in charge of Vimeo, many hoped he would bring SoundCloud’s focus back to creators after its short attempt to rival other streaming platforms. SoundCloud’s strength and distinction is its creator community. The shift back to those roots under Trainor (helped by the phenomenon of SoundCloud Rap) put the company back on a lot of radars.

SoundCloud’s integrations and partnerships added value to the service, creating more income opportunities and Pro-level subscribers. Distribution via Repost to the likes of Spotify, AI mastering through Landr, and integrations with multiple DJ software partners (including Pioneer, Serato, and Native Instruments) — among other features — offer an attractive proposition for artists. Platforms like Spotify and Apple Music are wary of such integrations, presumably to keep us within their walled gardens. But users love to tie together the multiple apps and services they use, especially when sharing and promoting music. SoundCloud is smart to welcome these third-party collaborators.

In Music Business Weekly, SoundCloud boasts of 250 million tracks on the platform, versus the 70 million-ish songs on Spotify. Of course, these aren’t all polished songs — this number counts all the demos, goof-offs, DJ mixes, spoken content, and sound collages found on SoundCloud. But this brings out another factor for SoundCloud’s renewed success — the pandemic. In the report, SoundCloud says COVID-times have presented “a true mix of tailwinds and headwinds” (perhaps the understatement of the year). It seems advertising income is the central area of uncertainty. In the ‘tailwind’ category, artists and budding artists in lockdown are adding more music than ever to SoundCloud. Subscriptions are on the rise, as are paying users of the Repost distribution service (estimated to number at 80,000 artists this month). 

Time will tell if this profitable quarter is a fluke for SoundCloud. Spotify only recently achieved occasionally profitable quarters, but its finances still hang in the balance. However, I blanch at writing about profits and earnings reports in this blog, especially as a success measure. What’s important to me is the persistence of this vital tool for sound-creators and their communities. SoundCloud remains a piece of the music ecosystem puzzle and a necessary stomping ground for new and emerging artists worldwide.

🔗→ Soundcloud’s Revenues Jumped 37% to $166m in 2019 – and It’s Just Posted Its First Ever Profitable Quarter

Any Relief is Sweet Relief

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One More Post About Stress and Creativity → I’ve alluded to the challenges and difficulties of putting together a weekly email newsletter, which are the obstructions of creative work, really. Whether writing, music-making, brainstorming, anything requiring the mythical ‘creative juice’ — the stars should be aligned, right? If something’s out of whack, then perhaps it’s not happening. The mood escapes us, and, creatively, we feel like fish flapping on the edge of the dock. 

I could probably say it’s felt like this for four years, but COVID-times — coinciding with the launch of my newsletter somehow — exaggerates the mental forecast for dark clouds. A few of you have picked up on these feelings, responding to confirm the matching weather in your heads. Our challenges aren’t equal, and I’m aware I’m better off in these circumstances than most. But the combination of daily chaos from the White House, a global pandemic, and the duly exacerbated struggles of self-employment weigh heavy. I admit: this stress-fog is the reason the newsletter slowed down its pace to fortnightly. No matter how much I try to keep my brain fresh — news-avoiding, stoic reminders, meditation — the dark clouds find a way to shoo off the ideas. And the motivation to go along with them. 

So how do I feel today? Probably, like you, a bit better. Damon Krukowski tweeted yesterday that Boston’s 4.2 earthquake was actually “everyone jumping out of bed with energy for the first time in 4 years.” I don’t know how long this lasts — the daily chaos is already starting to resume, battering us for at least a couple of months. The pandemic is scarier than it’s ever been. And I’m still a self-employed person balancing the financial precipice. But on at least one or two of those points, I see some hope, and I didn’t feel that way several days ago. Any relief is sweet relief, and my creative process is thankful. 

I decided to use this blog and my newsletter as a respite from all this turmoil. That’s why I haven’t spoken about it much and why it feels weird writing about it now. And I don’t want to make it all about me, either. But I feel like it’s a good possibility you’ve been going through the same challenges. You might also feel less ‘weighted’ today. Again, that doesn’t mean it’s easier from here out — creation is hard even in the best of times. But any ray of light helps shine through those clouds, doesn’t it? Onward.

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Speaking of my Email Newsletter → Will Sumsuch let loose a bunch of lovely words about Ringo Dreams of Lawn Care in the new issue of 5 Mag. He calls my newsletter “a neatly packaged antidote to our horrendously homogeneous musical landscape” and “like an artistic self-help guide.” Can you see me blushing through the email? I hope to live up to those accolades as rev back up to my weekly broadsides. Thanks, Will! The latest issue of 5 Mag is only available to subscribers right now, but you can download it for $2.99. You should! It’s rad, and, as usual for the publication, it features a lot of informative underground dance music content to grok. [LINK]

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Pylon – Box → The best band I ever saw live (and I didn’t even get to see them in their early ’80s prime) has a wonderful box set out. It’s Pylon, and it’s called Box. Sasha Frere-Jones wrote some great words about it on 4Columns, including this thinly disguised call-to-arms: “These recordings demonstrate how powerful the idea of punk was as liberation, not in the sense of political emancipation but as a license to start from scratch.” Anyway, you could do worse than put on Pylon today or any day. “These kids listen to dub for breakfast.” You can listen to (and buy) Box on Bandcamp or those streaming spots. [LINK]

Looney Machine of Outrage

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Negativity Will Not Do → I could probably write about every other post that appears on The Red Hand Files here. Nick Cave’s answers to his reader’s questions are delightful and insightful, and most deserve highlighting. The latest, Issue #122, is a response to Pat from Chicago asking how Nick deals with hate mail. Nick jokingly — I hope — claims to enjoy “a good death threat in the morning.” Then I’m fully on board once he dismisses social media as “that looney machine of outrage.” I’m sticking the phrase in my quiver for future deployment. 

But it’s Nick’s dose of resistant optimism and a rally to continue doing creative work in the face of uncertainty that stirs my soul. I needed to read this today:

Of course, there is much in our world that is in need of change, to be set to rights, and clearly humanity is complex, conflicted and full of faults, but at this moment in time, when our very existence hangs in the balance, we need to come together not just in good faith and consolation, but also in a spirit of creativity and invention. Our existence depends upon offering the best of ourselves. Negativity, cynicism and resentment will not do.

On the same day, James A. Reeves offered this complimentary observation (unintentional) on his Atlas Minor blog: 

It’s an awful feeling, being afraid to hope. But I’ve relied on pessimism as a protective measure for too long, only to discover it’s another warped mirror.

I literally exclaimed, “Oh, shit!” when I read that. It felt like I got burned. This week’s tough — the toughest in a while — and the stress is nearly unbearable. My own ‘protective’ pessimism and wallowing outside of my creative pursuits aren’t helping anyone. Quite the opposite, actually. Thanks for the wake-up call.

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Joe Muggs on “Starfish and Coffee” → Joe Muggs was given the task of writing in-depth about a Prince song in a lengthy Twitter thread. He chose “Starfish and Coffee.” Hey, that might be my favorite one, too. Joe’s thoughts and recollections on this classic are heartwarming, reminding me of all the things that make one love music (and Prince). He also touches on that DJ set sweet spot: playing a song that everyone knows and digs, but you never hear on the radio (or the 2020 equivalent). Anyway, this is a great thread. Hopefully, someday this screed will get transferred to a blog or personal site (you should do one, Joe) and away from the ephemeral clutches of Twitter. Passionate remembrances such as this deserve a more hallowed ground. 

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“I Don’t Want To Talk About It” Masks → Orlando art troubadour Patrick Greene ran for mayor of ‘the city beautiful’ in 2004. His campaign slogan was, “I don’t want to talk about it,” a sentiment that has haunted us (and him) ever since. As we barrel further into COVID-times, Pat has heeded the call to extend his slogan to us mask-wearing ‘over its’ as we do our sensible duty while discouraging senseless chat. Or at least that’s how I read it. 

The masks are $16.00 (including shipping within the US), and Pat will donate four of those dollars to Community Hope Center. That organization helps the homeless and those living destitute in the (now) ex-tourist motels along the theme park highways. You may recognize this existence from the film The Florida Project. What was a budding problem at the time of that movie has gotten much, much worse thanks to the economic effects of COVID on Central Florida’s service industries. Supporting Community Hope Center in this crisis is a worthy cause.

Send Pat $16.00 for one of these handy masks. Click here for his email address for more info, or PayPal him using that same email. Be sure to include your shipping address.

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Affect Display – Animal Drift Animal → Canadian producer Damien Smith is Affect Display, and he’s released a unique seven-track album titled Animal Drift Animal through the Pirates Blend label. The tracks recall Detroit techno’s early explorations, as releases became less about the dance-floor and more about the head-trip. Smith’s drum programming sets Animal Drift Animal into this heady mode, with frenetic rhythms that betray influences traveling across a landscape of genres. There are scenes of pastoral ambiance, but also indie-quoting guitar lines in “FlightorFury” and a couple of others, a mellow gothiness in “Transference,” and disorienting experimentalism leading to grandiose prog-ness in “Dauen.” And it works. Affect Display has delivered something unusual and grabbing. He’s shaking things up, and what more can one ask for in these lockdown days of endless sameness? Check out the video for “Until the Light Hits the Door” for an eerily nostalgic taste of Affect Display’s electronica:

Ralph Kinsella and the Poetics of Bedroom Listening

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Ralph Kinsella contacted me through this blog and emailed a link to his just-released Bandcamp-only Abstraction EP. The tunes blew me away — this was an ambient music I wanted to hear, melodic and optimistic, dynamic rather than constant, and featuring guitars, both processed and clear. I wrote about it in a previous #Worktones segment, giving the Abstraction EP high marks. But, behind the scenes, I emailed Ralph asking if he thought of following up with an album. And if he’d like my 8D Industries imprint to release it.

Ralph responded with the completed demo of his album Lessening. Though recorded at the same time as the Abstraction EP, Lessening felt like a step forward. Hearing Ralph’s music at a 50-minute stretch suited his sonic world-building. The music is glistening and evolving, taking on suggestive textures that convey movement from place-to-place. I’m loath to bring up ‘the lockdown,’ but these hopeful, outward-reaching tones are an antidote to seclusion.

Today Lessening is available on all the streaming platforms as well as Bandcamp. I can’t think of a better way for 8D Industries to close out this year of uncertainty — it’s an album of hesitant lightness and a resolve to keep going. 

I briefly spoke to Ralph Kinsella about this album, his music, and the beautiful part of Scotland where he resides. 

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I take it Abstraction is your debut under your own name. If so, what’s your background before that? I believe you were in a band or bands, correct? 

Ralph Kinsella: Abstraction and Lessening are the first records I recorded alone, and roughly at the same time, during the COVID-19 lockdown. They are siblings in that way, separated at birth. I wanted to do nothing more than capture something — a feeling, an emotion, maybe. Certainly, the unassailable need for extended and stretched forms of expression. Hopefully, listeners might relate to feelings of detachment and piercing melancholy, as I felt when making the records. 

I spent a long time improvising and experimenting with sounds in the lead-up to these releases. Before making these sounds, I was in various bands (mostly lo-fi bedroom rock). 

Tell me a little about your recording process. Anything surprising, either in technique, location, or even the gear you use? Do you approach the music with a ‘philosophy’? 

I record everything in a spare bedroom, and all the music starts with improvisation — usually on guitar (or synth) with a series of effects pedals. I try to use as little equipment as possible: a Stratocaster, harmonium, delay pedals, a cheapo synth, and a good synth. I use Logic Pro essentially as an eight-track. Limitations are the most important thing for me when working alone. So I avoid using any plugin instruments or too much DSP after recording. Like Keats, the philosophy is ‘truth’ – even though no such thing exists.

As a guitarist, how did you fall into this ambient style of music? Who are your inspirations/long-distance mentors for developing this sound?

The Swedish record label, Häpna, changed my life as a teenager. I’ve been obsessed with experimental music with post-rock leanings ever since. I’d go to Monorail Records in Glasgow and pick up anything new from the label (usually based on the cover art – the aesthetic curated by the label/artists was wonderful). I found the record labels and artists contributing to this creative ecosystem inspiring. It showed me a different model, one centered on creative expression.

At the moment, I enjoy listening to (and trying my best to understand) the music of Elaine Radigue, Francis Dhomont, Loren Conners, and, most recently, Cucina Povera. I think they’ve all been unknowingly collaborating with me for a while now.

When I reviewed the Abstraction EP, I pegged it as “bright, gentle, and optimistic.” Do you think that’s a fair assessment? If so, how do you arrive at that ‘vibe’ when a lot of ambient electronic music nowadays is dark and droney? And the world being dark and droney, too?

You’re right – I’m always looking for a way to make instrumental (and more left-field music) without the ‘higher access mode’ approach (by that I mean, the “my music is hard to listen to, therefore it must know more than you do” approach). I like to thread/tread fine ground between pop/experimental and abstract/structure.

Tell me a little bit about Dumfries and Galloway. I know much of The Wicker Man was filmed in the vicinity, which is wild. How does the landscape affect the music?

Liminal, fringe spaces are always interesting places for creativity. The way that land visually falls away into the sea in the imagery of The Wicker Man has a similar energy to the kind of stuff I’m interested in: where rural and (semi-rural) Scotland uncomfortably meet urban areas. The boondocks, interspersed with fragments of debris and flickering housing scheme street lights. These places (and the artistic exploration of these places) imbue my work. 

Is there an ideal listening environment or frame-of-mind for Lessening? 

The records (as with most music of this genre) require a certain amount of engagement. The pieces are musical conversations – they want to start a dialog with the listener and, I think, reject passivity. I like the poetics of the bedroom for music listening – that’s where I created the music, and that’s where it probably resonates best. 

• Ralph Kinsella’s Lessening is out now on 8D Industries.

Generous Expertise

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The terrific documentary about Other Music popped up on Prime Video last month. I’ve wanted to see this for a while — the NYC store, much mythologized, really was the ideal of an indie record shop. It had it all: a niche selection curated by the owners and staff, records filed under sometimes-baffling genre section names, cards with reviews filled to the edges with jumbled handwriting affixed to releases, store layout and organization to the point of disorganization, and so on.

The documentary made me miss New York City (I’m so happy I got to visit a few months before The Strange Times) and, of course, browsing in record stores. But, most of all, I miss the communities and interactions that revolve around great shops. This aspect of music culture was fading, along with independent retail stores, with or without COVID interference.

Other Music, New York City

Record store clerks get a bad rap for being smug jerks, judging customers’ musical tastes from behind the counter. Sure, I know a few of those —perhaps on a bad day, I’ve been one of those — but I think the cliché is overblown. As the Other Music doc shows, record store employees are often helpful experts in their chosen fields. As Caroline said as we watched the movie, “I could listen to them talk about records all day.” They know a lot about music, they listen to a lot of music, and their favorite thrill is turning someone else on to great music. People who work in record shops live for that.

There’s a moment in the documentary when a customer says to the clerk, “I’m looking for something like Lou Reed that’s not Lou Reed.” We wait for the side-glance, or a snarky response, or the indignant huff. The legends and depictions of pretentious record shops train us to believe this might be a terrible thing to ask. The customer is brave even to bring it up. 

But record store staff enjoy questions like this. The request is open-ended but has a launchpad. It’s an invitation to explore, and, most of all, it’s the customer saying, “I trust you to turn me on to something I haven’t heard yet. And I’m inclined to love it.” Maybe that’s just my own experience (I owned a record store once, remember), but I think I’m right. 

I can’t imagine the response if that person asked for “something like Lou Reed but not Lou Reed” on Facebook or Twitter. Maybe he’d get a handful of helpful replies in the spirit of a record shop clerk, but the snark would cover those over like a storm cloud. I don’t know of an internet equivalent of a space where one stranger can ask another for an open-ended recommendation without fear of trolls or insults or intimidation. 

Record stores are places of generous expertise. It’s sad that the concept almost seems quaint in this volatile age. And that’s what I miss the most about stores like Other Music. Hopefully, these stores — Other Music not included, unfortunately — will be around once we get out of this mess. In the meantime, watch the documentary. If you ever had — or have! — a favorite record store, this movie will move you.

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A couple of weekends ago, 1200 record stores participated in Record Store Day. I don’t need to tell you that this was a weird edition of the annual tradition. Record store day occurs typically in April but, this time was pushed to June, as there was a thing called “wishful thinking” back then. As that plan fizzled out, we’re now celebrating RSD 2020 through three ‘RSD drops’ on the last Saturdays of August, September, and October.1One wonders if this monthly schedule was inspired by ‘Bandcamp Days.’ In part, the idea is that spreading it out will thin the crowds showing up at actual record stores. This schedule, in theory, will also help space out the releases, so they’re not all hitting on a single day. I’m not so sure.

The decision exists in our current retail paradox of ‘less physical customers, more physical sales.’ The dramatic lines in front of record stores (which you can see in photos from a year-old blog post of mine) are no longer welcome. Elbow-to-elbow bin browsing is not allowed. That’s a shame as peeking at the person’s selections next to you is how vinyl junkies make friends. 

Most record stores won’t open their doors to the record-collecting masses. The RSD organizers frowned on online orders of exclusive releases, but this year it’s acceptable. Stores are trying to restrict orders of these limited items to local addresses, which sounds like a losing battle. Some stores are using a lottery to determine which customer snags a rare vinyl release or who gets to step in the store for an allotted time. Others are using platforms like Instagram, posting a photo of the record. Then it’s ‘first come first serve’ among the commenters. And, appropriate for this year of live-streaming, Zoom-led RSD tours from stores are happening.

In Variety, Mick Pratt of the Northeastern US indie chain Bull Moose says of the challenges, “I choose to be optimistic about it and hope that it will be great and it will not result in too much stress, either for staff or for customers who are like, ‘Damn, what I really needed to get through 2020 was this record.'”

How did it go? It seems like it went okay, but shifting vinyl fans from crowding the stores to crowding the internet had foreseeable problems. Here’s a tweet from Damon Krukowski, whose old band Galaxie 500 released the live album Copenhagen for RSD:

Regardless, the point is to support these stores (among all the other independent businesses you’re supporting) during this difficult time. You don’t need to wait for the next Record Store Day to do so. We can’t lose these places of generous expertise: the record stores, the bookshops, the locally-owned restaurants, the farmer’s markets, etc. I have the feeling once we get out of this, we’ll need these places more than ever. I don’t know how we’ll manage if they’re gone.

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John Shepherd has a generous expertise. You’ve probably heard about the short documentary John Was Trying To Contact Aliens by now. So you know Shepherd’s expertise wasn’t only his musical selections. Though I’m not convinced all those knobs and wires and screens and machinery actually did anything, you know, scientific. You might also know that his generosity extended to alien life forms. He DJ’ed to the great unknown, an audience that may or may not be out there. I know the feeling — I used to have an overnight slot on college radio.

As evidence of my embarrassing music-nerdom, the most crucial part of the documentary, to me, is when, in vintage footage, Shepherd pulls Musik Von Harmonia out of his vinyl collection for a local TV crew. As obscure as that album is now, it was but a rare fossil when that television ‘human interest’ piece aired — sometime in the ’80s is my guess. Shepherd’s geek move was strategic. He knew this would go out on television, potentially to an audience in the hundreds of thousands. So what album does he choose to show? And then he plays some of the music, announcing “now here’s a song from Harmonia” into the microphone. Shepherd’s audience is now more than extraterrestrial, and he knows it. 

Like making friends with the person browsing next to you at the record store, John Shepherd aims for connection. He’s satisfied if that connection is with aliens or a TV viewer left dumbfounded at a Harmonia album on the evening news. The film’s director, Matthew Killip, speaks about these connections in The Guardian: 

Killip was interested in extraterrestrial life less as scientific inquiry than cultural phenomenon – “if you make a film about someone trying to contact aliens, there’s an in-built narrative problem, which is that they don’t contact aliens,” he said. But he found Shepherd’s lifelong interest in contacting someone, or something, in outer space to be “deeply romantic”, and more universal than a guy rigging thousands of dollars of radio and electrical equipment in his grandparents’ living room might seem. “We’re all sort of sending out a message hoping that someone else will pick it up and understand us and understand who we are,” Killip said. “We’re all trying to make contact.”

The compact but poignant documentary John Was Trying To Contact Aliens is streaming now on Netflix. And, John is right — Musik Von Harmonia is an album worth hearing.

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.

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.”