a shred of aura

good morning ~

(click the link / sunrise to listen)

My Big Breaka shred of aura

today’s track is kind of in that youtube weather channel vaporwave vibe

cool news from this week - I just officially joined the Board of Directors of StretchMetal, an excellent org presenting and facilitating atmospheric music. they put on great slow music events and run something called the Atmospheric Music Alliance, which I’m certain most of you would be into joining.

also friends meeting - my band with m. geddes gengras - is finally performing again. we’ll be at Visit in Newburgh next weekend and will hopefully have some new music for you shortly, here’s the flyer:

btw thanks for the excitement following last week’s announcement of “astral projecting into flavortown” - - there’s another single coming this month and then Feb 7 you can hear the whole thing and let’s run up those streaming numbers in the meantime ;)

In the last few months of high school a friend gave me two burned CD-Rs that would fundamentally alter my life. This was a common occurrence in the first ten years or so of the 21st century - your friend's handwriting in sharpie slid out from a CD wallet could fundamentally alter your encountering of the world. First was "All Hail West Texas" by the Mountain Goats, an aggressively low-fidelity collection of songs about broken people and their various triumphs. The whole album's captured via cassette tape in a rattling boombox - throughout the songs you can hear the gears of the boombox itself chugging along alongside the chord changes. I covered songs from that album often throughout college and I'm still using boomboxes and cassette tapes extensively.

The other CD-R contained "Elephant Eyelash" by the band Why?, an alt hip hop, lofi, bedroom pop, hyper confessional project featuring brothers rendering in beautiful blood harmony lyrics that alternate rapidly between hyper swoony and noxiously caustic - the lines often read as both threats and promises of undying love ripped from somebody's LiveJournal. Quasi suicidal, full-to-bursting with inventively clumsy metaphor, super horny in a lopsided kinda way - it fit my 17-year-old mood really perfectly. Plus sprinkled throughout the album are some insanely personal audio recordings - a nephew on a voicemail, the band's two brothers' father as a young rabbi speaking passionately into a tape recorder, some kind of testimony. The music spoke to me as it spun in my Discman.

A tumultuous summer followed - virginities lost, borders crossed, a disastrous month-long drive across America, but I arrived in Connecticut for college. My friend of the CD-Rs happily wound up at another liberal arts school like forty minutes away and so when we somehow caught wind of the fact that Why? would be opening for Ya La Tengo in New Haven we obviously found a car to borrow and made plans to go.

At this point in human history it was surprisingly challenging to actually hear music - by and large, if you wanted to hear it, you had to acquire it one way or another, through the record store or through pirating. You'd read about an album coming out and have no way of actually acquiring the media. Streaming and social media were nascent - at this point Facebook was only open to people with particularly tony .edu email addresses and MySpace was probably the place you were most likely to hear something from an upcoming record. And there weren't readily available YouTube clips of performances of new songs - stan culture was still yet to come. Albums would leak all the time, of course, but you could never really fully trust something you downloaded illegally - for instance, my pirated copy of "And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside Out" by Ya La Tengo for some reason omitted the first three tracks, and so for a decade plus an album by one of my favorite bands started at track four. Kicking things off with "Let's Save Tony Orlando's House" is a majorly different vibe.

So when Why? announced they were about to play some new material that would be coming out the following year it was insanely exciting - it almost didn't matter that the performances were absolutely mesmerizing and that the songs were incredible, I was going to be pumped no matter what. After the show we saw the three of them loading their own van out front, something I failed to fully digest until like 15 years later. And filled with the emotional high highs and low lows of their music, I kept turning the headlights of the Prius off on the backroad highways back to Middletown, testing how sharp the edge of the knife.

I waited 14 months for "Alopecia" to drop and made sure to buy the deluxe edition LP - not that I had a record player in college, it just came with a CD of demos from the album. I wanted to ingest and understand it all. And I listened to it obsessively, made other people listen to it, put the folded LP insert up on my dorm room wall. I also made music in GarageBand in its shadow - hyper confessional, genre agnostic, unpleasantly confessional. It burned in - everything I tuned into after had this album's shadow laid across it.

Many years later a friend asked me for help and I was happy to oblige. Seeking some actual medical insight, I drove them to their old stomping grounds and waited around, an unaccompanied male in a high-vis camo jacket in the "women's imaging" lobby. Afterwards we made the trip worth it by roaming the local H-Mart and tooting around on a tour of the significant schools and culs de sac of my friend's youth. It was a kind of loose fit hanging out that reminded me of being in high school, plus we were in the suburbs. We ate a lot of pizza and then on the way home we listened to "Alopecia" all the way through, cued up instantly via Spotify, no wait required.

It hasn't aged particularly well - my friend pointed out accurately and horrifically that the more rap oriented segments sound like something Lin-Manuel Miranda would make. And it is undeniably grim. When I was 19 and more tempestuous I found comfort in the mood, but listening back now it's hard not to feel alienated by lines like "I say the Friday before Easter was not good / I cried to myself in the pisser." We both agreed, though, that the line "sucking dicks for drink tickets at the free bar at my cousin's Bat Mitzvah" from the same song is legendary. And the musicianship is really unparalleled - the orchestration, the vocal performances, the sheer amount of Steve Reich-influenced mallet percussion, it really is a grand musical statement, more than just the bed on which to lay edge lord cringe lyrics. I still love the record, still know every word and melody, and it's not that I'm nostalgic for the time that these songs will forever invoke - I am simply yearning for a time when you could actually year for a copy of a song, when hearing music still maintained a shred of aura.

But what about you? When does listening to music feel truly special to you? Is there anything you’re actually looking forward to hearing? What was the best CD-R someone ever gave you?