busybee

So the new keyboard arrived today and I swapped it into my setup, along with the Akai MPK49 (which I also finally restored to working condition). Here’s some vague unstructured thoughts about it.

Today is Bandcamp Friday. That makes it a very good time to support independent musicians.

Right now I could use a bit of cash, as I’ve been hit with some unexpected expenses and I don’t have much of a safety net regarding money I can access right now. So, if you have any interest in my music, right now is a very good time to buy some of it. Or my whole discography, even. I have around two dozen releases each in a wide variety of genres, almost all written by me.

Just the current haps, yo.

Here’s the story I recited at the One More Light TDOR concerts with STANCE. Specifically this is the version I performed tonight (which is slightly different than Saturday’s rendition).

I figure it’s been a little while since my last random-updates update thing, so here’s what’s going on in my life. Because I guess some folks like knowing this stuff? Weird. Anyway.

My new roof is finally getting installed. It sure is loud and poundy. Supposedly this is a two-day project so theoretically they are around halfway done. Unlike most home renovation stuff I can’t easily take photos showing the progress. Oh well.

Also after trying to work on some music in my newly-rearranged basement I was finding that having the computer desk in the center of the back “wall” with keyboard way off to the left looked cool but it made actually working on music a major drag, since I couldn’t just turn and start recording, I’d have to get up and take a few steps over, and that made my workflow really frustrating. So since I couldn’t work on music today anyway (because noise) I reoriented stuff to be a bit more like how it used to be, with the desk on the left and the keyboard to the right of it, and now it’s way more comfortable to work on things.

Just testing using Backblaze’s raw object storage as a means of serving up a Bandcrash player for cheap. I’ll be documenting the upload process soon, if actual playback performance is sufficient.

After years of constantly lowering my prices, trying to get a vanishingly-small amount of sales on things I care about, I’ve decided to raise everything and make it uniform, across all of my music storefronts, namely:

• Bandcamp
• itch
• Gumroad
• Ko-Fi

Here’s my pricing strategy and rationale.

I feel like I need to come up for air, after some protracted busy-ness (not to be confused with business, which I have none of at the moment).

Do people ever read these things? Or do people just like knowing that I’m still alive? Either way here’s a “I’m still alive” post.

Caught up on my collections of:

• Posy
• Nicky Flowers

Added the discographies of:

• James Hastings
• our dear friend, the medic

So, hey, Bandcamp is a great service that a lot of musicians and fans rely upon for fair distribution and sales of music. It is a really great thing.

Unfortunately, Bandcamp’s owners decided that having a sustainably profitable business wasn’t Enough for them and sold it to Epic Games a year ago, with the idea that it’d become a money-printing factory that does All The Licensing.

And that didn’t pan out, so a week ago Epic re-sold Bandcamp to Songtradr, which is basically an A&R pay-for-play scam with the trappings of respectability. Here’s a video Benn Jordan did on the topic (focusing on a site called Taxi but Songtradr is the same basic thing):

Now Songtradr is blocking the Bandcamp union from actually being, y'know, a union. They aren’t honoring the union terms, have locked workers out of critical systems, are completely ignoring the collective bargaining power of Bandcamp as a company and are doing all sorts of heinous shit.

However! This is not a time to boycott Bandcamp! All that does is make Bandcamp less valuable and gives Songtradr more sway over them, while disproportionately impacting the musicians who rely on it. Please look to see what the union is requesting in terms of support and solidarity. There’s a lot you can do to show your support.

Independent musicians thank you.

Got some things done today, figured I’d talk about them.

Last night I was having a massive pain flareup so I smoked huge amounts of cannabis. That made me feel somewhat better (if a bit silly) but it also meant I was extremely hung-over today and ended up having to cancel meeting up with Spud for a thing.

But, I got some basement reorganization done and hit a major milestone, and also listened to some great music while doing it.

The air was clear enough™ today (AQI in the upper 80s, which is still no fun for me to be outside but that’s good enough for being in the basement) and I got goaded along by some folks on the Song Fight! discord to “just do it,” so I decided to start the process of reorganizing stuff.

I’m still having some pretty bad anxiety while driving, but the choir has started up rehearsals again which gives me a reason to drive at least once a week. Last night I felt anxious on my way there but totally fine on the way back.

Anyway, today I finally made my way out to the Renton Uwajimaya, which I’d been wanting to go to for a while, mostly as a driving acclimation thing but also to get some ingredients that I haven’t found at any of the Asian groceries in White Center. Most of the drive, as it turns out, is the same as the drive to the church the choir’s rehearsals are at, which makes sense since Renton is just a bit further down Rainier Ave. And I was anxious but I made it just fine, and on my drive back I was anxious in a few spots but I made it just fine.

I think if I keep doing this stuff I’ll feel fine faster.

I got stuff done today! For example:

• Uploaded a new release of the VRChat critter avatar (which is still on sale for $10) which fixes a long-standing bug in an Easter egg that people keep on complaining about about 5 seconds after they learn about the Easter egg
• Finally replaced the AI cover art on my Novembeat 2022 album, on both Bandcamp and itch.io (sadly it’s a huge pain to replace it on Spotify/iTunes/etc. and totally not worth it)
• Uploaded a full album video of Novembeat 2022, mostly to make it easier to share on VRChat (I will probably do the same for other albums as well)
• Wrote a couple of long-winded posts on Cohost, namely:
  • Answering a question about my computing setup
  • Answering a question about VR stuff
• Also finally set up automatic crossposting from Cohost to Mastodon

Oh yeah also I’m getting fairly active on Cohost and my asks are open. It’s fun. Way nicer than Tumblr, anyway.

I didn’t listen to much music over the last few days for a variety of reasons (and didn’t accumulate enough notes that felt worth posting) but today I am happy to report that I’m back on my shit. Not that the actual date/order of listening matters but as always you can corroborate the times on my last.fm profile if you really want.

Notables:

• “General Ed’s Naked Circus” by Helter Skipper and the Gilligan Mansons. It isn’t a particularly great album but it’s fun and I have it because I used to be friends with one of the members of the band, who I vibed with pretty well. Hearing the album again made me realize I hadn’t talked with him in ages, and I decided to track him down. I just hit a bunch of dead ends. If anyone happens to know what happened to a squirrel named “Fractal” from FurryMUCK, please let me know. I remember us sharing regrets that we never got together the first time that I lived in Seattle, and since then I’ve moved back to Seattle and I’ve been here for over a decade this time around and, oops, I really should have reconnected at some point.

  I did find a SoundCloud playlist from one of the members which lists the other members. I’m not sure which one is the real-life name of my online friend, although there’s two likely candidates. Unfortunately I can’t find current contact information for either of them (just a bunch of dead Facebook pages). Although the more likely of the two seems to still be active there. I should reach out.

• I don’t listen to Song Fight! as much as I should but this fight came up in my playlist and while most of the entries were pretty darn good, these entries stood out in particular:

  • Lily Plus Martin
  • Slither

  I mean there’s a bunch of consistently-great musicians who submitted for that one and the fight as a whole was pretty great! I’d have had a hard time narrowing down my votes on it if I’d actually listened at the time. But these entries were from folks I’m not so familiar with and they surprised me for various reasons.

• The album Here Be Dragons by Blue Nagoon wasn’t in my playlist but it was in a long-open browser tab (based on a recommendation from the person who runs Radio Free Fedi). I finally decided to consume it and, yeah, it’s pretty great! I’ve added the album to my Bandcamp Friday purchase queue.

• One of the first punk bands I got really into was Arrogant Sons of Bitches, when they were touring and happened to play a show in my town the same night a friend decided she needed to get me out of the house. Years later, the core members founded a new band, Bomb the Music Industry!, and when I learned about this I got all of their albums.

  Anyway, one of them finally came up in the playlist, and it was well worth the wait (and the download). It has all the same old ASOB energy while also being a nice scathing criticism of the modern music industry (especially performative counterculture) and also bringing in a variety of acoustic elements like synths that I don’t recall ASOB ever using.

  There’s also a great self-aware line in the second track, “I’ve been writing the same song […] over and over and over again,” in a song which sounds… pretty much exactly like half of the ASOB songs, frankly. It works.

• Alternative Facts by KXNG Crooked is a great missive on the political landscape of 2017, which still applies today. Somehow this track doesn’t seem to be on their Bandcamp as far as I can tell. Looks like it was actually released by a major label? Good for them.

• Tes Lacets sont des Fees by Dionysos is a fun little ditty. I don’t understand a word of it.

• “The Legend” by 5-3 Federation is a classic that is kinda uh. Maybe problematic? Also I think this was one of Lowtax’s musical projects? I’m finding no information about it. I am pretty sure I got it from Something Awful’s front page back in the day, but if there is a link between Lowtax and this track, literally nobody on the Internet has made that connection so it probably isn’t him.

• Vektroid is always great. I think this is the first time I heard Telnet Erotika, which apparently has been expanded and rereleased as Telnet Complete. Do I need to update my collection? Looks like yes. Another (potentially expensive) addition to the Bandcamp Friday queue. Man, I’m starting to see why people just subscribe to Spotify or Apple Music these days.

• Kid Congo and the Pink Monkey Birds has a track called “The History of French Cuisine” which also doesn’t seem to be on bandcamp but it’s a great Frank Zappa-esque jammy thing.

• Whale Legs by Guts Club, from the Moderate Fildelity microlabel

Okay I think that’s enough for right now. Having a mental health shit at the moment

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.

I used to be a voracious consumer of music. I would listen to as much music as I could, in as many different genres, from as many different bands, as I could handle, for nearly every waking moment of every day. My music collection has over 53,000 songs with a total duration of over 130 days. My choices in listening devices and methodologies have always been informed by how I can enable myself to listen to as much variety as I could, without needing to actually choose what to listen to at any given time.

Music also helped me to focus what I was working on, and was possibly a big part of my self-medication regime for my ADHD and executive dysfunction. Having music playing made it so much easier for me to focus on what I was doing.

I also developed a peculiar habit: every time I came across a song I really liked, I’d buy the entire discography of the artist as a “surprise gift for my future self.” It’s a big part of why my music library is so big, and it’s given me a lot of delight from always having something new to listen to.

But yet, over the last few years I have barely listened to any music at all, aside from the stuff I’ve been working on myself. Most of my day has been full of silence, pretty much only listening to music when I drive — and I hardly ever drive. And the silence has been overwhelming, maddening, and is possibly a big part of why my brain’s been in vice grips as of late.

How did this happen?

Recordings from last weekend’s Pride concert!

Oh man I am so overjoyed with how our choir shows went! Holy fuck, joining this choir was probably the best decision I’ve made in a long time. Every show we’ve done has been wonderful and the people are so great and I love spending time with everyone. It’s great being surrounded by fellow ADHD transgender/nonbinary weirdos who all have music in common but so many disparate experiences and ideas and just like, oh god so much talent from everyone.

We’re between seasons now and it’ll feel weird not having rehearsals every Wednesday evening for the next couple months, but there’s a lot of talk about doing plenty of social gatherings in the interim and I’m very much looking forward to that.

I haven’t felt like blogging lately, but here’s some updates.

Once upon a time I used to be hyperproductive. I’d spend 8 or more hours a day writing code, then I’d go home and draw comics for hours, and then on the weekends I’d write and record music. I’d have pain symptoms as part of it but that just felt like a badge of honor, and that it’d all be worth it someday.

Now I can’t hold down a job at all, I can barely focus on any of those things, and even holding a pencil to start drawing just feels like too much. I have so many ideas in my head and so much shit I want to be doing with my time, but every time I start to work on anything it just hurts too much.

Anyway, I figured I’d talk about a bunch of the stuff I wish I could be working on right now.