Music finds for August 4

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Getting back on my “listen to music to calm my shitty brain” thing, because it was helping and then I started to forget to do it again.

I might add more as the day goes on.

Bandcamp Friday: August 4

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Hey it’s Bandcamp Friday! This means today’s a good day to buy music on Bandcamp. (Such as mine.)

Here’s what I’ve bought this month:

Music rediscoveries for July 12

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I got a late start on listening to music today since this morning I was having some stomach issues and didn’t want the extra sensory input, and then I had to take Tyler to the vet for his annual wellness exam and butthole grooming.

But after I got home from that I started listening to music again. Here’s things that are tickled my ears today:

  • Ouch Those Monkeys was a really weird musician who posted a lot of music to somesongs back in the day, and then disappeared just as suddenly. I collected most of his(?) music at the time. I wish there were more information about him. As far as I can tell it’s completely disappeared from the Internet.
  • Magic Arm - Move Out is great. No idea how I ended up with it. Anyway I bought way too much music yesterday so this band is going into my Bandcamp Friday queue.
  • Wow I have a lot of crap in my library. The downside to being a packrat.
  • Also I’m not sure how to feel about songs that make use of the N-word (as a reclaimed thing, sung/spoken by Black artists). Part of me is like “this music isn’t for me and I shouldn’t listen to it” but another part of me is like “why is this particular racial barrier a line I draw and not others?” I of course would never sing along to it, but I also don’t generally sing along to music in the first place. I’m definitely a lot quicker to skip songs based on the use of that word and I think that deserves some introspection.
  • So that said, Die Later is a pretty good jam.
  • Okay I probably should draw the line at white rappers using the N-word though.
  • The only Gorillaz albums I have are “Gorillaz” and “Plastic Beach.” I should complete my collection. I definitely don’t want to fall down the Deep Lore rabbit hole though.
  • Jeremy Blake’s Heartsing is pretty great and it’s also surprising that my deep-dive listening pulled up something so recently-released. I guess that’s just how probability works.
  • Artemis' Gravity is just plain amazing. It gives me pretty strong Portishead mixed with Imogen Heap vibes.
  • A couple of good Remixfight songs came up. I miss Remixfight. It was a short-lived spinoff of Song Fight!, where folks would all do a different remix of the same song that week. Most of the folks who were active there eventually moved over to ccMixter but I never really found that the ccMixter remix output was even remotely as high-quality, for a number of reasons. Unfortunately I can’t figure out the actual artist behind this song, or the original song, and neither thing is findable online, and remixfight is long gone, and the archive.org archive of it is weirdly broken in ways I’ve never seen happen on archive.org, but it seems to be entitled “Blue Ocean” originally by Colin Mutchler. The specific remix I liked was by Milo; for some reason the tags on the fight were also messed up so I only heard that one in isolation, whee. But anyway uh. Remixfight was great.
  • Brain Fog by Nicky Flowers is also pretty great. It also has a video as it turns out.

Read more…

Bandcamp Friday, May 2023

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For the next 23.5 hours, Bandcamp is waiving their cut of music purchases made on their platform, which makes it an amazing time to buy independent music there.

As always, I have plenty of stuff you can get there (including a recently-released 80-minute meditation album and an hour-long musical journey inspired by a variety of coffee grinders), and you can get a pretty decent discount on my music if you just buy it all at once as a discography.

I also like to keep a checklist of albums to buy on this day, and this month the two albums I bought are a recent release by my friend Sam and the discography of ratwyfe mostly because I heard someone do a cover of his song cryptid and I knew right away that I’d totally dig all of his music.

Anyway. Support independent musicians, both by buying the music that you like, but also spreading the word of mouth of the music that you like, too. You might not think you have much of a voice but every little bit helps way more than you think; every flood begins with a handful of raindrops.