busybee fluffy rambles

As usual, Bandcamp is waiving their cut of the purchase price on the first Friday of the month. So this is the best time to consider buying my music. Update: Today only, use discount code plaidfriday to get up to 80% off on everything, including my full discography. Because why not.

As a voracious consumer of music, I maintain a running list of things to buy on the next Bandcamp Friday so that I can make the biggest impact on a monthly cadence (and also keep better track of my music spending habits). Here’s what I bought this month:

• Botak — built-in presets, vol. 1, some fun silly music made from the built-in presets of a Yamaha PSR-3
• Last BeNeVoLeNcE — The Other Worlds - 2nd Act, some videogame-inspired nerdcore hip-hop
• wohali — Variety Show, some weird weirdness that I’m not quite sure how to describe, much less explain
• The entire discography of bgm, an amazing Songfighter who’s been really knocking it out of the park lately
• The entire discography of Ghost, who makes nice cozy tunes
• Deacon Bill — Intelligent Toilet
• Hopeless Otis — Dangerfield

For more recommendations, check out my Bandcamp profile, or look at my past Bandcamp Friday posts.

This year’s Song Fight! Live will be premiering August 26 at 6 PM PDT/9 PM EDT. Please join me and my music friends with the mirth and merriment as we all perform songs while pretending it’s a concert! (And join in the live chat.)

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.

• Jeff Lofton - Nola Beat
• Kaiser Cartel - Carroll Street Station
• Jeremy Blake - Mini.Mod
• Ambienteer - ataraxia
• State Shirt - So Weird

I might add more as the day goes on.

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:

• Inverse Phase - discography
• Magic Arm - discography
• Artemis - discography
• Blue Nagoon - Here Be Dragons
• Vektroid’s discography (having forgotten that I’d already bought it in 2015 and Bandcamp unfortunately doesn’t let you buy just the stuff that isn’t already in your collection)
• Bird Streets - Lagoon
• C. T. Matthews - Ducky’s Delivery Service OST
• nomnomnami - Charm Studies OST - Magical Beats to Study To

Stuff that grabbed me today yesterday:

• The ancient Song Fight! title “Indie Rock Bottom” still has some great songs on it. Mouth Reliant, prayformojo, and Narboutique stood out in particular.

• Back in the day I was really into The Verve Pipe, not to be confused with The Verve. I always found it disappointing that the only song of theirs which got any real radio play was The Freshmen, which I didn’t care for (and is one of the few songs I’d always remove from my MP3 collection after reripping the CD over the years).

  Anyway, a while back I found and downloaded a bunch of their live recordings, such as The Back Room @ Colectivo Coffee on 2017-11-25, which is an absolutely amazing performance of a bunch of their songs reimagined from angsty grunge/alt-rock to bittersweet country/folk, which was not a transformation I was expecting but holy cow does it work.

  And they actually managed to make me like The Freshmen. Dang.

• Anyway me posting about The Verve Pipe on Mastodon led to someone pointing out an ironic ska cover of The Freshmen which you can hear over on YouTube and it’s uh. A thing. I don’t think I’ll be listening to it again, but hey, it exists.