8Sided Blog

a celebration of sound, culture, and the punk rock dream

Gardening Not Architecture

· 1 Comment

There was an article about me yesterday in the Orlando Weekly. Written by long-time friend Daniel Fuller (who you may remember as danielfuzztone), the piece is a sort of ‘where is he now?’ explainer for the curious. Of course, I’m not hiding — I’m here on the blog and involved in many public-facing projects. But, locally, I’ve left the scene behind. Remember: I was a Q-Burns Abstract Message once, and for a decade or more, you could find me DJ’ing in Orlando at least a few times each month.

Daniel did a fantastic job summarizing what I’m up to. And the article is fascinating (at least to me) when paired with a prior Orlando Weekly profile from 1997, also written by Daniel. If only I knew then what I know now etc. etc.

There are a few things in the article I feel like elaborating on. I thought about calling this the ‘director’s commentary,’ but, in that comparison, I think Daniel would be the director. So these are my liner notes:

How Orlando’s Michael Donaldson left global DJing behind to reconnect with music (and life)
Q-Burns’ abstract journey
How Orlando’s Michael Donaldson left global DJing behind to reconnect with music (and life)
Q-Burns’ abstract journey

“I got into DJing initially because it seemed like an extension of what I was really into as a punk rock kid … I was really into the idea of the band being the facilitator for the show; they weren’t necessarily the stars.”

The main draw of punk rock for me in my teenage years wasn’t the music, though I liked a lot of that, too. Instead, it was the concept of fans and bands occupying a level playing field. One was as crucial to the scene, the show, and the ‘infrastructure’ as the other. As a result, punk rock felt like a co-op. (Here’s the point where, once again, I recommend Michael Azerrad’s Our Band Could Be Your Life. This book describes the grassroots independent music scene that shaped all my opinions and feelings on how decentralized communities really work.)

As I grew up, punk rock did, too. Suddenly, many of these bands were preening on magazine covers and making major label compromises. They became the stars, and we became the fans in the crowd, a hierarchical separation. I lost interest.

Then, I discovered underground dance music around 1990. At that time, the independent dance/house/techno scene had a lot of the elements that brought me to punk rock: the dancefloor as equal (or maybe more critical) to the DJ, a self-distributed ethos, and an international network furthering the music through zines, small clubs, and independent distributors. Of course, there were always DJ ‘stars.’ But what interested me were the scenes that developed around specific labels, crews, and parties. The DJs or their names were inconsequential, which is partly why many early producers kept changing pseudonyms from release to release. It was also common for the DJ to be hidden, maybe behind a wall with a small opening. Or in the center of the dancefloor without a spotlight. Like the band in my quote above, the DJ was there to facilitate the goings-on.

But, yeah, that aspect of underground dance music dwindled as the boom years of the mid-90s hit. The trajectory followed that of punk rock, with more and more DJ cover stars and heightened commercial aspirations. The DJ booth became a place under spotlights, and by the mid-2000s, one couldn’t DJ without a line of people watching instead of dancing, like the DJ’s doing a guitar solo or something.

I recognize that I found myself on a few magazine covers and did the major label thing — I wasn’t immune to these aspirations. But by the late 2000s, I was over it. Underground dance music lacked most of the things that initially brought me into it. DJ stars got upgraded to superstars, festivals were ascendant, and that whole Boiler Room thing of ‘let’s watch the DJ’ became the norm.

I realize some pockets retained the original spirit, and some probably still do today. But I couldn’t connect with the place I found myself in — and I’m partly responsible for occupying that place — which made me uncomfortable. I wanted out, cold turkey. And then the keratoconus hit.

“It became a little tougher for me also because I had this eye disease called keratoconus that made it really difficult to see in dark rooms — so it became less and less fun for me for that reason as well,” Donaldson says.

You can learn more about keratoconus at this link. I knew I had a problem when I was playing a warehouse party in San Francisco under my ideal circumstance — no spotlights! — and I couldn’t see the record covers. I’m thumbing through my vinyl bag and have no idea what to play because I couldn’t distinguish one record from another. That sucked! A DJ named Joey Youngman was there and saw the trouble I was having. He happened to have a penlight and gave it to me, my knight in shining armor.

Not-so-fun fact: Scott Hardkiss had keratoconus, too. We used to commiserate over it whenever we talked. I miss that guy.

But after seeing Meat Beat Manifesto perform, he bought a sampler and began creating his own dance tracks …

I tell the whole story of how Meat Beat Manifesto led to my first sampler and how that encounter eventually resulted in a tour with them in this episode of the Scotch and GOOD Conversation podcast.

For the curious, search for “Animation Festival” on Bandcamp — a Butthole Surfers-esque group he was in during the late ’80s.

I would rather you didn’t search for that, but here’s the link as I know you will anyway. Please don’t start with the first song as it’s distorted all to hell.

Animation Festival wasn’t a band but a solo effort I recorded on an old four-track recorder. (My then and still close friend Les added some guitar to the last tune.) I was teaching myself music production and setting up challenges for myself. The goal of this project was to see if I could record a ‘continuous album’ on four tracks. In other words, to have the separate songs fade into each other. If you’ve ever tried recording an album on a four-track — especially in stereo — then you know this is tough! I was successful though not without mountains of tape hiss.

I sent this to a Memphis-based tape label called Harsh Reality Music. They put it out! And they sent one to Factsheet Five, and it somehow got a great review. “This is real music,” was the review’s last sentence, which baffles me to this day. But, technically, this is my first album, my first time working with a label, and my first review.

The notes on that Bandcamp page say I recorded the tape in 1990, but that’s wrong. I started recording this in 1987, going into ’88. Oh, and this is fun: I achieved the pitch effects on my voice by twiddling the tape speed on the four-track. That’s how we used to do.

In fact, one of his favorite countries to travel to was Russia, where he DJed more than a dozen times.

I really need to write more about Russia on this blog. I wrote about one experience here. 

I wouldn’t say it was one of my favorite places as I loved going anywhere, especially if I hadn’t been. But I started going to Russia in 1998 — a prominent club promoter was an early fan — and, yes, I ended up back there about 15 times.

I made many friends in Russia, and I’m still in touch with a few, though some have long since moved outside of the country for various reasons. I loved exploring Moscow and Russia and was fond of the people I met. But, yeah, the government and its leaders always creeped me out (which led to more than one heated conversation with a Russian friend). 

As I kept going back, things got weirder and weirder. My last visit was around 2010. During my visit, I was stopped and threatened with arrest for walking to a diner after midnight, and the club I played got raided by authorities touting machine guns. The possibility of either of those things would not have crossed my mind until my last few trips.

But so many beautiful things happened there, too. Once I was invited by the then-girlfriend of my friend Boris to join her family for Maslenitsa, the Russian day of forgiveness. That was quite an honor, and we ate the traditional pancake-like meal while the father quizzed me in Russian (his daughter translating) about my favorite science fiction movies. After dinner, the father invited me to the drawing room, where we partook in shots of vodka. Then, after plenty of drinks, the father called his daughter over to help translate something for me.

He got emotional. The father explained that during Soviet times he worked on Russia’s nuclear missile arsenal. “I helped with the missiles aimed at YOU!” he said. Then, getting more teary-eyed, he added, “If you had told me then I’d host an American in my house for Maslenitsa, I would have said you were crazy. It’s incredible to have you here. These are wonderful times.” And we toasted and did another shot.

Those were wonderful times. I don’t miss DJ’ing, but I wouldn’t mind returning to that feeling of reconciliation and friendship among those formally separated by state-ordained ideology. And I’m not just talking about people of different countries. But, like my last DJ set, it seems so long ago. 

A Series of P.O. Boxes

· Leave a Comment

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.

Aliens That Look Like Automobiles

· 1 Comment

In the late ’80s, I was heavily into zine culture. Isolated in Central Louisiana, I was an outcast kid into weird stuff, craving connections to an outside world of strangers. I can’t remember how I initially discovered zines and the related mail art community. I’m sure my love of DIY punk rock played a part.

Eventually, I obtained an issue of Factsheet Five. The mag inspired me to open a secret post office box, so all this unusual mail wouldn’t arrive at my parents’ house. After sending off several envelopes containing a few quarters, or postage compensation, or an enthusiastic letter, I was part of the zine scene. I was connecting and corresponding with like-minded weirdos across the world. Kind of like I still do today — but without sending out stamps.

Let’s get a couple of definitions out of the way. ‘Zine’ is short for ‘fanzine’ — a short-run, self-published, often obsessive, and sometimes free magazine made by (and for) a ‘fan’ of something. The first documented fanzine was created in the ’30s, probably by mimeograph. That original zine, like most zines in the mid-century, was focused on science fiction. Punk rock created another significant zine movement, and, in the ’90s, the format reached an apex with riot grrl zines.

But zines could be about anything. There were zines for collectors of you-name-it, anarchist zines, intimately personal scream-for-help zines, zines by moms about mom-life, conspiracy and UFO zines, comix zines, and on-and-on-and-on. One of the most unique and heartfelt zines I read at the time was Duplex Planet. Published by an employee of a nursing home, the zine featured interviews and updates with the residents as they arrived and (often sadly) departed. I’m pleasantly surprised to see that it’s still around. Duplex Planet showed the possibility of zines and self-publishing as a vehicle for a personal voice.

If you think this sounds a lot like blogging and email newsletters, then I’d say you’re not off course. I recently subscribed to Rusty Blazenhoff’s Electric Dreams email newsletter, and right there in the header, it’s called “An Inbox Zine.” Wherever you go, there you are.

I’m thinking about zines because of Factsheet Five. Factsheet Five was like a search engine for zines but it was also a zine. Hundreds of single paragraph reviews of zines filled its pages. And the reader was also given the zines’ addresses and how to get them (such as “.50 or two stamps”). There were also music etc. reviews and editorials from various zine luminaries. But you got this for the zine listings. It was a joy to go through all these zine descriptions and highlight the ones that created the most curiosity. From my perch in Tioga, Louisiana, these were pre-internet windows to the wider, weirder world.

One could receive Factsheet Five a few different ways — by sending three dollar bills and a couple of quarters to the editor, or by mailing something to review (music, your zine), or by contributing something (writing, artwork). I did all three of those throughout college to get my issues.

And here’s why Factsheet Five and zines are on my mind. Early this week, I was on Archive.org and thought, “I wonder if any old issues of Factsheet Five are archived here?” I did a quick search and discovered just under a dozen issues. I picked one from 1988 — as that’s the time I was most active in my zine-collecting — and flipped through the virtual pages. Amazing! I recalled when, to me, all of this was new and dangerous. I glimpsed some familiar names, including a few ‘pen-pals’ who I met through zine-trading. And then, to my surprise, I ran across a name I certainly recognized:

Plague On Wheels reviewed in Factsheet Five

In 1988 I decided to publish my own zine. It was called Plague On Wheels. The name comes from the title of a fictitious book written by Kilgore Trout in Kurt Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions. It’s about aliens that look like automobiles. And ‘Michael Behaviour’ was my punk rock name. A lot of us young miscreant-wanna-bes had punk rock names in the ’80s.

The review refers to Plague On Wheels as a ‘pfanzine,’ which is zine slang for a music-oriented zine. The ‘p’ stands for ‘punk,’ but a pfanzine can be about any genre of music. My zine had a lot of music in it, including interviews with a few random bands that answered my letters. I doubt I even heard these bands beforehand — I wrote them to get free music in exchange for some ‘press.’ Luckily, none of their music was awful.

Plague On Wheels was handwritten, not typed. I didn’t have access to a photocopier (or the money to photocopy), so I had a pen-pal friend in Miami do it for me. I met this friend via Factsheet Five. He was a school teacher and could get free photocopies, but the quality was poor, and all the blacks faded in various tones of gray. Combined with the sometimes difficult to decipher handwriting, my distant friend and I agreed the flaws added a distinctive character.

My friend Flipper — also from Tioga — wrote the ‘How To Start a Radio Station’ piece. Now he has a book out through HarperCollins and regularly writes for established music magazines. I sent him this Factsheet Five review, and he told me that I was the first ‘publication’ to publish his writing.

Plague on Wheels. What a trip.

I feel like there’s something I can say here about zines and blogs and newsletters. I should pull out my recurring theme of ‘the way we use new technologies can’t escape tradition.’ It does feel like I’ve been doing this a while. Running across a blog with an exciting point of view is similar to finding a cool zine on Factsheet Five. It just seems, with zines, the freak flag flies a little higher.

Zines are still around. And blogs and newsletters are resurgent. As long as singular voices are looking to connect — to find the others — we’ll have zines and blogs and all these things. And maybe our current state of isolation, this self-quarantining, has me thinking about how vital these voices are when we can’t seek each other out in person. Many of us need the weird little windows to the outside world, especially when those worlds seem cut off from us.

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.