OK, this is weird. Hi.

I’m sending a quick message via this dreaded platform to the lovely 300+ folks who may or may not want to hear more from me and Ringo-adjacent meanderings.

The scoop: I have two new newsletters that are happening outside of Substack. I’d love for you to sign up.

The first is the closest we’ll get to the vintage Ringo Dreams of Lawn Care format. It’s called Dramatic Chipmunk, and it’s going to be more personal and full of stories, it’s going to be off-the-cuff (i.e., convoluted), it’s going to be a little strange. If you recall enjoying Ringo Dreams of Lawn Care in the far reaches of your memory banks, then this must be the place. How often does it go out? I have no idea. Not too often and with unintentional randomness.

Hosted by our new pals at the wonderfully named Rumicat, you can sign up for Dramatic Chipmunk here → [GIMMIE DRAMA]

Once I feel the troops have assembled there, the debut missive from ‘the Chipmunk’ will descend into unsuspecting inboxes. Get in on some early action.

Nice, right? Oh, there’s more.

Part of the reason you haven’t heard from me, other than <waves hands in the air at the world on fire while twirling around like a crazy person and moaning with sustained annoyance>, is that I started an online music and culture magazine called The Tonearm with my friend and confidante Lawrence Peryer.

It’s neat and you should check it out!

And there is a newsletter for The Tonearm, which goes out every weekend. I’m writing that, too. It usually features deep dives into stories we recently published on the site, algorithm-defying recommendations from Lawrence and yours truly, and then we end it with someone rad telling us about something they think is rad. This week, Mike Scott of The Waterboys recommended Norwegian country rock. You can check out this week’s issue of what we call Talk Of The Tonearm by clicking these words.

And, yes, if this sounds good to you, then I’d love for you to also subscribe to Talk Of The Tonearm. You can do so here → [TONE ME UP]

Other than that, I’m occasionally posting things on 8sided.blog. My last post there, which means a lot to me, is a remembrance of my old friend Dave Allen.

Substack? So wack. This is the last thing you’ll see from me here. For realsies. If you feel like having my ambiguous verbiage arrive via email, then the two newsletters linked above are the way to go.

Thank you, friend. I hope everything in your world is as good as it can be under perilous circumstances, and I’ll see you in one of these other places.

— Michael

P.S. I thought about doing that thing where I instruct you not to follow me on Mastodon or Bluesky, which is obviously a ploy to get you to follow me in those places, but I’m not going to do that.

Happy (and hopeful) new year!

After a long and mysterious absence, here I am, popping back into your inbox when you least expected it. Or perhaps you never expected it or didn't give me a second thought, full stop. I don't blame you. It's been a long seven months since I sent out one of these newsletters and my blog's eerily silent as well. The only place you could openly find me all this time was Twitter, which is simply embarrassing.

I'm rearing my dully throbbing head in your sight-line for a couple of reasons today. The first is to explain my disappearance, which I'll now get out of the way as quickly as I can.

I wrote about this on Twitter last August with an optimistic tone that, in retrospect, was perhaps jumping the gun a little. Expanding on that thread, I'll say that I was (and am) exhausted — just like many of you. As COVID-times dragged on and on and on and the vicious news cycle dragged on and on and on, the ennui gathered into mountains. There was nothing I wanted to write about. Nothing in my head, nothing inspiring, nothing exciting to document in the early morning hours. Even my journal, updated almost daily for years, went dark.

Luckily my professional life doesn't rely on writing, so I had the luxury to stop and wait. I knew that I was hardly alone in this stifled feeling. And, heeding the advice of those talented enough to write through this malaise, I knew the best strategy was to not stress out about my lack of motivation. The recommended move was actually to lean into it — do other things, find new hobbies, read lots of books, and occupy the brain with something other than the fact that the creative plumbing's sprung a bad leak.

So, that's what I did. I shifted focus to my spunky music label, 8D Industries. I learned to make tasty and fiery hot sauces (which became a gateway drug to vegan cooking). I got actively involved with marketing Caroline's growing Kitten School channel. I spent a lot more time with family as I successfully and safely moved mom to a house next door during a pandemic. And I started getting involved in freelance podcast production.

Several months ago, I was hired to edit and co-produce Andrew Loog Oldham's Sounds and Vision podcast, and the experience has been a delight. If you don't know, Andrew is the original manager and producer for The Rolling Stones — as just one of his too-many-to-list-here historical music adventures — and he's got stories for days. Check out the podcast if you're even a little curious. It's a lot of fun. I'd recommend the Elliot Easton (guitarist with The Cars) episode for a starter as it's got lots of juicy behind-the-music-industry tales.

Meanwhile, the writing bug has finally returned over the last couple of months (along with the music bug, but that's another story). As arbitrary as 'the new year' is as a signifier, it's still a useful prompt to refresh. And that's what I plan to do. On the immediate agenda: make some changes to the blog, start blogging regularly again, and then, once firmly in the saddle, relaunch the newsletter. Voilà. Easier said than done, right? But I'm excited nonetheless, and that's an accomplishment in and of itself.

I'll finish this deep gaze into my navel with a few notes about this newsletter.

First off, I'm retiring Ringo Dreams of Lawn Care. I consider Ringo its own series (in the television sense) and a moment-in-time capsule. I'll call the relaunched newsletter something else (tbd). It’ll have a different format but I’ll cover the same genre of topics.

Also, the newsletter won't be on Substack. I'm exploring a combination of Sendy and Newsletter Glue to host the newsletter on my site. This potentially sets up a roadblock of discouragement as it's complicated (oh jeez I've got to figure out what a VPS server is). But I want to learn newsletter self-hosting partly as a self-challenge and also to be able to teach others how it's done.

Finally, I want to assure you that your Ringo subscription will automatically transfer over to the new entity once I'm ready to roll. You don’t have to do anything, unless you’d like to unsubscribe which you can do at any time (including now if you'd like).

The second reason I'm intruding your inbox as perhaps you curse the post-2021 hangover that befell you: I've released a song today. 🚀

Grottoes is a long-imagined project, revealed as I finally step away from Q-Burns Abstract Message. Yes, the AUDIOTOTEMPOLE EP was always meant as a closing of the door. And Grottoes predates “Touchtones (1997),” the earliest reference on that EP. I tried and failed to start a band called Grotto in the early '90s after the dissolution of my much-beloved (by us and some others) band Tick Tick Tock. There are too many other bands called Grotto nowadays, so Grottoes it is. It looks mightier written as text that way, so win-win.

The quiet first appearance of Grottoes was a remix for Brighton's The Self-Help Group and the song "Temple OS" (a fine song in its own right, btw). That one was recorded in mid-2021, during my supposed creative lag, and is the last time I worked on something musical. I hoped this would spark other Grottoes tunes to serve as accompanying tracks for something called "Straw Belle."

"Straw Belle" isn't new. I started recording it maybe three or four years ago, and it's a song that I revisited and tweaked periodically. I settled on a final version at some point in late 2019. I feel it's one of the best things I've recorded. And I held it tight — only about four people have heard "Straw Belle" before today — under the assumption that I'd record a few more songs like it and release an EP. As you probably guessed, that never happened.

After encouragement during a catch-up phone chat with my friend Jeff (the bass player in even earlier attempts at bands), I realized that "Straw Belle" would never see the light of day if I attached it to the loose promise of 'other songs like it.' I decided it should finally come out on its own, and, as this revelation came a month ago, New Year's Day seemed like a novel release date.

For your consideration, here's "Straw Belle" by Grottoes. Artwork by Matthew Naquin. Secret assistance from The Imprisoned Wizard. Sounds like group homes, wavering spaces, pangs of crunch, tones from belief, e-bow symphonies. I hope you like it. Please tell the others if you do.

("Straw Belle" is also on the streaming machines, and you can click on this sentence to find your flavor.)

2021 recap? I'd rather not. It was fine and not fine. You know what I mean. I choose not to wallow in the hollow. But if you'd like to read some insightful impressions of the year that was, then look no further than Sasha Frere-Jones' thoughtful collection of those from his bright circle of friends. There's one, from bassist extraordinaire Melvin Gibbs, that I can't stop thinking about — it haunts me like a new year's ghost:

This, the contrast between those who have to deal with tangible loss and those who are scared of intangible loss is, for me, the defining dichotomy of this historical moment. Those who have will need to give to those who’ve suffered loss. To me, it seems that the issue of whether that giving will be regarded as a form of thievery on the part of those who’ve suffered loss, or a form of community building on the part of those who are doing the giving will determine the course of human life on this planet in the coming years.

Something else I think is important to mention is the Sounding History podcast. It's hosted by Tom Irvine and Chris Smith, two academic brainiacs who study music history in a compelling manner: through the lens of the Anthropocene. That is, how the extraction and exploitation of resources of the last 500 or so years — and the intertwined increase in unrestrained capitalism, ecological collapse, and human misery — have led to the music we listen to today. That sounds like a bummer but, while sobering, the podcast has the tone of a rollicking history lesson that mainly exists to make one aware. It's also entertaining and has sent me down a dozen rabbit holes (so far). I highly recommend this.

One rabbit hole is the idea of recorded music as energy expenditure. The last episode of the podcast delves into the history of formats, from shellac discs (made from bug juice and limestone) to vinyl (PVC waste is highly toxic) to CDs (perennial landfill denizens) to streaming (data churning server farms eat lots and lots of energy). Thinking through this has spawned a question: knowing that all material creation and energy consumption have degrees of ecological impact, what method of listening to recorded music has the most nominal cost?

My feeling (and it's just a feeling) is that downloading music and replaying it directly from one's hard drive (or smartphone, iPod, etc.) has the least energy/ecological cost vs. vinyl/CDs/streaming. I had a brief exchange with Kyle Devine, author of the book Decomposed, repeatedly mentioned as a resource in Sounding History, and his feeling is the same. The eco-cost saved may be negligible as an individual metric, but there's still a compelling argument made — along with all the other arguments — for owning your digital music rather than streaming it. If only music files were somehow more attractive to listeners, with contextual touchstones that foster sentiment and engaging interfaces that encourage community. You should read Marc Weidenbaum's keen thoughts on that subject here.

What do you think? I'd love to know. I feel like this topic — and others like it — is influencing my interests and my writing for the future. It's a relief to have something new to latch on to, and as I learn and read more, there's no doubt I'll have more to say.

OK, I'll close this surprise missive and, once again, wish you a fun and hopeful new year. Please write if you'd like — to say hello, to agree or disagree, to tell me what a VPS server is all about; all are welcome.

And I'll see you soon. Really.

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btw — I'm Michael Donaldson and you can read more about who I am and what I do here.

• If you dig this newsletter click the heart at the bottom. ♥️
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• And please leave a comment if you'd like to chat about this. 💭 

Ahoy! Your pal Michael here, delivering a quick episode of Ringo Dreams of Lawn Care, an interim broadside perhaps, as I prepare for this newsletter's relaunch on a self-hosted platform. The party just won't stop.

This weekend I'm offering recommendations, mainly of the musical kind. But first, in lieu of some meaty essay taking up space in this email, I'd like to enthusiastically point you to a pair of instructional and inspirational reads. These two pieces are interconnected and fall in line with the pseudo-philosophy that I've unhelpfully named 'The Punk Rock Dream.' 

Bas Grasmayer, who publishes the excellent music industry commentary newsletter MUSIC x, wrote one of the better instruction manuals for ridding oneself from the clutches of Facebook, Inc. "Start deplatforming yourself," Bas says. "Build value elsewhere. Free yourself and others."

The article details the steps to take for gradually leaving the online panopticon of Facebook, Inc. Bas addresses why one should do this and the common excuses not to — such as "all of my friends are there," or "I need it for work." Even if you've never considered cutting the Facebook cord, I still think you'll get something out of Bas's article. Please read it here.

Starting a blog is a powerful form of resistance against the mighty corporations dominating and shaping the modern internet. Posting in your space, a space that you own and maintain, rather than some company's data-sucking profit machine shows solidarity with the original spirit of the free internet. Blogs are also fun, lest you think I'm solely into this to advance some egalitarian digital revolution. 

Marc Weidenbaum plays up to the 'fun' aspect alongside many other good reasons to blog in a recent Twitter-stream-turned-blog-post. Marc's written about blogging before, and he makes a convincing argument — in case you need convincing. It's a fantastic piece. Here's my favorite paragraph: 

I'm reading Kay Larson's superb biography of John Cage. There are many Buddhist stories in it, most of which come down to doing the same thing forever with no response and then suddenly all is well. That is blogging.

That's perfect. Read Marc's whole piece on blogging here. Marc's an engaging writer, so you'll enjoy his short article even if you don't think you could ever start a blog. 

(And here's some more advice on starting a blog from yours truly, written a couple of years ago.)

If Marc and I have piqued your interest and you're thinking of blogging, then I'll tell you what — reach out any time, and I'll help out however I can. I'm happy to give guidance on getting started, platform options, what to write about, and so on. Just drop me a line with your blogging questions, and I'll reply with advice and encouragement. 

One quick piece of advice if things like WordPress and getting set up seem daunting: give micro.blog a spin. It's a great place to start, you'll get a simple hosted blog site for $5/month (you can use your own URL, too), and the community there is wonderful. And I'm a part of that community. (I get nothing for plugging micro.blog. I just think it's a worthy — and fiercely independent — project.)

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OK! On my blog, I started a series called 3+1. The idea is this: I send interesting people a slew of questions, and they pick three to answer. And then, for the '+1,' they tell me about something they love that more people should know about. 

As this is a newsletter episode with recommendations, I'll give you the +1s from my last two participants (you should also click on the links on their names to read their full 3+1 sessions):

Russel Hensley (Airships on the Water):

On a recent music deep dive on YouTube, I came across a song called “Light” by a group/project called FEM. As far as I can tell, FEM is the side project of the singer/multi-instrumentalist Cuushe, who makes catchy electronic dream-pop type songs. FEM has more of a full band sound, combining her vocals with guitars, bass, keys, and jazzy drums. So far, I’ve only found that one track by them, so I’m not sure if it was just a one-off thing or there are plans for more. It’s a beautiful song with a fascinating mix of sounds, so I’m hoping they keep it going. Maybe if more people check out “Light” by FEM, they’ll be motivated to release some more music!

James A. Reeves:

Two answers came to mind at the same time, and they’re connected. The first is the music of Bohren and Der Club of Gore. Their music is essential to my writing life. Particularly Midnight Radio, which is slow-motion doom jazz with a light-night neon aesthetic that points to the second thing: staying up late with the radio when I was a teenager in metro Detroit, listening to the Electrifying Mojo at the top of the dial. This was the early 1990s, after Mojo had been on the air for ages, quietly influencing the shape of music by playing everything from Funkadelic to Kraftwerk to Devo to Model 500 to some thirty-minute version of “Planet Rock” or “Flashlight” that only he seemed to have. Some say he laid the foundation for techno. The man lived as a myth, a ghost in the ether who would tell everyone listening to flash their headlights, and I remember driving down Woodward Avenue flashing my lights while passing cars did the same. It was beautiful, all these strangers drawn together by a voice in the dark.

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Now here are three things I love that you should know about:

Rachika Nayar – Our Hands Against The Dusk → I’ve been delightfully obsessed with Rachika Nayar‘s debut album over the past couple of weeks. The Brooklyn-based artist (in both visuals and sound) has accomplished some heavy-lifting with Our Hands Against The Dusk — the album is unabashedly experimental and uncompromising but somehow remains accessible and, yes, beautiful. Guitar is the main instrument throughout, but it’s looped, processed, and sometimes ‘glitched’ into unfamiliarity. The opening track, “The Trembling of Glass,” is an introductory window to Nayar’s technique, with layers of texture and manipulation swept away in the last half to reveal a bare acoustic motif. It hooked me in straight away.

Interviewed in Magnetic, Nayar explains her method: 

I see one aspect of my process on this album as tearing up an instrumental sample into a million pieces and then putting those fragments through cycles of recombination … these processes feel to me like exploring a single idea through multiple and multiplying perspectives — seeing one thing in all its different realities and selves. 

When one listens closely, there are many opportunities to identify what Nayar is up to, but her execution is nuanced and organic, despite the music’s inherent digitalness. One hears these ‘million pieces’ as a whole, as guitars ring with hopeful tones on “New Strands” and pianos and cellos combine and intertwine on “No Future.” The effect is mesmerizing — dancing somewhere between music that’s ambient, experimental, and influenced by modern classical — but, most of all, it’s affecting. The emotion that went into creating this album is anything but disguised. 

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Moderator – Midnight Madness → Electronic music producers from Greece have a fondness for jazzy beat constructions. A few prominent small labels are carrying the torch, such as the long-lasting Timewarp outfit. Then there’s Melting Records, an Athens-based imprint specializing in instrumental hip-hop and trip-hop reminiscence. But Melting’s discography has recently branched the label’s sound into uncanny territories. Melting Records releases are still sample-heavy, crate-dug assemblages accompanied by rhythms that err on the phat side. But the sources have gotten more global, drawn from a world of foreign locales, and snatched from genres and eras that extend beyond the usual jazz/funk spectrum.

Case in point: Midnight Madness, the latest album from Greek DJ and producer Moderator. As noted in the release’s promo text — which, full disclosure, the label hired me to write — Midnight Madness has a midnight movie feel, like we’re witnessing something sordid and exotic from the safe distance of a cinema’s chair. The consistent Morricone-meets-RZA vibe amplifies the grainy film quality of the album’s 14 tracks, helped along by crackly spoken snippets captured from who-knows-where. It’s hard to know what is sampled and what originates from Moderator himself — the vocals are obviously ripped from parts unknown, but there are also lovely instrument textures throughout, threading the tunes together.

“Walking Slow” summarizes the album’s modus operandi — spaghetti whistles, Agent Cooper on guitars and saxophone, forlorn vocals, and those beats those beats those beats. Some songs have speedier moments verging on big beat (remember that?), but Moderator is best when the pace is leisurely, and the layers are thick and dreamy. “Crystal Gaze” and “Once Upon a Time” are fine examples of this, two songs that lope like a sleepwalking b-boy unable to escape slumberland.

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Michael Bratt - The Darkroom → Michael Bratt, a D.C.-based composer and conductor, sent his new album __The Darkroom__, a set containing one solo song and four collaborations. It’s “a collection of ambient electroacoustic works,” he tells me. “Many of the tracks are extremely personal in nature, and some of these collaborations have been three or four years in development.” The solo track opening The Darkroom, “Visions,” planted the seed for the project six years ago.

This patience is refreshing in an age when we’re told to release nonstop music. It also results in an attention to detail, as heard throughout The Darkroom. Take the title cut as an example, where strings and flutes play off each other elegantly while a more abrasive electronic section sneakily rises from silence to dominance. Or the plucked piano notes of “As the Earth Grew Still,” spaced together with implied distance before gradually coalescing in harmonic layers. In other words, nothing here sounds hashed out.

Based on the weight of talent and intellect on The Darkroom, you might expect an album that’s heavy and impenetrable. But it’s a soulful listen, very human and reflective, with many moments that are gently disarming. “You Belong Here” comes to mind, with processed guitars and subtly droning electronics conveying a comfortable loneliness.

The approach is academic — a lot of thought goes into his music, as you’ll discover if you check out Michael's song notes on my blog — but doesn’t ignore the visceral pleasure of this beautiful, meaningful recording.

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I didn’t think I’d get one of these out this week but here we are. It will be at least a couple of weeks until you hear from me again — lots going on here in Ringo-land. And, if all goes well, my next intrusion will be the announcement that the newsletter is re-launched, emailed to you directly from 8sided.blog rather than the ‘Stack. Hang on to your hats.

Thanks once again for reading. I appreciate it and I appreciate you. See you again soon! 🚀

P.S. — Last episode I mentioned the duck box and the potential for ducklings. Well …

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btw — I'm Michael Donaldson and you can read more about who I am and what I do here.

• If you dig this newsletter click the heart at the bottom. ♥️
• If you have a groovy pal who might like this, click the share icon. 📩
• And please leave a comment if you'd like to chat about this. 💭 

Good day, old chum! Michael here, bringing you the latest episode of the curious and occasional text broadcast called Ringo Dreams of Lawn Care. I thank you for joining us and being a part of the Ringo squad. There's only one rule in this club: no Fischer-Pricing allowed. 

How are things? All is going well here. The duck box delivers heaps of joy this month, and I have my first vaccine appointment on Thursday. Things are looking up.

Fair warning. This episode of Ringo is a tad self-indulgent (no surprise, really). I'm thinking in public through some decisions about this newsletter and the topics I write about. Related to all this, I changed the tag line on the blog this week. It used to be "Thinking about music's place in the 21st century." But, as we're two decades into this century, I figure we probably have some ideas about music's place by now. There's more on that change, and some other developments, below, followed by cool things you should check out. Embrace the ramble!

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I'm watching this Minutemen concert video from 1985 ("And when reality appears digital," Mike Watt soothsays at 18:57) and thinking about the punk rock dream. American independent music was at its height, disadvantaged, compared to its British counterpart, by the sheer size of the country. For the first time, bands like these were finding nationwide renown without a major label attached. (A quick pause to recommend Michael Azerrad's essential book Our Band Could Be Your Life if you'd like to learn more about these scenes.) But the dream — yes, the punk rock dream — was autonomy. Self-releasing, self-distributing, self-promoting, self-administrating, self-booking. Some, like Ian MacKaye's still inspirational Dischord outfit, came closer than anyone had before.

Fast forward a few years after that Minutemen concert. I was nineteen years old and wanted more than anything to start a record label. But those were ancient times, and I had no idea how to manufacture vinyl or find a distributor and doubted it was possible from my lonely North Louisiana dorm room anyway. So I dreamed — came up with names, imagined the types of bands I'd sign, scribbled fake logos, studied the discographies (and personalities) of labels like SST, Alternative Tentacles, and Factory.

What a time. Here I am (guitar) at nineteen, playing something resembling punk rock with my friends (photo by David):

"Home Taping Is Killing Music" was a strange '80s PR campaign by the British Phonographic Industry, a trade organization representing major labels and distributors. We read that slogan to mean "the music industry" as taping our friends' records made more music, not less. The punks agreed. Alternative Tentacles released Dead Kennedys' In God We Trust Inc. on a one-sided cassette — the b-side was blank. The cassette displayed the familiar tape-and-crossbones icon (now appropriated by The Pirate Bay) and the phrase, "Home taping is killing record industry profits!" Below that: "We left this side blank so you can help."

The major labels were the target of our ire, but, in reality, our problem was with the corporate gatekeepers. Sure, we had our gatekeepers — the fanzines, the college radio DJs, the cool punk rock clubs. Not all gatekeepers are bad, but those corporate gatekeepers insisted on shoving their agenda-culture down our throats. 

Because of this attitude, some celebrated when Napster supposedly (but not really) brought down the music industry. That era offered a glimpse of the power of self-distribution, aided by the internet revolution. As bandwidth got faster and tools more sophisticated and egalitarian, predictions about 'the end of the major label' were common (guilty as charged). "No more gatekeepers!" was the rallying cry — that emerging teenage bands would soon have the same chances at an audience as an established superstar. 

The result: not only are the corporate labels flourishing, but new gatekeepers have covertly replaced the old ones. Sure, the power to self-everything is here, but most choose to sieve their independence through an algorithmic filter. We're gaming the gatekeepers just like old times, but now it's about massaging the algorithm to get us on the right playlists, to amplify strategically placed hashtags, and to get the targets just right in that boosted Facebook post. 

There's so much frustration with this newfound reliance on social media and low-paying streaming services. But do things have to be this way? 

Back in my dorm room, I was frustrated that I couldn't figure out how to do what all the punk-inspired DIY'ers wanted: to navigate this music thing without any interference (or interaction) from 'the man.' That was the punk rock dream. And now we can have it but only if we really want it. The dream's not easy, and algorithms, and the promise of shortcuts, are seductive.

If I've personally advised you on label or recording artist stuff, you've heard me mention 'the punk rock dream.' I talk about it a lot. I've been thinking about the concept since that dorm room. So, when I decided I needed a new tag-line for my blog, I decided on "A zine about sound, culture, and the punk rock dream." Because, really, that's what the blog and newsletter are all about. (The 'zine' part is a nod to how I got started with all of this.)

OK. Let's talk about Substack.

I've been thinking about moving this newsletter off Substack for several weeks. There are four reasons for this:

• I have no intention to ever charge a fee for this newsletter. Substack exists around the assumption that someday I'll change my mind about that. 

• The lack of design options. Every Substack newsletter looks pretty much the same.

• This stuff. Problematic.

• I'd like what I'm writing to live on a platform I own and control. 

I want to expand on the fourth reason by addressing the changing definition of independent music. The qualifications once seemed cut-and-dry, apparent in Michael Azerrad's book that I linked to above. Now things are fuzzier. How independent is the punkest of punk labels if they primarily promote through Zuckerberg's platform, via a corporation so huge it would have given Jello Biafra an aneurysm back in the day? A band might self-release, but are they independent if Spotify and YouTube are the focus of their outreach? One could even go as far as to charge that a reliance on Apple products to make music is a dependence on the most giant of multi-national corporations. 

We can go all over the place with this until it's just nitpicking and cutting hairs. But my definition of 'independent,' which I wrote about here, is summed up by a simple question: do you truly own the work you're passionate about? 

That ownership includes all the decisions made about how an artist presents her work: how it's distributed, how direct the access is to the audience, and the alignments that color the public perception of the work. The primary platform hosting this art — your preferred way for people to check out what you've made — plays a large part in determining ownership. The person who writes paragraphs of prose as a Facebook post doesn't own that — Facebook can take it down at any time. It's the same for a photographer using Instagram as her only portfolio. Or a video-maker hosting his achievements solely on YouTube. I don't even think Bandcamp is immune, despite its reputation as a bastion of music independence. It's all the same if you're relying on it. How screwed would you be if it went away? Or if a corporation that doesn't share your values acquired it?

I'm not saying you shouldn't use these platforms. But position your art and the work you're passionate about under the assumption that these platforms and — crucially — their policies are impermanent. These should be deployed as mere tools, not adopted as foundations. Let your work live somewhere you own, and make that place the primary destination for your audience. Everything else is a funnel. 

Sounds like the punk rock dream, right?

That's one reason I'm working to move this newsletter off Substack. I considered the prospect of hosting Ringo on an owned platform soon after the launch but put those changes on the back burner. Over time, the other three reasons have added some varying degrees of urgency. 

As you've undoubtedly noticed, this newsletter has gone from weekly to fortnightly to occasionally. When I do ease back to a regular schedule, I want the newsletter living and beaming out from my website rather than Substack. I've done the research and am looking to apply something close to what Jared Newman is doing (without charging my readers, of course). There's also some great advice from Ernie Smith of Tedium on self-publishing an email newsletter.

There will be at least one more Substack-based Ringo, the final number depending on how long it takes me to get all this set up. My last Substack missive will be a short one letting you know the switch is happening — you won't have to do anything as I'll port your address over to my new self-published digs. Of course, you can opt-out or unsubscribe at any point.

At the very beginning of Ringo, I mentioned that this newsletter is an experiment until it isn't. This change is another visit to the lab, mixing chemicals and seeing what happens. I'm constantly testing what independence means in the digital age and how the internet can facilitate — rather than stifle — that punk rock dream. Consider this newsletter and 8sided.blog a continuing report on my findings.

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The talented + prolific music and film writer Robert Ham is also contemplating Substack, which hosted his essential The Voice of Energy newsletter. I ended up in an extended Twitter DM conversation with Robert about this, and we debated our options. Robert's decided to move his newsletter to Buttondown, which is my first choice if self-publishing doesn't work out. 

If self-publishing is like self-releasing, then Buttondown is like signing to a small, hands-on indie label. Many small labels were started by someone frustrated by other labels, wanting to make the landscape better. Buttondown, a one-person operation, seems to have formed from a newsletter equivalent to this label frustration. Indeed — if self-publishing's technical ins-and-outs are intimidating (and tbh I can't say I'm entirely free from intimidation here), then Buttondown is a fine option.

Another fine option is subscribing to Robert's newsletter, The Voice of Energy. He astutely reviews music and movies and interviews makers of both. This newsletter is responsible for seriously extending my listening and watching queues. Here are the archives for The Voice of Energy's past issues if you'd like to check it out, but don't subscribe there — subscribe here on Buttondown instead.

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Stuff's been happening on the blog:

• Maybe you thought I'd spend this entire newsletter writing about NFTs. I could have! Here are two blog posts I wrote on this crazy-ass craze: The Hidden Value(s) of Digital Art and NFTs for the Rest of Us. 

• I also had an interesting conversation with emerging hyperpop artist Rachel Kerry about how experimental music techniques are infiltrating pop music.

• And I spoke with writer and visual artist James A. Reeves about blogging every day through a pandemic, the liberating possibility of fiction, and how he sees gas stations as sci-fi temples. 

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Steve Cobby – I've Loved You All My Life → Maybe there's a lockdown stimulus to Steve Cobby's prolificness — he's released two previousalbums since the pandemic's start, as well as a single and a murmur or two from his old outfit, Fila Brazillia. But Steve has always brimmed with musical output, a career-long series of textured and melodic songs with intricacies that belie their frequency. 

If there is a stuck-at-home influence on his latest album, the warmly titled I've Loved You All My Life, it's in the sense of longing for sightseeing. The cover depicts a green, lush, but enclosed location — the starry sky is our escape hatch. And the music seems to travel, not explicitly quoting worldly influences but hinting at them as if remembering what it was like to be a tourist. "Kintsugi" comes closest, resembling a sort of Polynesian jazz fusion with tuned percussion, soaring flute-like lines, and thick four-fingered chords. Someone's whistling away in the background, like an overzealous member of Martin Denny's band. There are many other sonic vacations on the agenda — "Plutus Maximus" feels like a night-time stroll through a pleasantly unfamiliar town, and "Keeping Ourselves Together" could soundtrack a tranquil cabana session, fruity drink in hand. And the album closes with "Mise En Abyme," a wistful duet of harmonica and piano that might signal the recognition of memory, that the things we miss the most live on inside our heads. 

I've Loved You All My Life is a joy to listen to and, yes, reassuring. This album might be my favorite of Steve's work out of all of his recent (all worthy) options.

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Ausklang – Chronos → Soaring spaciousness abounds on Chronos, an album from the Berlin-based trio Ausklang. The band's not quite moody enough for post-rock, a bit too drummy for ambient, and way too heady for indie-rock. They're somewhere in the middle of all of that, probably closer to what I hesitate to call "soundtrack rock." Ausklang are like a Popol Vuh for the drone-footage age, replacing the ecstatic mysticism with shoegazey optimism. 

The pieces are primarily improvised, the best bits edited together, and then overdubs added — a songwriting process pioneered by fellow German space cadets CAN. But while CAN gloriously sprawled and looped, Ausklang build and erupt. The title track, for instance, is a subdued slow-end jam that blasts itself into reverb-drenched guitar lines and cymbal crashes near the five-minute mark. And then there's the gorgeous "Future Memories," lulling the listener with a beatific guitar-then-piano melody before a Slowdive-like upward swell washes everything away.

The band performs a two-hour improvised ambient set every week at The Zionskirche, a 19th-century neo-romantic church. This aspect of Ausklang closes out Chronos via two beatless tracks that combine light drones, guitar atmospherics, and hopeful piano. Thus the album's sequence mirrors the band's dynamic sense — the tracklist progressively glides and thickens before floating down to a gentle landing. The album is so satisfying upon reaching the end, it's tempting to replay Chronos from track one and fly again.

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Woo-hoo! We've reached the finish line of this episode of Ringo Dreams of Lawn Care. After all of that, I'm excited to see where it goes next. 

As always, I love receiving your comments and 'hellos.' Send 'em on. But for now, I'll keep this short and simply request that you hang in there and keep on dreaming of brighter days. They're on the way. Thanks again for reading, and I'll see you again soon. 🚀

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btw — I'm Michael Donaldson and you can read more about who I am and what I do here.

• If you dig this newsletter click the heart at the bottom. ♥️
• If you have a groovy pal who might like this, click the share icon. 📩
• And please leave a comment if you'd like to chat about this. 💭 

Hello from the weird wilds of Central Florida. It's your old pal Michael bringing you another installment in what's cryptically titled Ringo Dreams of Lawn Care. Thanks, as always, for being a part of our Ringo fam and successfully deciphering these covert communications.

Each episode of Ringo has a theme song. Oops, except for this one. Or maybe the next one. 

I'm putting the theme songs on pause because 1) I started to feel like I was phoning it in, and I don't want to feel like that; 2) I have a newly commissioned music project that's going to hog my studio-time for a while, and; 3) I really want these musical interludes to be a bit more special for you and me both. So, rather than occurring each episode, I'll surprise us now and then. These will become less 'theme songs' and more a glimpse or preview of 'what I'm working on.' I'm planning to increase the music-making (as part of a new thing I can only hint at right now wut), and the idea is that adding a dose of specialness will spur me on. We all need an extra dose of spurring these days.

I previously wrote about how I felt trapped in this home office, a nasty consequence of lockdown. My solution was a complete office rearrangement. I moved my desk to face a different direction, installed bookcases, added a 'reading chair' area — changes intended to make the space seem like something fresh and new. I hoped for some hocus-pocus: "Hey, brain! We've been in the same room for six months, but now we're in a WHOLE NEW ROOM." It turns out it's not easy to fool the brain.

Fast-forward to New Year's Eve, and we're counting down to midnight at my house. It's ten minutes until 2021, and I pop in to the home office for some forgotten reason. I'm greeted by books and wood and tchotchkes all over the floor. At some point in the last hour of 2020, my bookcase completely collapsed, spreading carnage everywhere. 2020, in all its wretchedness, was determined to get one more stupid disaster in before the clock ran out.

The result is that, for the first two months of the year, my home office featured a bare corner and piles of books and whatnot distributed in inconvenient places. The brain, unaffected by the first office switch, now screams, "I can't effectively work among this inexcusable clutter!" 

I'm pleased to announce that yesterday bookshelves were installed on the wall behind me. They look great, and my handyman assures me, "they won't fall even if you stand on them." I've also hung a couple of vintage Feng Shui promotional posters on the adjacent corner. Now the brain seems happy. This accursed room (in the way that rooms feel accursed after a year of lockdown) is starting to seem like a different place.

Embarrassing confession: I did power up Zoom and test the angle to see how the books and posters look in the background during a call. Oh, come on — you do the same thing. Life in 2021 is so strange. Anyway, the background looks nice and a lot more interesting than it did before. I do need a fourth shelf, though. And, I know: pictures or it didn't happen. So, see below. This is (always) a work in progress, BTW.

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Recorded audio can have a transportive intention, from the 'it's like you're there' feel of a great live album to the third LP in the Environments series plopping the listener in the middle of a hippie be-in. 

Environments! That series was launched in 1969 when sound recordist Irv Teibel realized listening to the ocean waves he captured for a Tony Conrad film improved his concentration. Teibel eventually released eleven installments, with a few of the Environments records displaying this bold motto on the cover: "The music of the future isn't music."

Hippie be-ins aside, many used the Environments LPs like how we have 'mood' playlists on Spotify or 'music for studying' YouTube channels. The sounds were played in the background, non-intrusive for the most part, aiding the listener in achieving a flow state. You can lessen the anxiety of paper-shuffling and deadlines by making the brain think you're working amid gentle rain in a pine forest.

These 'environments' take on an extra layer after months of lockdown and working from home. Concentration and flow state are still goals, but the transportive aspect has prominence. We want to feel like we're somewhere else, to break up the Groundhog Day-ness of repetitive tasks in the same room. Every. Single. Day. 

One recent example is I Miss My Bar. Set up by an actual bar in Monterrey, the site provides a series of looped audio feeds of sounds you might hear in your favorite drinking establishment. Sliders allow you to adjust the volumes of the various loops, or you can mute sounds entirely. You can also tailor the sounds to resemble a coffeehouse if that's your flavor. 

This isn't the Environments record that transports us into a pine forest or a deserted beach. I Miss My Bar and sites like it imagine city life — the busy, crowded pub and the cheerful night out. Telling the brain that we're in a forest is relaxing, but hanging out in a forest isn't normal for most of us. Recapturing normalcy in these times is oddly regenerative, and for many of us, that's the social sounds of a bar or coffeehouse.

As usual, YouTube takes things a step further. In The New York Times, Eliza Brooke writes about YouTube's version of urbanized environments that features imaginary spaces and pop culture references. Of course, there's the Rainy Day Coffee Shop, but there's also the Twin Peaks diner and lots of Harry Potter. There's an additional visual aspect with YouTube, often a static shot or animation looped alongside the audio, and sometimes subtly creative as in this subway ambience stream. 

Writer Kyle Chayka refers to these videos as "an imagination aid" to help you "pretend you're somewhere else, or someone else, far from your current worries." While transportive, the Environments records were primarily for concentration, the cover text often noting their meditative qualities. 2021's 'environments' deliver transportation first and foremost. The soothing, flow states are a by-product of aurally planting ourselves outside of our overly familiar settings. These streams promise distant travels from a small room. 

* Addendum: I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention The Numero Group’s fantastic Environments app.

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Though universally revered, Martin Scorsese is sometimes viewed as an old-fashioned relic as he digs in his heels against changes in contemporary media. Previously, he got lots of nerdy flack for referring to superhero franchise films as "theme parks" rather than "cinema." And, recently, in an essay on Federico Fellini, Scorsese went off on algorithms and the overuse of the word "content" to describe artistic output. He's mainly referring to visual media, of course, and how "the art of cinema is being systematically devalued, sidelined, demeaned, and reduced to its lowest common denominator" when we refer to it all as "content." Here's Scorsese:

"Content" was used more and more by the people who took over media companies, most of whom knew nothing about the history of the art form, or even cared enough to think that they should. "Content" became a business term for all moving images: a David Lean movie, a cat video, a Super Bowl commercial, a superhero sequel, a series episode. […] … it has created a situation in which everything is presented to the viewer on a level playing field, which sounds democratic but isn't.

A platform's reliance on algorithms that can't separate artistic intention from specious cash grabs exacerbates this perception. There's so much talk about freeing ourselves from the gatekeepers, but perhaps 'old-fashioned' human curation is a gatekeeping we need. Scorsese again:

Curating isn't undemocratic or "elitist," a term that is now used so often that it's become meaningless. It's an act of generosity—you're sharing what you love and what has inspired you. Algorithms, by definition, are based on calculations that treat the viewer as a consumer and nothing else.

"Scorsese is right," tweeted music critic Ted Gioia. "Anyone who refers to film, music, or writing as 'content' is simply not a trustworthy custodian of anything of cultural value. Unfortunately, these are the key decision makers in media right now."

I don't have too much of a problem with media companies calling the music or movies they stream "content." It's like a politician using blatant dog whistle language — at least you know who's in this for the right reasons and deserving of trust. What's insidious is when we, as artists, are convinced to start using the word "content" instead of "art" or even "our work." A musician creates a beautiful song, puts sweat into editing an accompanying video, and then thinks, "here's some content for YouTube" — that's distressing. 

Language is powerful, and the words we use in our heads change our behaviors. If we start replacing words like "art" with "content" — even just internally — our intentions shift. We start feeding the companies hungry for content. Instead of making music and films for the fans or the human curators, we're producing content for the algorithms. 

Seth Godin must have read Scorsese's rant. Soon after the essay's publication, Seth wrote his own rant on his daily blog: 

Publishing to an algorithm is not the same as publishing to an audience. And living in a culture that's driven by profit-seeking algorithm owners is different as well. Because without curation, who is responsible? Who is guiding the culture? Who pushes the boundaries or raises the standards? […] …we benefit when we realize that the algorithm isn't rooting for us and quite probably is working against us. The only winning approach is to earn permission and a direct connection with our fans and then act as curators for ideas (and as our own publishers).

Getting back to the power of language, I touched on this topic on the blog a few years ago when I commented on Cherie Hu's idea that "The word 'creator' does more harm than good." (Cherie's original essay is offline, but I wholeheartedly recommend her Water & Music platform, where you can find many of her enlightening pieces.) I wrote this in my blog post: 

It may seem like semantics, but the way we adopt and use language rewires our thinking. Hu's point— which I never considered — is that the more we refer to ourselves as 'creators,' the easier it is to submit to the notion that our creations are in fealty to others. Notice how the services almost all use 'creator' — a sampling of examples Hu points out include YouTube Creators, Facebook for Creators, Spotify's "Creator Marketing.' So when a platform sneakily claims ownership of our work we're desensitized against protest.

"Content" is the same. The language implicates employment, that we're delivering goods in a fiefdom. Responsibility, leverage, and agency shift to the "content provider."

Buckle down, folks. Dig in your heels like Martin. You're artists making art. Don't let anyone tell you anything else. 

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Now that we're talking about language, here's a passage from Philip K. Dick's Time Out Of Joint, which I've been saving FOREVER. Ragle Gumm had some thoughts about how language shapes reality:

Words, he thought.

Central problem in philosophy. Relation of word to object... what is a word? Arbitrary sign. But we live in words. Our reality, among words not things. No such thing as a thing anyhow; a gestalt in the mind. 

Thingness... sense of substance. An illusion. Word is more real than the object it represents.

Word doesn't represent reality. Word is reality. For us, anyhow. Maybe God gets to objects. Not us, though.

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It's never too late to discover a great band. Sad circumstances may make it seem otherwise, as in the case of Tomaga. Somehow this London duo was off my radar despite first appearing in 2013. I happened across their 2019 album Extended Play 1 a few months ago, and from the first track, "Bluest," I was immediately roped in. Tomaga's sound is textured and intricate, with jazzy post-punk drums, flashes of discordance, and in-studio arrangements hinting at a modernized This Heat. That's when I learned the bittersweet moment of my discovery — looking up Tomaga online, I saw that 1/2 of the band, Tom Relleen, had just died of stomach cancer.

Tomaga's other half, drummer and percussionist Valentina Magaletti, announced last month that the band completed a new album before Relleen's passing. Intimate Intensity is due on March 26 and, judging from the three advance tracks streaming on Bandcamp, this is an early contender for 'album of 2021.' The title track is especially potent, carrying forward all the elements that drew me into "Bluest." The drums, accompanied by pingy percussion, play at a meter just out of grasp; a muted bass carries a wisp of melody; warm, melancholic strings embrace this sonic space. This is the final sound of Tomaga (as it's the last song on the album), and it's weighty and intensely moving.

Floating Points collaborated with Marta Salogni on a gorgeous, plaintive 'reinterpretation' of "Intimate Intensity," released last week. It's a benefit for The Free Youth Orchestra, a charity set up in Tom Relleen's name. Amazing stuff. 

Side note: I recently wrote about my love for an EP by Holy Tongue, and I now see that Valentina Magaletti is also a member of that project. 

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NYC musician/librarian Shea Betts visits us again with a dose of aural contemplation on his tranquil new album, Enna. I recently reviewed Sea / Sky, his debut release, and its overdriven, 'natural-wonder' ambient music style. While that album conveyed a windy skyline meeting rough seas, Enna captures an extended episode of pleasance and stillness. And with the cover art foliage and titles like "First Light," "Bloom," and "Sunday," one gets the feeling that spring is in the air. 

The album's method resembles languid chords played on organ or harmonium, realized through warm, synthesized textures that sit somewhere between the two. Shifting movements in the mid-range are often accented with sparkling overtones (most prominently on "First Light" and "August "), barely hinting at melody but still feeling familiar and song-like. 

These days I'm drawn to music that I best describe as "reassuring," something that I can put on as I sit back and clear the attic. Enna fits the bill. And the songs are relatively short — we usually expect a single track in this drone-ish style to take up a side of an LP — but the spaces left in-between songs suggest a moment to breathe and reflect. I'm not sure if this was Betts' intention and that he meant Enna as a sort of sonic balm, but its tones indeed do wonders for a restless psyche. 

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That's a wrap on this episode of Ringo Dreams of Lawn Care. I hope you enjoyed reading my ramblings. I didn't plan it, but I see there's a thread throughout this episode of self-healing and resetting mindsets. As I say at the end of each newsletter, "hang in there." 

I realize how lockdown has shaped these writings and everything we do creatively. That includes all of us, everyone, everywhere. Now that we see some light at the end of the tunnel (though still distant), I wonder how our art will change once we're out of this mess. Undoubtedly it will still be different than it was before. 

As always, don't hesitate to reach out to say 'hey.' I'm always eager to hear from you. Thanks again for reading, and I'll see you here again soon. 🚀

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btw — I'm Michael Donaldson and you can read more about who I am and what I do here.

• If you dig this newsletter click the heart at the bottom. ♥️
• If you have a groovy pal who might like this, click the share icon. 📩
• And please leave a comment if you'd like to chat about this. 💭 

Hello, friend! I’m Michael Donaldson, and this is the return of Ringo Dreams of Lawn Care, an email newsletter about music-listening, music-making, and the befuddling culture around those things. Because there comes a time when you just have to dance like no one’s watching even though it turns out everyone is watching.

These newsletters are getting spotty in frequency, that’s for sure, but I soldier on. I’m encouraged to report that lately, I’ve got a spring in my step after limping through the newsletter wilderness. And, you know, I was thinking about a new layout and format for this ‘first of the year’ relaunch, but I chickened out. That will come at another time. 

Today I’ll get to the heart of the matter, and that means a new theme song. “International Scope” is snakey and plodding, fuzzy like an afternoon hangover. No guitars were harmed in the recording of this song (as much as my frazzled playing might sound like it). So, sit back, pop open “International Scope,” and then proceed into some extended blog thoughts on the state of digital sampling.

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One quiet morning in the early 2000s, I arrived at my label’s office and listened to the voice mail no sampling record producer wants to hear. The call was from a lawyer representing the estate of the leader of an obscure ’70s funk band. He knew that I used a 2-bar drum loop from this band on a song from my first album. It didn’t matter that this loop was fairly common, used prolifically in both mainstream hits and underground white labels. It also didn’t matter that I probably grabbed the loop off one of those erroneously named ‘royalty-free’ sample CDs that were common in the ’90s. The lawyer (and, presumably, his client) wanted his cut. 

Long story short, the fact the loop appeared in several mainstream hits probably worked in my favor — once the lawyer saw the requested final sales figures for my album, he realized I was small potatoes. I guess I wasn’t worth the effort, and I never heard from him again. But the most disturbing thing was how he found me. He was going through listings of songs that sampled his client on a sample-identifying website. 

I’m not sure which site the lawyer used at the time. Today’s most popular one, WhoSampled.com, launched several years after that frightening phone call. But the fear persists among producers. A new article in Pitchfork by Mosi Reeves details how representatives of legacy catalog use WhoSampled to source potential litigation, despite its intended purpose of pointing fans to old records:

It is a useful resource for rap listeners, despite its complicated role in sampling culture. Chris Read, the London-based company’s head of content, said that using the website as a fact-finding tool for potential lawsuits is a violation of its terms of service, and that the practice “stands in opposition to the reason WhoSampled was created, which is to provide a place for music fans to discover the origins of the music they love and celebrate sampling as an artform.” He acknowledged that the site does not distinguish between cleared and uncleared samples in its listings, because information about sample licensing is not always made publicly available. Producers can request takedowns of listings related to their work if there is information that “they would prefer was not published” on the site, he added.

The law is clear, so producers using uncleared samples — myself included — are unambiguously in the wrong. Many in the music industry’s creative roles have called for an overhaul of these laws to recognize sampling as an art form and create avenues for producers working outside the profitable mainstream. Some lawyers, like the one who contacted me and ended up letting the sample slide, would seem to agree. But then there’s the challenge of differentiating those who use samples artfully vs. those who use them to profit off the notoriety of earlier works. Yes, music rights are complicated.

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But that wasn’t the first time I received a phone call about an illicit sample. A previous scare happened a few years earlier. Backstory: One of our label’s first records included a song with a slowed-down loop from Herbie Hancock’s “Bring Down The Birds.” This was the same sample that formed the backbone of Deee-Lite’s “Groove Is In The Heart.” On our record, the loop played so slow that it became the song’s loping bass line. 

I arrive at the studio office, and there’s a waiting voicemail message. “Hi, I represent Herbie Hancock, and I’d like to talk to you about this song.” My label partner and I stared at each other open-mouthed, for probably five minutes. It took us a few days to build the nerves to return the phone call. The guy on the other end of the line says, “We just wanted to let you know that Herbie knows about the song and likes how you used the sample. If we want to license the song or use it anywhere, we get to do so for free.” Uh, yes sir, no problem, sir!

So I guess you could say I got pretty lucky with samples. There have been a few close calls (I won’t elaborate!) and other times when I had to turn down a movie or TV license because a song had an uncleared sample. I did once try to clear a sample legally. The sample in question was a short vocal drop repeated in the song maybe six times. The artist’s publisher wanted a five-figure advance and half the publishing ownership of the piece. So that didn’t happen.

That was twenty years ago. There was huge resistance to sampling then and, if you weren’t dealing with Herbie Hancock, you could expect to give up a lot for legal clearance. Want a crazy example of this? Search for A Tribe Called Quest’s “Can I Kick It” on BMI’s Songview repertoire. You’ll see that the only songwriter credited, who also owns 100% of the publishing, is Lou Reed.

I stopped sampling not long after my failed attempt to follow the rules and get something cleared. I wanted more chances to license my music to a broader audience, and I had a bad feeling that a third phone call wouldn’t go as well as the first two. But now sampling is more acceptable and viewed artistically (and as a means of easy cash flow), even by the old-timers. Check out Bob James. The supposed “most sampled artist of all time” has given a bunch of his songs to Tracklib, a site that pre-clears songs for sampling at a low cost. But I have to wonder if sampling is as attractive when we remove the thrill, secrecy, and danger. There’s nothing like discovering that weird beat or sound on an obscure thrift store record and transforming it into something new. And then getting away with it.

(Someday, I’ll write more about why we sample and how sampling installs outside contexts, and how all that relates to Gysin’s cut-ups, etc., etc.)

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Robin Rendle says, “The web doesn’t have to be this ugly and embarrassing thing … the web can be made beautiful.” He’s made a beautiful webpage to prove this case. Rendle has illustrated his scrollable essay with vintage woodcuts and metal engravings that are surprisingly effective in amplifying his points. And those points are about how the recent ubiquity of email newsletters is a missed opportunity for a blog renaissance.

Rendle is really asking, “how do we make the web for everyone?” He sees the rise of newsletters as an encouraging sign that people are moving away from social media’s grasp. But why not embrace blogs, which are capable of much more creativity than allowed in email? Because, ultimately, the open web is not as convenient. Website-building is not intuitive, nor is website-following (“RSS is for nerds.”). The creators of Substack know this and made a publishing tool that’s easy to use and receive. 

“If we could subscribe to websites easily,” says Rendle, “then the web itself might not feel quite so forgettable.” He suggests that browsers should include built-in RSS reading. In a way, I guess this would be like a global version of Facebook’s newsfeed. That feed is essentially an RSS reader, but one can only subscribe to feeds within Facebook’s toxic prison camp. 

I do like newsletters. On second thought, I actually like that more people are writing and sending out personal essays. The email newsletter is merely the delivery method. Thanks to Feedbin, I read my newsletters in an RSS reader, living side-by-side with the blogs I enjoy. 

Ringo is amazing and I have no plans to stop but, if I had to choose, my blog is my preference (luckily, I don’t have to choose). Blogging feels more open, free, and permanent (as permanent as something on the web can be). I do fear that newsletters may prove a fad — both Facebook and Twitter are jumping on the newsletter bandwagon, which hints that ‘peak newsletter’ isn’t too far off. Blogs remain that scruffy outlier, unpeggable and persistent, slippery between fingers of profit-hungry CEOs. Email’s okay, but blogs keep the web weird. 

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Burdy – Satellite → Back in the ’90s, all of us downtempo-headz listened to lots of Fila Brazillia and the other artists inhabiting the Hull, UK, imprint Pork Recordings. One act that stood out was Baby Mammoth, a duo who shared Fila’s knack for melody and sly rhythmic constructions. An amicable gent named Burdy was one-half of Baby Mammoth. We ended up becoming friends thanks to his semi-frequent sojourns to the US, where we often DJ’ed the same club nights. After a couple of solo releases and a stint as an Australian, Burdy took a long break from music-making. Now he reaches out from his new base in chilly Canada, surprising us with a delightful album of fresh music. 

Satellite was recently released on Filtered Deluxe Recordings and features ten tracks that won’t disappoint fans of the Mammoth or their Pork label-mates. The songs feature Burdy’s sense of melody, sense of humor (“Murder Hornets,” anyone?), and his sense of style. Meaning, this is stylish stuff — pleasantly sloping beats, a rush of organic and electronic instrumentation, and vibes for days (or daze) make me wistful for when we used to pack dance floors with 100 BPMs and below. Start with the second track, “Kananaskis,” with its road-movie guitar, watery bounce, and cryptic chants, immediately pulling you in for the long haul. [LINK]

Emily A. Sprague – Hill, Flower, Fog→ “Mirror” is the unassuming third song on Emily A Sprague’s latest, Hill, Flower, Fog. As gentle as a shower of cotton puffs, the song lightly bubbles and pings in sensuous repetition for over nine minutes. The changes are subtle — a lonesome synth swell lingers in the background, pining for recognition, and stereo echoes increase patiently. “Mirror” is the best kind of unobtrusive, and it’s almost shocking when it ends. It feels like a sound that should last forever. 

It’s tempting to say the same about all of Sprague’s latest album for RVNG Intl. — its warm reassurance is a welcome companion. It feels real, and, over six sonic tapestries, Sprague turns a Eurorack’s cold toughness inside out and brushes its circuitry with earth, dew, and sap. Like mysteries of the natural world, Sprague’s electronics feel emergent.

Hill, Flower, Fog is a pandemic album, recorded last March as the world started to realize the trials to come. But these songs magically (and sonically) trade impending sense of loss and uncertainty for sonic intimacy and optimism. One could note that Sprague’s cyclic melodies and looping treatments reflect the imposed routines of lockdown. However, the music is encouraging, inferring these daily patterns as something cherishable, an opportunity for reflection and moving inward. It seems to say, “one day at a time.” [LINK]

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Woosh! Thanks so much for reading. Here’s to a new year (yes, I’m a little late) and new beginnings. I have a lot in store for both Ringo and 8sided.blog so keep your ears to the ground. I’ll also have a music announcement soon WUT. In the meantime, reach out any time if you have feedback, comments, or wanna say hello hello. I’d love to hear from you. Stay safe, keep dry, and, if you’re using a reusable mask, remember to wash that sucker. I’ll see you around again soon! 🚀

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btw — I'm Michael Donaldson and you can read more about who I am and what I do here.

• If you dig this newsletter click the heart at the bottom. ♥️
• If you have a groovy pal who might like this, click the share icon. 📩
• And please leave a comment if you'd like to chat about this. 💭 

I jumped into January 1st with too much going on, with other things piling on top over the following days. All attempts to write and publish Ringo foiled and unraveled. It’s nobody’s fault but my own, but, hey, I’m considering this a chance to recalibrate.

Distraction’s a problem, always has been. Here’s hoping the political winds change, and distraction levels decrease, but I’m not holding my breath. Personal and professional occurrences are distracting enough. I’m on a Sisyphean quest to defy and deny distraction so I can more easily do things I want to do this year — like send out a weekly Ringo. 

Anil Dash recently posted about his Personal Digital Reset. This piece poses his alternative to New Year’s resolutions, a typically 2021 cleanse of one’s digital life. Many of his proposals make sense: a lot less (to no) social media, ingesting online news and information solely with intention, replacing FOMO with YAGNI (‘You Aren’t Gonna Need It’). Others, such as wiping your computer and reinstalling everything from scratch, seem drastic but might actually be a good idea. Honestly, getting bogged down for hours maintaining a computer sounds like another distraction to me. But we are recalibrating here, right?

Have you seen The Isolator? Here’s a helmet worn while working, to relieve the writer of all distractions. It even includes an oxygen tank, so you don’t have to come up for air. On the other side of the coin, there’s the TV Helmet — an enclosure that feeds the wearer nothing but distraction, uncontrolled and divorced from intention. Notice how similar these are in concept despite the dichotomic applications. Happiness is found somewhere in the middle, no headwear required. 

That’s a rambling way to say that Ringo will be back soon, perhaps sooner than you (and I) think. Recalibration is almost completed. Thanks for remaining and reading.

* A special thanks to new subscribers, including those who found me via this lovely article by Will Sumsuch in 5 Magazine or this kind recommendation from Jon Freer. You’re probably a little confused right now, but I promise it’ll all come together soon.

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It’s not my reputation to leave you empty-handed. Here are some recommendations for you to enjoy and mull over until we meet again:

Daniel Lanois on WTF with Marc Maron + Rick Rubin on The Moment with Brian Koppelman → Possibly the best thing I did all week was listening to these two podcasts back-to-back. These conversations illustrate how a music producer's role can overlap with some combination of philosopher, personal coach, and crisis manager. It's not just about drum sounds and reverb. Lanois talks specifics about the process of wrangling great work from icons (and their giant egos), and Rubin expands on that with the big picture view. I recommend you listen in that order — a masterclass in the mindsets required to inspire others into action, not just applicable to inside a recording studio. Bonus: this interview with Trevor Horn conducted by Prince Charles Alexander (also a producer of renown) has a lot more 'shop talk' than the previous two but is still a fascinating listen. Horn is such an amicable interviewee. 

New Wave Eye Candy → That’s a tag on Simon Reynolds’ Hardly Baked blog and there are three installments in the series (so far). These posts contain a long scroll of vintage graphics from album covers, adverts, and posters that exemplify the look and attitude of the post-punk new wave. It’s also a remarkable glimpse of cutting edge graphic design just before the days of Photoshop et al.

Ken Burns’ Jazz → Noting this because chances are you are an Amazon Prime subscriber so you can get those dark gray vans to frequently visit your doorstep. Jazz is available on Prime’s streaming service at no extra cost right this very moment. This astonishing series from K-Burns was released in 2001. That was just in time as I doubt many of the interview subjects were around much longer. This thing is massive — is it like 20 hours, maybe more? Well, the pressure’s on because I think it’s leaving Prime (as a ‘freebie’) on the first of February. You’ve got a week. At the very least, watch the first few episodes — the origins of jazz are compelling, instructive, and say a lot about US history. Of course, the history of any country is in the history of its music.

Optional Essentials Vol. 1 → My friend Dr Olive — who once took me to the top of Mont St-Michel — recently launched a new label, 3 to the 3rd Music. The latest release is an ambitious two-part compilation cheekily titled Optional Essentials. The hype-text describes this collection as “the home-made home-listening soundtrack to one of the strangest years, written by music makers from 7 countries.” The sound is chill, overall, but audacious. There’s a diversity of instrumentation and mood-scapes, never a dull moment. The sequence is thoughtful, easily pulling the listener into its zone when played from beginning to end. And I have a connection — I contributed the song “Tarkovsky” under my Q-BAM moniker. I recorded this song ages ago, inspired by repeated visits to Moscow and my admiration of the Russian filmmaker named by the title. And I sampled Robbie Hardkiss saying, “Everything is cool.” Also on the compilation: amazing new tunes from my friends (and label-mates) Monta At Odds and Gemini Revolution.

Juniore - Ouh là là → I literally discovered this while I was writing the ramble text that starts this update. I know nothing about Juniore (yet) but the first impression is that they kinda sound like Stereolab creating songs for a Giallo movie. Which also sometimes describes the band Broadcast. So it’s like that. It’s great and the lyrics are in French so they don’t throw me off while I’m ramble-writing.

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There you go. I’m getting back on the saddle, one foot at a time. Ringo will be riding high in no time.

Hope you’re doing fine and please feel free to check in. I’ll see you in the ambiguous soon! 🚀

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btw — I'm Michael Donaldson and you can read more about who I am and what I do here.

• If you dig this newsletter click the heart at the bottom. ♥️
• If you have a groovy pal who might like this, click the share icon. 📩
• And please leave a comment if you'd like to chat about this. 💭  

What d’ya know, mistletoe? I’m Michael Donaldson, and I’ve returned for another episode of Ringo Dreams of Lawn Care, an email newsletter about music-listening, music-making, and the astonishing culture around those things. Thanks for joining our hacienda of Ringos. As Tony Wilson once said, “Never there when you want me, always there when you need me.”

It’s a newsletter in flux! Right after I announce that Ringo is resuming a weekly schedule, I take three weeks off. Not a good look. It turns out the end of the year/holiday season is not the best time to get ambitious. 

More on that subject at the end of this newsletter. In the meantime, I’d like to remind you that every episode of RDoLC has a theme song. This time it’s called “Lelewo.” I usually embed a SoundCloud player at this point — and you can still listen to it on SoundCloud here — but ’tis the season, so I decided to post a short video for this song. (After clicking to it, you may have to click the speaker icon to hear the tune.) Shot a few years ago on Apalachicola Bay, it depicts a rare and strange sight that only occurs at Xmas time in Florida. 

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In The Quietus, Daniel Dylan Wray (who claims to listen to five new albums a day) feels that 2020 deadened music’s healing power for him. As the months (and pandemic) dragged on, music only added to the deluge of information (“Pressing play sometimes felt like opening up Twitter …”), and silence was often preferable. Though Daniel still experienced euphoric music moments, a lot of music (or the act of listening to it) felt “draped in sadness.”

Daniel has a theory. His 2020 listening experiences are happening in a singular space — the same place where he’s locked down, living monotonous days, working from home, endlessly worrying. He’s not bonding with music in grungy nightclubs or record shops, or discovering new tunes with friends, or equating albums to time spent on road trips or in unfamiliar cities. Daniel explains:

The process of discovering and experiencing music is intrinsically linked to a sense of place. We all have indelible memories – from the profound to the prosaic – attached to where we were during a musical epiphany or awakening. This year that process has been hacked down to nothing more than sitting in front of a computer screen at home. … Music is a multi-sensory experience, from the sweat and pulse of a club to the stench of stagnant gig venue carpets, and from rifling through fusty charity shop records to perfectly programmed light shows that dazzle the eye as music tickles the ear and chugging smoke machines engulf you. 2020 has robbed music of these other senses.

He has a point. I do equate many of my favorite songs and albums with events, people, or places. And I don’t go out as much as I used to (even before COVID-times), which might be why I don’t have too many current songs with strong memetic connective tissue. 

Music critic Ann Powers writes about similar feelings in her moving new essay Diary of a Fugue Year. Like Daniel, she refers to music as another layer of information to digest. But she also finds that her mindset toward music has transformed after months of lockdown, flavoring the act of listening with a strange intimacy: 

Music makes me yearn for what feels lost: a whisper pushing breath onto my neck, a voice singing loud into a crowd yelling back at it. In my solitude, though, recordings become a lifeline. Spending time with music has never felt more private, a way of both sheltering from and mediating the noise from outside. At the same time, the sound always takes me somewhere; it’s often the only way I hear a stranger’s voice on any given day. See what I’m getting at? Nothing’s got just one meaning. In a year crowded with contradictions, music’s way of enhancing emotion can feel clarifying, or it can overwhelm. Like every other form of information, music is reaching people through static-filled channels, distorted, muffled, feeding back.

We know many new practices will linger after the pandemic: working from home, live-streamed concerts, and telemedicine, to name a few. We might also listen differently, our ears heightened to receive the emotion of the moment. At home, songs will continue to sound much more personal than before COVID-times. And in the wild, music discovery becomes a visceral experience like few others. Or, at least, it will seem that way for a while once we get out of this.

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For me, one album that’s strongly attached to a specific spatial memory is The Clash’s Sandinista! It was the first vinyl record I ever bought. I remember wandering into the mall record store thinking, “I should get something by this band The Clash I’m hearing about.” Looking through the bins, I see that Sandinista! packages three records filled with music for the price of one. So, that’s the one I picked over London Calling or the two others. 

As I told Lawrence Peryer at the end of my interview on the Spot Lyte On podcast, Sandinista! probably wasn’t the best first exposure to The Clash. The album was difficult to latch on to — there was so much music, and the styles varied wildly from track-to-track. I remember liking “Magnificent Seven” and “Police On My Back,” but I didn’t get it overall. Maybe I chose the wrong intro album, making The Clash a band I’d merely appreciate through the years. 

Simon Reynolds recently wrote about Sandinista! on his Blissblog, calling it a “fan-perplexing triple – which must be their least-listened record (well, apart from Cut the Crap) but which makes for a surprisingly listenable listen for streaming-era ears.” A vintage album best suited for streaming, then? Simon explains, “It’s not a record that can be listened to in a single sitting, especially in those days of vinyl — all that getting up and removing another disc from the sleeve, or flipping over the platter.”

Matty of MusicREDEF tweeted his thoughts to me:

When we first dip into a catalog, I wonder about the effect of that first record we listen to from a band. It can make the difference between becoming a fan or “meh.” Catalog dipping is a lot surer with streaming. You’re not really taking a chance anymore. And it’s easy to know which albums are the favorites, the most listened to, or the critically lauded ones. Before digital music, we were often guiding our chance-taking by album price. Three albums for the price of one was tempting. Also, there was the cut-out bin. Those $3-and-under records were often our intro albums, but, usually, only a band’s least popular records ended up as cut-outs. (Though I did discover Eno via the cut-out bin. That was Before And After Science, I believe.)

The Clash’s ambitious triple album Sandinista! was released 40 years ago this month. Of course, I now enjoy it quite a bit. And I see “Magnificent Seven” (and much of the album) as an ’80s milestone, ahead of its time. I agree with Matty. 

Here’s a fascinating oral history of that song from Consequence of Sound. And there’s a new music video for “Magnificent Seven.” The legendary Don Letts edited it from footage from The Clash’s time in NYC and their 1981 Bond’s residency. So good, so nostalgic. 

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You can’t have too much of a good thing. Since the very beginning of COVID-times, Bandcamp has waived their revenue share on the first Friday of every month. That means after payment processor fees, artists (or their labels, if managing the account) got an average of 93% of the total.

Bandcamp Fridays were a rousing success for everyone involved, not the least Bandcamp itself. Though the company led us to believe these first Fridays ended with 2020, I suspected these events would continue. And here’s Bandcamp with breaking news: 

Although vaccines are starting to roll out, it will likely be several months before live performance revenue starts to return. So we’re going to continue doing Bandcamp Fridays in 2021, on February 5th, March 5th, April 2nd, and May 7th. As always, isitbandcampfriday.com has the details.

Also, in the announcement, Bandcamp rightly points out that fans shouldn’t think these are the only days to buy music and support artists. Normally, “an average of 82% reaches the artist/label” through Bandcamp on a day that’s not the first Friday of the month. That’s still pretty good and remarkably better than those other guys. 

So why have these special Fridays, then? Well, they’re a lot of fun. Bandcamp Fridays remind me of Tuesdays at the record store — new releases came out every Tuesday in the olden times — and fans would line up at the door before we opened in anticipation of their favorite artists’ fresh music. Nowadays, Bandcamp Friday’s excitement carries over to social media. The social platforms come alive on Bandcamp Fridays with recommendations, exclusives from the artists, and praise from fans. It’s a nudge to the broader public that there’s something more than Spotify, that an inclusive music community bubbling with intention and enthusiasm exists in 2020. And because of that, I expect Bandcamp Fridays — or some version of it — to continue well beyond next May.

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HEDGING →

• Elijah Knutsen – Music For Vending Machines 1 → Elijah Knutsen, who gave us the exquisite Blue Sun Daydream album a couple of months ago, is back with Music For Vending Machines 1. Elijah refers to this first-in-a-series as “a miniaturized listening experience … much like something purchased from a vending machine.” The three songs, each clocking in at an average length of nine-and-a-half minutes, note a particular noise in their titles: “Air Conditioner Sound,” “Vending Machine Sound,” and “Purple Wisteria Tree Sound.” Those titles are red herrings as these ‘sounds’ are spacious, melodic, and far from mechanical or ordinary. “Vending Machine Sound” in particular gives our ears a visceral variety — layers of mesmerizing, shimmering tones fade into a chorus of voices and footsteps. And then those noises succumb to warm bendy chords alternating in the stereo field, like an interim track on that lost mid-90s My Bloody Valentine album. As with his previous Blue Sun Daydream, Elijah Knutsen’s self-described “micro-release” is a gorgeous-sounding diversion, transporting and soothing the listener within its sonic world. [LINK]

• Monta At Odds – A Great Conjunction → Kansas City’s Monta At Odds are a spacey band, both in sound and obsessions. Science fiction literature had a heavy influence on their Argentum Dreams album (released in 2018 on my 8D Industries label). And the band’s recent single “When Stars Grow Old” is inspired by a vision of a future culture remembering its past on a distant world. So it’s no surprise that December 21st’s ‘great conjunction’ of Saturn and Jupiter would inspire the band to summon a new set of cosmic tunes. These five songs are Monta At Odds at their Oddsiest — a crafty mix of soaring space-rock, frantic jazz drumming, fluttering sine waves, and post-rock echoes. “The Gods Are Conspiring” is the highlight, a rousing instrumental sound-piece that imagines an agitated Popol Vuh blissfully rocking out. Along with the other tunes on this EP, it’s a fitting soundtrack for watching heavenly bodies appear to collide in space. [LINK]

• Shea Betts – Sea / Sky → This album is the first release from NYC-via-Canada librarian and music-maker Shea Betts. As evidenced by the title Sea / Sky, the album is an ode to both, with the first half inspired by the ocean’s movement while the second reflects the windiness of the atmosphere. Shea tells me that he had “a desire to make a more ‘abrasive’ ambient sound – something more distorted and overdriven than the subdued ambient that I often listen to.” That abrasiveness is anything but, closer to an accommodating tinge of distortion on keyboards that sustains like church organs. This organ-like quality gives Sea / Sky a religious air, an almost worshipful respect for the natural world inhabited by the album’s two subjects. With measured difference, the ‘Sea’ half conveys roughness while the ‘Sky’ portion is lighter and flowing. And the songs in the middle are a combination. “Where the ocean meets the sky,” says Shea. Despite its simplicity, Sea / Sky is expressive and visual — listening in full, with the concept in mind, is movie-like. I imagine a vertical slow-motion camera pan from the water to the clouds. Probably in black and white and dramatically contrasted. Is Béla Tarr available? [LINK]

• Body Meπa – The Work Is Slow → Body Meπa named themselves after an Ornette Coleman album (though Coleman’s lacks the crafty pi sign). They create an occasionally-at-odds-with-itself rumble that isn’t too far off (at least conceptually) from what Coleman was transmitting on that album. Music critic Sasha Frere-Jones, Grey McMurray, Melvin Gibbs, and Greg Fox handle a standard guitar-guitar-bass-drums line-up but, in righteous post-punk fashion, Body Meπa sonically exiles standards. The Work Is Slow is Body Meπa’s new album, comprised of mesmerizing riffage, cometary improvisations, and a sharp rhythm section guiding the reins. There’s no nonsense to the production (in the stereo field, Sasha is credited with “right guitar” while Grey wields the one leaning to the left), but the variety of squeals, squalls, and cyclical melodic phrasings bends the album away from simplicity. And you kinda want to see just what is happening to these guitars. A good intro track is “Money Tree” with its opening eterna-looped guitar and double bass action (I think — which would be a call-back to Sasha’s dual-bassed former band Ui), calmly landing in Tortoise territory. Body Meπa’s album has earned many listens in my lockdown space, a noble achievement in a time when new music temptations are relentlessly hitting me sideways. As for the title The Work Is Slow, Sasha had this to say in an installment of his essential email newsletter: “I use ‘the work’ as a way of describing a daily practice of spiritual health and emotional sobriety, but you may have another discipline that fits the bill.” A limited number of bumper stickers with the phrase are available. [LINK]

• These four albums and several more are included in my latest Buy Music Club list of Bandcamp recommendations. Dig in! [LINK]

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Thanks again for reading Ringo Dreams of Lawn Care! When will you hear from me again? Well, I’m going to follow an unplanned three-week break with a planned three-week break. Which means you’ll find Ringo in your inbox no later than January 10. That’s a new year (finally!), and that’s the 33rd episode of something that started as a wobbly “should I really do this?” experiment. I can’t believe I’ve made it this far. 

During my Ringo break, I’ll frequently post on the blog, so please find me there. And I’m going to play around with some ideas for this newsletter. I’m considering a few different format changes, the addition of a new section or two, and a couple of other small enhancements. Who knows what 2021 will bring to the Ringo-sphere. I certainly don’t. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I sincerely wish you a happy and wonderful holiday season. I know this is a challenging one so take care of yourself and your loved ones. 2021 is right around the corner, and it’s going to be filled with hope, friendship, and great music. Stay safe, hang in there, and I’ll see you in the new year! 🚀

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btw — I'm Michael Donaldson and you can read more about who I am and what I do here.

• If you dig this newsletter click the heart at the bottom. ♥️
• If you have a groovy pal who might like this, click the share icon. 📩
• And please leave a comment if you'd like to chat about this. 💭  

Well, hello there! It's me, Michael Donaldson, and this is my (sometimes) weekly newsletter about music-listening, music-making, and the wild and woolly culture around those things. Thanks for being a part of our loudly humming choir of Ringos. Mmmm-mmm-mmmm.

If you're reading from the USA, then I hope your holiday week was lovely. Despite the challenging hell-year known as 2020, there's a lot to be thankful for. For one thing, I'm thankful for all the good music that demands my ears daily. There's so much of it. And I'm thankful for the opportunity to write this newsletter and especially thankful that you're setting aside the time to read it.

I want to get into this week's essay straight away, but, as you know, every episode of Ringo Dreams of Lawn Care has a theme song. This week it's a 'from the vault' favorite called "Triangular Lake." Like this newsletter, the tune has a bounce in its step. Short and sweet! Have a listen to "Triangular Lake," and then let's dig deep into the frustrating and fascinating world of music genres.

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Like end-of-the-year best-of lists, new genre names are something that music fans love to hate. There's a mixture of disdain for perceived pigeonholing and a failure to keep up with the latest trends — nothing makes a music lover feel older than a new, incomprehensible genre. Then there's the sub-genre and the micro-genre. Seriously, it never ends. It's genres all the way down.

Instead of feeling intimidated, I say embrace the genre and all its fancifully named layers. Genre is an identifier, important in pointing the way and gluing together scenes. There was a time that you could walk into an indie record store, look at the clientele, and guess what genres they listened to by how they looked. It's harder now that genres are less-defined and blur together — which I'll argue is a good thing. But it's also why genres are reaching beyond sonic vibes and sounds, increasingly representative of technological innovation, communities, and desired lifestyles. 

If you're a musician, there's nothing worse than the question, "What do you sound like?" We shuffle our postures and avoid answering, or vaguely go for something broad like "rock music." If you look up old artist interviews with me, you'll see I often responded with "funk," which was unfortunate. Why can't we just own our genre — or create our own? Consider the genre as an elevator pitch. It's a chance to claim a plot of land and plant a flag. 

Here's how Seth Godin thinks about genre, as explained in his recent appearance on The Moment with Brian Koppelman:

"People who are creatives bristle at the idea of genre because they think it has something to do with generic. It has nothing to do with generic. It's the opposite of generic. Genre means that you understand your part in the chain — [and] in the process, in the market — well enough to make something magical that still rhymes with what came before. You've done the reading. You respect the audience enough that you can't just show up and say, 'This is like nothing you've ever seen or heard before.' It actually is where it belongs."

It's fun to look at the birth of genres. The sounds predate the descriptive monikers, often by many years. Traditionally, genres are christened through these sources:

• An artist or band name. Bill Monroe's Blue Grass Boys is where we get bluegrass.

• Song or album titles. Ornette Coleman's 1960 album Free Jazz and The Maytals' 1968 single "Do the Reggay" popularized those terms.

• Compilation album titles. A 'scene' is pre-built into the curated collection of artists, such as the now-legendary producers assembled on 1988's Techno! The New Dance Sound of Detroit.

• Lyrics. "I said a hip-hop, the hippie, the hippie to the hip, hip-hop and you don't stop …"

• Record labels. In the late '80s, you would've called Skinny Puppy something else if Throbbing Gristle didn't start Industrial Records.

• Music Journalists. Simon Reynolds is the ninja of the genre name and is still at it. But even before, there was 'heavy metal,' applied to music for the first time in 1970 by Mike Saunders, future vocalist of punk band Angry Samoans. Writing for Rolling Stone, he referred to Humble Pie as "27th-rate heavy metal crap." Ironically, Sauders did not come up with 'punk rock,' which was coined the same year in Creem Magazine.

• Music Executives. Seymour Stein of Sire Records came up with 'new wave' to market all these bands he was signing fresh off the stage of CBGBs.

• The technology. Dub comes from 'dubplate,' which is technically a music-delivery format. But dub is hardly ever heard on a dubplate these days.

• Territory. We can call music from Guatemala Guatamalen music even though the locals undoubtedly have a more specific name. And the 'western' in country & western refers to the western US where many rural workers migrated and settled, especially during the Dust Bowl.

• Radio. Famously, Alan Freed named his radio show The Moondog Rock'n'Roll House Party. Like in many of the examples above, Freed didn't use the phrase first, but he popularized it.

There's one more traditional method of genre creation, which I hinted at in the beginning. The artist comes up with it herself. There's a lot of power in naming your genre as, if you're successful and others catch on, you become the forebear. Fela Kuti did this with Afrobeat. And Brian Eno did this with ambient music:

"All the signs were in the air all around with ambient music in the mid-1970s, and other people were doing a similar thing. I just gave it a name. Which is exactly what it needed. A name. Giving something a name can be just the same as inventing it. By naming something you create a difference. You say that this is now real."

Quick side story: in the late-90s, a friend and I often DJ'ed trip-hop records and hip-hop instrumentals with the turntables pitched up near +8. Speed garage was the genre du jour at the time, so we jokingly named our genre 'speed downtempo.' It didn't take off.

But, yes — sometimes a joke or off-handed comment will spawn a genre name. NYC's DJ Olive came up with 'illbient' as a sarcastic response when a journalist asked if he played ambient. And Gilles Peterson famously once joked that his side room at an acid house party was the 'acid jazz' area, birthing a repackaged jazz revival. 

Genre is intrinsically tied to the music it denotes but spreads out to other qualities of the genre's followers. Goth is as identifiable for its fashion as its sound, and close-knit genres like nerdcore are increasingly identified by membership in their communities. 

What's interesting — with technological developments inseparable from how we interact with music — is the emergence of genres outside of a musical style. That is, the communities or the platforms define the genre, and the music comes later. 

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I want to look at a few recent arrivals in the pantheon of genres to see how defining our music ends up describing so much more. Be warned — many of these sub-genres contain references to other sub-genres. You might get genre whiplash.

Hyperpop

On the excellent Jaymo Technologies blog, Jay Springett writes about the daunting proliferation of genres and how streaming platforms affect genre creation: 

The world is now dominated by microgenres and subcultures, shaping perception of reality via niche hashtags and network effects. For better or worse someone at Spotify finds or makes up a genre name and then populates a playlist with content. The idea that people would be mad about an online genre having a name and coming from nowhere now seems quaint.

Jay is possibly hinting at hyperpop, a genre name popularized by Spotify via the in-house playlist of the same name. The actual sound of hyperpop is debatable and evasive, with many of its elements drawn from vaporwave, an older genre (by a few years) but somewhat more explainable. There's a Gen Z do-it-yourself aesthetic, and many of hyperpop's ephemeral stars are in their early teens. Lizzy Szabo, who helps curate the playlist, understands that hyperpop is "an artist and listening community" as much as it's a musical genre. One thing to notice about that quote: the listeners are included in the definition, powering hyperpop alongside the creators. To participate, throw aside any reservations about a movement dreamed up by a big corporation. 

Glitchcore

Glitchcore shares many of the artists found on the Hyperpop playlist. Its defining sonic trait is the 'glitch' — quick edits, stuttering vocals and syllables, things that would have once made us check our compact discs for scratches. Some even take hyperpop songs and add these 'defects' for glitchcore remixes. But glitchcore's difference is in its inspiration and intention. TikTok videos, with visual glitches matching the audio ones, along with bright colors and flashes, are the reason and original platform for most glitchcore tracks. Like how a TV signal popping in-and-out changes the quality of a show's dialogue, it's a visual aesthetic influencing the sound. Glitchcore is a genre given shape by a video editing technique mixed with a nostalgia for digital's early days of jarring imperfection.  

Lo-Fi Hip-Hop

Like hyperpop, lo-fi hip-hop (or lo-fi beats, chill-hop, or, sometimes, 'music for studying') gets its name from a curated spot on a streaming platform. In lo-fi hip-hop's case, these are streaming channels on YouTube playing an endless selection of music usually accompanied by a looping anime scene. A Gen Z variant of ambient music, lo-fi hip-hop is meant to accompany studying, video-gaming, or zoning out. This is another genre that's expanded its popularity in COVID-times, with the studying girl of the 'lofi hip hop radio - beats to relax/study to' channel serving as a lockdown work-from-home companion. The music itself draws directly from boom-bap hip-hop and — for those in the know — the mellow side of '90s trip-hop, but is more basic, often constructed from interchangeable sample libraries and beat kits. Lo-fi hip-hop is a diluted version of its predecessors, which is why it's so effective as in-the-background focus music.

Bedroom Pop

Bedroom pop started as 'what it says on the tin:' pop music made in the bedroom. Its unexpected ancestor is the lo-fi indie movement of the '90s, with bands like Sebadoh and Guided By Voices recording albums on four-track cassette recorders. Nothing kept those bands from visiting a studio, but the constraints inherited through four-track recording were integral to their sounds (and brands). 

The bedroom pop aesthetic predates the pandemic but has unsurprisingly grown during months of lockdown. The songs are generally sparser and have an air of intimacy not found in your usual pop. Vocals are often delivered at an ASMR volume instead of belted out. 

Billie Eilish is the patron saint of bedroom pop. She does record most of her music in a bedroom with her brother, though these raw tracks are then mixed in multi-million dollar studios. As you might have guessed, unlike the four-track to the lo-fi bands, the 'bedroom' part is no longer essential to this genre. As the bedroom pop artist Girl in Red says, "Pop bangers are being made in bedrooms and bedroom pop-ish songs in studios. It's more about how it sounds than where it's made."

Slowed & Reverb

Slowed & reverb is one of the oddest new genres, its name a play on the seemingly ancient (a decade+ old) hip-hop sub-genre chopped & screwed. Slowed & reverb appropriates other songs, but instead of 'glitching' or 'remixing' them, the music is slowed down ('screwed') and then doused in reverb. Recent hip-hop tracks mostly receive the slowed & reverb treatment but, as an offshoot of vaporwave, cheesy '80s AOR songs are frequent targets, too. This genre is all about the feelings evoked — listening is like being lost in a fog that's hazy, nostalgic, dream-like, and druggy. It also tends to turn upbeat songs into melancholic sobfests. 

Because slowed & reverb uses pre-existing songs, you can only find its 'hits' on YouTube, SoundCloud, and (sometimes) Bandcamp. The other platforms have copyright barriers, though some producers have gotten away with compiling slowed & reverb mixes and servicing them to Spotify as podcasts. In a recent development, a few artists are now commissioning official slowed & reverb remixes of their singles, so perhaps there's growth potential after all.

Are you interested in creating your own slowed & reverb track? There's an app for that.

Ambient Television

This is the newest genre on the list, coined by Kyle Chayka in The New Yorker earlier this month. I'm fudging a little as ambient television is not a music genre but a television aesthetic that draws influence from the same well as lo-fi hip-hop. This example shows how, as with glitchcore, different mediums are interacting to create new genres. 

Ambient television follows Eno's maxim of "as ignorable as it is interesting," or as Chayka explains, "something you don't have to pay attention to in order to enjoy but which is still seductive enough to be compelling if you choose to do so momentarily." These are the new breed of Netflix design shows or, as Chayka pinpoints, Emily In Paris — TV shows you can look away from to read that iPhone notification without feeling like you're missing anything. 

There are more intriguing ramifications here when thinking about how streaming influences the ways we absorb digital media. Here's Chayka again: 

Whereas the Internet once promised to provide on-demand access to limitless information and media to anyone willing to make use of a Google search, lately it has encouraged a more passive kind of engagement, a state of slack-jawed consumption only intensified by this past year's quarantine ennui. Streaming companies once pitched themselves as innovators for offering the possibility to watch anything at any time, but do we really want to choose? The prevalence of ambient media suggests that we don't.

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Genre-chasing can seem ridiculous. But, as you see, the names we use to bond music together says everything about how we listen. New genres are a commentary on the present culture. And old ones are an archeological dig. As Seth Godin said at the top of this essay, genres help us understand our "part in the chain." That goes for the fans as well as the musicians. Genres decode the links formed through technology, platforms, fashion, and community. Embrace the genre.

Here's a music genre list to scroll through. And here's an interactive genre chart provided by Every Noise at Once. The latter offers audio samples but keep in mind the music is only part of the story. Chances are both lists are seriously behind on all of the new genres, even if they were up-to-date a week or two ago.

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I didn't mention world music as it's such an odd genre phrase. The music industry dreamed it up in the '80s to create a section in record stores for non-Anglophone music releases. It's a catch-all term, which is treacherous, but, admittedly, it's difficult for stores to have specific sections for Guatemala and all the others — they probably wouldn't even bother, which is the point of a single 'world music' section. One great thing about Bandcamp and — to a degree — streaming is that music is easily identifiable and categorized. Country-specific playlists and tags reveal some of my favorite sounds grouped territorially for context. 

The Grammys adopted world music for an award category, a well-intentioned motion to spotlight music outside of the English-speaker's gaze. But how can one judge Nigerian Juju against Bengali folk music and Colombian cambia under a single category? It's diminutive but arguably less so than ignoring this music entirely. 

Addressing this notion and problems with the 'world music' term, The Grammys have changed the Best World Music Album category to Best Global Music Album. You aren't the only one confused as this is indeed another catch-all term. In a perfect world, music climbs its respective genre trees to get grouped — for awards purposes — under core styles. Pop, rock, jazz, and so on. But only The Weeknd cares about The Grammys anymore, so I'm not devoting too much energy to solving this problem.

The topic of 'global music' does give me an excuse to highlight the Italian label Unexplained Sounds Group. Led by Raffaele Pezzella (AKA The Sonologist), the label issues a series of compilations exposing experimental music from different regions and countries. Persian countries, Mexico, the Balkan region, and Lebanon are only a few under Pezzella's lens. 

These compilations break any limiting ideas you might have about music originating from these countries (or so-called ‘world music’ in general). For example, the Middle Eastern influences are present but subtle in the label's Anthology of Contemporary Music from Middle East — but, mostly, these artists are making electronic and experimental music in forward motion, merely rhyming (as Godin says) with the sounds we might expect. Listen to some selections from Unexplained Sounds Group's extensive discography on Bandcamp. These artists are bold innovators, so the music is sometimes difficult but also consistently fascinating and illuminating. 

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EDGING →

• In this week's essay, I mentioned the hip-hop sub-genre chopped & screwed. That reminds me of this article about Screwed Up Records and Tapes, a record store in Houston devoted to maintaining the legacy of DJ Screw. Read this even if you think you would have no interest in DJ Screw and this music style — it's a fantastic piece of writing, and the story of this genre is fascinating. [LINK]

• Here’s a list of music I enjoyed on Bandcamp in the past couple of weeks via Buy Music Club. I may write more about one or two of these in the future — includes a great recent album from William Tyler, a new one from Emily A. Sprague, and the Touch and Go label is now on Bandcamp which means Slint is, too. [LINK]

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Thank you for making it all the way to the end of this episode of Ringo Dreams of Lawn Care. I hope you enjoyed my ramble and, as always, if you have any comments then don’t hesitate to reach out.

Hang in there, watch good movies, stay safe and masked, and I’ll see you next week! 🚀

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btw — I'm Michael Donaldson and you can read more about who I am and what I do here.

• If you dig this newsletter click the heart at the bottom. ♥️
• If you have a groovy pal who might like this, click the share icon. 📩
• And please leave a comment if you'd like to chat about this. 💭  

Greetings, Ringonauts. It's me, Michael Donaldson, and this is my (sometimes) weekly newsletter about music-listening, music-making, and the often inscrutable culture around those things. Thanks for being a part of our roving band of Ringos. As the wise man said: no matter where you go, there you are.

I'm enjoying some subtle temperature drops here in the tropics (that's where I am, right?). I took a break from the newsletter this morning to boat around the lake with a few members of my social pod. That's about as good as it gets right now, and I'm continuing my day with a slight jump in my step. It's been a lazy but reassuring week, cutting through the brain fog by rewatching Sopranos episodes (which I'm starting to realize is kind of a lockdown 'thing') and reading inspiring articles about vintage snowball fights. 

I don't have to tell you — every episode of this newsletter has a theme song. Like all of its core elements, I determined the title at random, and it's called "Experimental Forestry." The less I say about it, the better (intentional mystery!), but I will point out that the drums are crazy. Have a listen to "Experimental Forestry," and then let's dive into this week's ramble.

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What's this? It's Brian Eno in 1973's flamboyant "I wear make-up because I look better" glory. A 24-minute documentary called Eno popped up online this week, filmed during the recording of Here Come The Warm Jets. The opening scene sums up Brian's modus operandi — he's playing the piano well enough that for a second, you think, "he can actually play the piano." But then you realize he's not that good at all. It's his enthusiasm and concentration that's making it work. And, unless it's buried in the mix, that piano part never makes it into "The Paw-Paw Negro Blowtorch" anyway (kind of like the sitar solo we hear seconds later — huh, what?). Says Eno, "I have attempted to replace the element of skill considered necessary in music with the element of judgment." What a find, what a gem.

After I was alerted to the doc (thanks to Jon from A Poke In The Ear), I started thinking about how crazy it is that we have access to videos like this. We're rolling in historical documents of the bands and artists that fascinate us, demystifying their images and processes. I mean, I remember having no idea who Joy Division really were or what they looked like. In the early '80s, it wasn't easy to get ahold of the evidence, and the band and its album covers didn't help. And then I ended up at a friend's house, and he's got a videotape — 5th or 6th generation copy — and Joy Division is playing live on a TV show. My guess is it was the Granada Reports video. Secrets revealed — there's the band, one step closer.

The hidden networks that delivered these tapes are a story in themselves. Did my friend get the video from the classifieds of a music magazine? Goldmine, maybe? Perhaps it was a hastily dubbed bootleg found in an underground record shop. A lot of stores back then had a few of those behind the counter (mine included). My friend was part of a network of tape traders, so he dubbed these tapes himself and received a steady flow of covertly filmed concerts and static-tainted television appearances. Without the 'secret handshake,' these things were hard to come by.

Now, of course, all of this is available from a YouTube search. Discoveries are added all of the time, like the Eno video, and this recently unearthed Joy Division footage. That's fantastic — alongside fans, music historians can't believe their fortune. But are we trading away the mystery? There was a magic to knowing nothing about Joy Division. We knew they were British, and the singer was no longer with us, whispered among music fans like a gossipy game of telephone. But that was about it. I remember staring at the cover of Closer and imagining the people responsible for this odd noise. In a way, it was inspiring — I was drawn in and creating my own context for the music. 

Sure, we read fanzines and underground publications to help piece together the puzzles. I fervently read all those things. But my favorite band in my teenage years, hands down, were the Minutemen. I lived and breathed that band. But I didn't find out that D. Boon, the lead singer, and guitarist, died in a tragic car accident until a couple of months after it happened. That's hard to believe, right? Now I'd see news like this on Twitter the moment it happens.

Mystery is still possible, but only if it's intentional. It's no longer the automatic by-product of existing outside the mainstream. I'm not saying mystery is better, nor would I rather not have quick access to views of Brian Eno applying make-up or Joy Division goofing around. It's good that there's no longer a 'secret handshake' for seeing these things or that where we live ropes us off from experiencing the music we love. But we should still consider mystery and whether, as artists and music-makers, we give away too much. Often the most powerful fandom comes out of inviting listeners to fill in the blanks.

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Continuing our journey on the nostalgia train, remember how we used to listen to albums? From start to finish? Thanks to streaming, it's all playlists and singles now, right? 

All signs pointed in that direction as streaming started taking hold of the listening space. But now, according to a study from Alpha Data (formerly BuzzAngle), album listening habits have increased steadily since 2015. There are interesting points to draw from the data — newer releases are more often listened to as full 'albums,' while we pick our favorite songs from older titles. But, unsurprisingly, new releases propelled by a ubiquitous single don't score high on the album-listening test. Also, country albums generally aren't listened to in full that much and score the lowest, while albums for theatrical musicals score the highest. Rock and electronic releases are somewhere in the middle. As you can guess, it depends on the artist and the album. I expect Radiohead to score high. 

I've never believed the 'album is dead because of streaming' narrative. Some bands are good at making albums, and others are good at releasing singles (and a handful seemingly excel at both).

This was always the case. Pre-internet, bands that made great singles were required to record an album. Those would end up as the 'it's only got one or two good songs' albums. Meanwhile, other bands made terrific albums that you listened to from beginning to end, but there weren't necessarily any stand-out singles. 

It always frustrates me when an act that releases outstanding albums feels they should switch to singles because 'that's what you have to do these days.' I don't know how much weight Alpha Data's study holds, but I welcome any encouragement for certain bands to record with 'the album' in mind. As I wrote on the blog, the album isn't dead, nor is the monthly single the way of the future. Look closely at who you are as an artist and the type of fans you aim to attract. The nature of your next release resides in that reflection.

Related to this: It seems that books are holding their own versus other 'traditional' forms of media (like radio and broadcast TV), which are withering. Books remain popular, even among Gen Z'ers. I assume this study includes Kindle/eBook editions and audiobooks. But, like the strengthening album, it's a triumph of long-form content. Also, considering the popularity of hour+ podcasts, it's hard to believe the future of media rests solely in the hands of those with short attention spans. Someone should've told Quibi.

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There is a long history of musicians tailoring their compositions to fit the delivery format. When 7" records were the craze, the two-and-a-half-minute song ruled. Once the long-playing record dominated (aided by shifts in radio programming in the '60s and early '70s), it became de rigueur to package songs as an album statement. The 45 RPM 12" created the extended dance mix. The compact disc inspired seamless albums and Eno's 61-minute song "Thursday Afternoon." It's not only formats that shape music — one imagines operas were (and still are) written with the opera house in mind.

Now many are tailoring music to fit specific streaming platforms and playlists. There is a 'Spotify sound' — big choruses up front! — and music created with TikTok virality at the top of the mind. There's nothing wrong with this until it becomes a compromise — the artist erasing what's distinct about her to satisfy market pressure or being convinced to by a cynical manager or label. 

Liz Pelly writes compelling and often scathing broadsides for The Baffler, and Spotify is usually her target. Pelly's latest must-read, titled "Podcast Overlords," focuses on the potential fall-out of Spotify's love affair with the podcasting world. A lot of it has to do with podcasters compromising their shows — and their business models — to appease Spotify.

Pelly sees musicians as the "canaries in the coalmine," foretelling that only the biggest podcasting names will find success on the platform. The others will face diminished identities and fanbases in favor of Spotify's platform branding and emphasis on 'star' playlists. And, unlike the music content, most exclusive podcast IP becomes the property of Spotify. 

As I mentioned, many Spotify-focused musicians bend their music to accommodate the platform. Pelly sees podcasts similarly affected, pointing out an increased frequency of shortened podcasts. An example is Parcast's three-minute Daily Quote, intended to fit automated personalized playlists like The Daily Drive and Daily Wellness. There's also a real danger of producers optimizing their podcasts — a positive reframing of appeasing algorithms that encourage milquetoast and unchallenging content. 

Writes Pelly:

… as much as Daniel Ek wants to continue doing interviews pushing the same talking points about the democratizing force that streaming has been, it ultimately just reproduces and exacerbates the exploitative status quo, where those without the numbers are treated as disposable. The fact that podcasting staff are unionizing is of particular importance in this regard. Solidarity amongst podcasters and musicians could be useful in imagining new systems and practices that work for everyone. 

As I've said re: music on Spotify, it's not a game anyone has to play. Think of this as an opportunity to create (and strengthen) communities for podcasts existing outside of Spotify's ecosystem. My often repeated analogy of '80s commercial radio vs. college radio applies — there were many listeners satisfied with hearing the top 40. But there were also plenty of people enthusiastic about the fringe offered on college stations. What's important is to embrace your lane. Let Spotify be Spotify (i.e., commercial radio) and instead reach out to the communities of listeners that reject 'optimized' content.

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Canadian producer Damien Smith is Affect Display, and he's released a unique seven-track album titled Animal Drift Animal through the Pirates Blend label. The tracks recall Detroit techno's early explorations, as releases became less about the dance-floor and more about the head-trip. Smith's drum programming sets Animal Drift Animal into this heady mode, with frenetic rhythms that betray influences traveling across a landscape of genres. There are scenes of pastoral ambiance, but also indie-quoting guitar lines in "FlightorFury" and a couple of others, a mellow gothiness in "Transference," and disorienting experimentalism leading to grandiose prog-ness in "Dauen." And it works. Affect Display has delivered something unusual and grabbing. He's shaking things up, and what more can one ask for in these lockdown days of endless sameness? Check out the video for "Until the Light Hits the Door" for an eerily nostalgic taste of Affect Display's electronica:

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I'm in love with "Caminito de mi Pueblo," a collaboration between NYC's Chicha Libre and Colombia's La Sonora Mazurén. Translated as "Little Paths of My Town," it's a cover of a tune originally recorded in 1976 by Ecuadorian accordionist, poet, and Moog pioneer Polibio Mayorga. This rousing single is a tribute to indigenous leader Cristina Bautista, heard speaking on the track, and was released on October 29, 2020, the first anniversary of her assassination. "Caminito de mi Pueblo" has an uplifting, rebellious feel that we can all appreciate — proof that resistance doesn't have to feel angry. It also features some cool synth riffs amidst the layers of traditional instrumentation and bouncing percussion. Read more about this single here.

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EDGING → 

• More Spotify dirt! I wrote about the platform's pay-for-play Discover Mode on the blog. It's like renting space on one of those old CD bin endcaps, but not one found in your favorite record shop. [LINK]

• It's pretty interesting to look back at how graphic designers — and music fans — tackled the artwork on a cassette tape spine. Columbia/Epic's stock design was always baffling — those ugly red block letters. I guess they did a good job of yelling at you from the record store cassette wall (across the aisle from the aforementioned CD bin). [LINK]

• Unify Cosmos promises "the most relaxing sounds in the world." The interface is simple and imaginative, dropping you into a variety of exotic (and not so exotic) destinations. [LINK]

ª Here's a list of what I've been listening to on Bandcamp as seen on Buy Music Club. [LINK]

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Yes! Thanks for reading this week's Ringo. I plan to resume my weekly schedule, so maybe … next Sunday? Fingers crossed. As always, if you have any comments, something on your mind, or a recommendation I need to check out, please get in touch. And it goes without saying that things are getting scary in COVID-land again. Don't feel bad about spending your nights going through all five seasons of The Sopranos or whatever — just stay safe, wave to your friends from a distance, and wear a snazzy mask when you have to go out. Hopefully, we're nearing a light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel glimpse. Take care and see you next week! 🚀

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btw — I'm Michael Donaldson and you can read more about who I am and what I do here.

• If you dig this newsletter click the heart at the bottom. ♥️
• If you have a groovy pal who might like this, click the share icon. 📩
• And please leave a comment if you'd like to chat about this. 💭  

I'll be back next week and, if all goes well, it will be the resumption of the weekly schedule of this newsletter. Maybe some other changes, too. Things are brewing. 

In the meantime, here's a video that I'll turn to any time I'm feeling down and defeated. It's my new happy pill:

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Not so fast. Since I can't leave you empty-handed, here are a few quickies.

• The best band I ever saw live (and I didn't even get to see them in their early '80s prime) has a wonderful box set out. It's Pylon, and it's called Box. Sasha Frere-Jones wrote some great words about it on 4Columns, including this thinly disguised call-to-arms: "These recordings demonstrate how powerful the idea of punk was as liberation, not in the sense of political emancipation but as a license to start from scratch." Anyway, you could do worse than put on Pylon today or any day. "These kids listen to dub for breakfast." You can listen to (and buy) Box on Bandcamp or those streaming spots. [LINK]

• Something I wrote amid this week's shifting emotions and tension levels: "Creating sends a signal that we believe in the future. And our creations point to the world we want to live in." That's from this blog post. And here's another blog post you might like. [LINK] + [LINK]

• Will Sumsuch let loose a bunch of lovely words about Ringo Dreams of Lawn Care in the new issue of 5 Mag. He calls this newsletter "a neatly packaged antidote to our horrendously homogeneous musical landscape" and "like an artistic self-help guide." Can you see me blushing through the email? I hope to live up to those accolades as I exit this break and rev back up to my weekly broadsides. Thanks, Will! The latest issue of 5 Mag is only available to subscribers right now, but you can download it for $2.99. You should! It's rad, and, as usual for the publication, it features a lot of informative underground dance music content to grok. [LINK]

• True story:

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Thank you. I'll see you next week. And I hope you have an opportunity to take a break, too. You deserve it. Stay safe, masked, and cautiously hopeful. 🚀

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btw — I'm Michael Donaldson and you can read more about who I am and what I do here.

• If you dig this newsletter click the heart at the bottom. ♥️
• If you have a groovy pal who might like this, click the share icon. 📩
• And please leave a comment if you'd like to chat about this. 💭  

Morning, sunshine. It's me, Michael Donaldson, and this is my (sometimes) weekly newsletter about music-listening, music-making, and the occasionally woozy culture around those things. Thanks for being a part of our clutch of Ringos. I’d love to think of something else clever to add here but I’m distracted by my gurgling tummy.

This weekend I somehow acquired a nasty stomach bug — maybe something I ate? — and I'm laid up. The brain is fuzzy; parts of me are even fuzzier. I don't feel like doing much more than remaining horizontal and making progress on The Three-Body Problem (which is how I spent yesterday). But I'm determined to get you a newsletter today.

There are strings attached: though I have some things I want to write about, I won't write about them today. Instead, I'm including a couple of blog posts from the past week. I'm also reaching way back for a favorite post about the attachment of memory and music. If you’re a regular reader of 8sided.blog then, first, thank you — but, also, you may have read the bulk of this newsletter before, so a quick apology for that.

And it's true — every episode of this newsletter comes with a theme song. This time I present "Performance Anxiety," which, with its queasy strings, doesn't sound too far off from how I feel. Enjoy the tune and read on — I'll start with a 'greatest hits' piece from January 2019 about the role nostalgia plays in the best music ever.

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My friend, writer Jamie Blaine, is interested in nostalgia — the things we remember and how we selectively remember them. We’ve had many discussions about memory and our memories. Jamie and I grew up in central Louisiana and have been good friends since our teenage years, so there are a lot of recollections we share. He’s much better at remembering the details than I am.

I wouldn’t say I’m distrustful of nostalgia, but I do try to be aware of how it shapes our attitudes and feelings in the present. I’ve had arguments with the ‘music was so much better then’ crowd — what you listened to when you were young and actively discovering music for the first time is always going to sound like the best music ever. I’m certain that present-day teenagers will be saying today’s music was the best thirty years from now.

I liked Andrew Weatherall’s attitude. In an interview with The Guardian, he was asked to name his favorite period of music. Weatherall said, “Last week. I’m not a golden age kind of person.”

But there is something about those special songs, heard for the first time under magical circumstances. They aren’t ‘the best,’ but they’re the best for us. These songs are intertwined with our memories and, when listened to, cause spine chills. Is there another art form that imprints on us in this way? Can a painting be locked with a memory?

Jamie loves this story of my most affecting song moment:

I craved new music as a teenager in Pineville, Louisiana, but it wasn’t easy to find. I ended up learning about new music from far away college radio stations, all static-y and fading in and out. Baton Rouge’s KLSU would come through under certain weather conditions, as would Houston’s KTRU. But the most reliable signal came from Lafayette and the college station KRVS. The format was mostly NPR and regional music (Cajun) programming, but from midnight to 6 AM the students took over and played ‘alternative music’ (what we used to call it in the mid-80s).

I couldn’t exactly stay up all night listening to the radio. My solution was to buy a pack of 120-minute cassette tapes (60 minutes per side, the longest you could get) and record the station nightly. I’d put a boombox next to my pillow and start recording at midnight and fall asleep. Once the tape ran out the ‘record’ key on the boombox would make a loud click. This sound woke me up for a second so I could groggily change the tape.

The next day at high school I would listen to the radio show from earlier — on my commute, in between classes, on lunch break, whenever I could. That’s how I kept up on all the cool music that was coming out.

That’s the set-up. The actual story is this:

One night I’m sleeping while the radio is recording and I’m suddenly semi-awake. I’m in that halfway state between asleep and cognizant, not fully conscious. And I hear this music playing, the weirdest, strangest music (or so it seemed at the time). I’m in bed, partly dreaming, and this magical sound is all around me, and I can’t quite believe it. I feel euphoric. Then I fall back asleep.

The next day I’m up and trying to remember. I’m not sure what happened. Was that music real? Was it all a dream?

So I’m at school trying to steal any chance I can get to listen to my tapes of the radio, to see if this strange song exists and if I’d even recognize it. And then — and I remember being in the middle of the hall on the way to class — the tune suddenly comes on. It’s this:

I’m frozen and get chills. It’s not so much that the song is so amazing (though it kinda is), it’s that weird connection with how I heard it for the first time — and how I heard Cocteau Twins for the first time — that moved me. I still get emotional when I hear the song, and it brings me back to the time when I was just starting to get excited about discovering music, discovering my music. It transports me to that boombox next to my pillow, and to that high school hallway where I stopped in my tracks with a big grin on my face – “This is that song!” It brings me back to the best music ever.

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Shortly after this piece was posted on the blog, a commenter named John William Simmons — who I don’t know — posted his thoughts. He summed up what I was trying to say better than I did. I doubt he’d mind if I pasted his comment here:

Cultural and even personal identity can be literally assembled, or composed, from a bundle of tunes. Memory is a record collection and you can learn who you are from sleeve notes. For most of us, the story of who we are, what philosophers call our narrative identity, is in a record collection. The unanswerable question is: what is it about song, about words and rhythm that is able to do this? How can music connect together and make sense of the pieces of a life?

Music places us, it locates us, within a time and within a culture. But – and this is the pleasure and the paradox of the experience – it does this by momentarily displacing us, dislocating us, dislocating our experience of who we are. Music roots us by uprooting us.

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Going through an old archive, I rediscovered this terrific article on Burton Silverman, best known (to his chagrin) as the painter of the cover art to Jethro Tull’s Aqualung. Here’s an age-old story — an artist does an inexpensive, flat-fee work-for-hire. And then the product takes off and earns millions for everyone except that artist. From the article:

The tale of how Chrysalis Records had done him wrong was turned into somewhat of a running family gag. Given the haggard figure he created, we mused that he might eventually embody his own artistic creation — a destitute, howling figure draped in rags and huddled in a darkened street corner. Buried within this bit of gallows humor lies a nagging truth: There’s a palpable sense of unease and frustration at seeing something he created become immensely popular — define his career, even — only to see his ownership of the work taken away, thanks in no small part to the persistent myths and outright falsehoods that have been told about the artistic inspiration for the cover.

The ‘persistent myths and outright falsehoods’ refers to how Ian Anderson, leader of Jethro Tull, keeps telling everyone that the figure on the cover is a representation of him. Silverman insists it’s not, and one wonders if he’d care so much if Anderson wasn’t such a knucklehead about this.

Silverman is a successful enough artist — recipient of countless awards and permanent collection inclusions — that his Wikipedia entry barely mentions his association with Jethro Tull. So, it’s not like Silverman owes his success to the band. But it grates on him. Silverman’s handshake agreement with Chrysalis didn’t anticipate all the t-shirts, the merchandise, the dorm room posters, and Anderson claiming ownership because he believes he’s the scary cover dude. (Anderson has also annoyed Silverman by publicly referring to the cover as “messy” and “not very attractive or well executed.”)

There’s no contract, an error on Silverman’s part, so maybe he doesn’t have a right to complain. Legally this is a grey area, detailed by a copyright attorney in the article. 

I recall other work-for-hire arrangements where there was a cut-and-dry contract, the project takes off, and the artist feels cheated. In particular, there’s one producer who did a remix of a known ’80s song. The remix took off, becoming a top-charting hit in the UK. The producer signed a ‘flat-fee’ agreement — no one forced him — but he felt the label should pay him royalties.

The remixer started publicly complaining that he wasn’t paid enough and should be entitled to a cut of the song royalty. “My remix is why this is popular,” he reasoned. He brought this up in every interview and article that featured him, perhaps oblivious that this remix of someone else’s popular song was the only reason for the interview.

In other words, rather than adopting a ‘body of work’ mindset and building on the success of this project, the producer was publicly renegotiating an arrangement that wasn’t negotiable.

A couple of labels commissioned the producer for other high profile remixes over the next several months, but nothing else was a hit. He disappeared from the charts and public interest shortly afterward. I am sure many in the industry passed on working with this producer because of his attitude and public airing of ‘sour grapes.’

Seth Godin writes about situations like this in a 2018 blog post titled Considering the Buyout. He brings up the “I Love NY” logo, which Milton Glaser designed for $2000, and the Nike swoosh, designed by Carolyn Davidson for an astonishing $35. Godin refers to these projects, and the remix and album cover above, as illustration, not art. They might be artistic — especially in Silverman’s case — but, Godin says, “Illustration has a client … taking on all the risk. The artist is free to wander, and free to own the consequences.” He continues: 

As Milton Glaser has shown, being associated with dramatic success as an illustrator opens the door to even more success. It can fuel your art and create opportunities for higher leverage in your illustration work as well. Illustration can pay some bills at the same time it chips away at your obscurity problem.

Derek Sivers talks about how if your answer isn’t an enthusiastic “hell, yes!” then it should be a definite “no.” But, he adds a caveat: when you’re starting out and building leverage, then often a “yes” will do. “Hell, yes!” is for artists with leverage, and it might take a few frustrating work-for-hire ‘yeses’ to finally exercise that privilege. 

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Sasha Frere-Jones interviewed the legendary Autechre in one of his recent SF/J newsletters. It’s a lovely interview, with insight into the new album’s mechanics and how the duo manages to work together from different cities in COVID-times. But a highlight is the prose of Frere-Jones — I love how he writes about the music he loves. Check out his on-point description of Autechre’s album:

SIGN flirts with disintegration but only lightly, throwing its weight into a smooth ravine lined with translucent panels and reflective tape, a river of light running below the wind of turbines.

That’s a sobering reminder that I really need to work on my metaphors. But that won’t stop me from dropping some words of my own about this fascinating album.

Undoubtedly, there’s programming and coding involved in making this music. Numbers and figures set into a machine, then let loose to create tones and noises. How random are these tracks? Is this set-it-and-go music? Like Eno’s generative experiments, the process would border on ‘the joke’s on us’ if the result weren’t so lovely. 

I also like how this album can float in the background but is also open to deep listening. In other words, SIGN is a prime #Worktones candidate but also enjoys attentive ear-analysis. I haven’t immersed myself in Autechre’s back catalog in a while, but I can’t recall other efforts sharing these opposing qualities throughout an entire tracklist. 

SIGN has already received its fair share of accolades — and also criticism of what some see as a compromised sound. As the follow-up to an eight-hour album, SIGN won’t seem anything but a compromise to those critics. But, for me, the tug-of-war between the off-putting and the inviting is a sweet spot. Autechre’s done it, and, judging by how many times I’ve already listened to SIGN, it’s right in the pocket.

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EDGING →

• I have no idea how we got here, but Halloween is less than a week away. This year, getting in the spooky holiday mood may prove difficult, so I’m going to do something surprising. I’m going to post a link to a Spotify playlist. Numero Group’s Fright on the South Side playlist is filled with Halloween-appropriate songs new and old. Yes, it’s a scream, and there’s very little that’s obvious or overplayed. Boo. [LINK]

• While on the subject of Numero Group and Spotify playlists, whoever compiles the specialty playlists for the label is a pro at this game. If playlists are your thing then there’s a lot to recommend in Numero Group’s public playlists. Another one I’ll highlight is Electoral College Dropout, “a soundtrack to the most depressing, stressful, and critical election of our lives.” Which reminds me, US readers: VOTE and VOTE EARLY. [LINK]

• Ralph Kinsella’s album Lessening is now available everywhere, not just on Bandcamp. Please give it a listen if you haven’t had the chance. This week, I interviewed Ralph about the album, his music philosophy, and what it’s like to live near where The Wicker Man was filmed. [LINK]

• Here’s a list of things I recently listened to + enjoyed on Bandcamp. [LINK]

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I have no idea how I got this far today. Thanks as always for reading. If you have any comments or would like to reach out then please drop me a line. ‘Get well’ wishes aren’t necessary as I imagine this stomach thing is on its way out (ooof). In the meantime, you’ll find me on the couch for the rest of the day thankful for my Criterion Channel subscription (the service's ‘70s horror movies ‘film fest’ is bonkers). Take care, hang in there, mask up, and did I already say ‘VOTE?’ Until next time … 🚀

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btw — I'm Michael Donaldson and you can read more about who I am and what I do here.

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• And please leave a comment if you'd like to chat about this. 💭  

Hello, pally pal. It's me, Michael Donaldson, and this is my (sometimes) weekly newsletter about music-listening, music-making, and the confounding culture around those things. Thanks for attending this meeting of the society of Ringos. Let's do the secret handshake, adapted as a covert elbow-bump under present circumstances.

All is well here. The temporary fortnightly schedule of Ringo newsletters is allowing some breathing room. I’m spending time working on the 8sided.blog, getting a rhythm down, and posting frequently. I've also given the site a makeover and think it's looking sharp. Which reminds me: if you know your way around CSS and have a little free time, then I'd like to talk to you. I wanna do a couple of small tweaks, but for the life of me, I can't figure out how to do them. I'm in the 'he's still learning' stage of CSS, so I'm easily stumped. Anyway, reach out if you'd like to help.

I've mostly sourced this episode of Ringo Dreams of Lawn Care from the blog. The first piece is an expanded and very different version of something I posted earlier this week. I like this idea — that the newsletter is an extension of the blog, where I expand on posts once I've had a few more days to think about them.

And, as you know, each episode of this newsletter comes with a theme song. Last time I mentioned a bunch of disappearing song files, sacrifices to the hard drive gods. I thought I'd give you another one of these sketch(y) mixdowns. This one is probably my favorite of the 'lost tracks.' All of the original audio and DAW files have vanished, so this is the only form of it that you or I may hear. Have a listen to "The Tiger in the Logo" and then join me on this week's ramble.

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I enjoyed this mini-doc from Great Big Story (R.I.P.) on 'The Last Cassette Factory '— though I'm wondering if any tape manufacturers have popped up since the video's release four years ago. As noted in the video, there's a resurgence of cassette releases. This growth is partly thanks to Bandcamp and a need to give fans a limited, physical version of a release without breaking the bank for vinyl pressings. 

It's an excellent idea for emerging bands to offer cassettes, especially when personalized with homespun artwork and packaging. Just don't believe that your fans are listening to your cassettes. It's safe to say these days most cassettes are purchased as a 'totem' — something tangible to represent membership in a band's fan-circle. There's also an element of support, like when I had a great time at a concert I got into for free, I'd buy the band's t-shirt. And, as the first commenter on the video's page notes, "The problem is I don't see any quality cassette players being made today." 

As for this video, we've all seen footage of the whirring machinery found in record pressing plants. It might be surprising to see that a cassette factory's inner workings are also fascinating and highly technical. 

I recorded my first 'album' in the '80s, and it was a manually dubbed, photocopied J-card cassette. I was part of a self-released cassette movement, documented in the book Cassette Mythos. I even had my 'albums' reviewed in a few 'zines. 

I still remember a friend of mine, also active in the cassette underground, telling me one day: "I know why all this music is released on cassette. Because it's not good enough for vinyl." Ouch. There might have been a little hard truth in that. I mean, just revealing that I recorded some cassette albums in the '80s has me a bit nervous. There are now labels actively seeking out 'undiscovered' cassette releases and reissuing them. Against previous odds, many are appearing on vinyl. As for mine — well, in retrospect, my cassette 'albums' were quaint but kind of terrible (btw – Ira Glass is right). Not ready for vinyl.

The author of Cassette Mythos would probably agree these tape 'albums' weren't for vinyl. Not because they weren't good enough, but that vinyl was never the intention. The 'cassette underground' was a healthy bubble for artists who weren't just outside the mainstream. They were outside the outside of the mainstream.

Here's how Cassette Mythos' back cover description describes these cassette artists: 

… the citizen of the real music underground, where the cassette tape and the home studio have provoked a mass exodus into basements, bedrooms or garages around the world. These networkers, in conjunction with the Zine Culture and the International Postal System, manically produce, trade, and distribute their own music, in their own style and for their own purposes, free from the censuring, perceptions-clogging nets of cash and commerce, forging what has fondly become known as the Cassette Culture.

There's a lot to glean from the independent music scene of the '80s. The top 40/mainstream held sway as it does now. The college radio/indie press crowd of acts were on the periphery, willing to graduate up a notch if needed. Then, there was a feisty strain of regional acts that shared an insular network of distributors and shops, venues and promoters, magazines and ‘zines, and specialty radio hosts. Michael Azerrad illustrates this with some of the acts he covers in his brilliant Our Band Could Be Your Life. That only includes the ‘80s indie rock scene, though. There were equivalents at this level in hip hop, jazz, religious music, the avant-garde — self-sufficient networks existed for all genres. Sometimes their contacts and outlets overlapped, but often they didn't.

'Cassette Culture' was another level. The only way to learn about releases was through a handful of zines (such as Factsheet Five, which I wrote about previously). The artists didn't tour. You could probably count on your fingers the number of radio stations that played them. And, radically, most 'Cassette Culture' artists encouraged other members of the scene to trade releases. Instead of accepting payment (usually a few dollar bills tucked in an envelope), these artists would send their cassette in exchange for yours. 

Self-sufficient scenes continued to spring up in the '90s — the indie 7" single revival of the early '90s comes to mind, as does — of course — the vast network created around electronic music and raves. 

Genre and lifestyle based scenes continue to appear, but are they self-sufficient? This question gets into the debate over what 'independent' means in 2020. Is a band or label truly independent when massive corporations like Spotify and Facebook are instrumental to its existence?

These scenes don't appear separate when they are all hosted on the same streaming platforms, promote on identical social media networks, and aspire to get coverage in the same major music sites. Of course, this intermingling has its positives — modern music fans listen to an incredibly diverse palette of styles. But I can't help but feel we're missing out on the regionality of music scenes and the strong network of support among fans of a genre. It might also be a piece to the puzzle of why we haven't felt any prominent music movements or shifts in over 20 years. 

As I've stated here before: we can learn a lot about technology's effect on culture by peering at it through the lens of the past. I'm lacking quick answers or suggestions right now. Rest assured, this is something I'm thinking about a lot so expect more commentary on the way. As always, your thoughts are enthusiastically welcomed. 

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In the latest issue of his Roden newsletter, Craig Mod offers advice on dealing with dingdongs. He also provides clues to determine if you, unsuspecting reader, are unknowingly a dingdong. What’s a dingdong? Craig explains: “A dingdong is a subset of asshole, but for the sake of levity, we go with the former. A dingdong believes — genuinely! — that their opinion and their frequent, unsolicited deployment of that opinion is helpful. Often: It’s not.”

Craig rightfully points out that website comment sections are ‘dingdong bonanzas.’ I believe this extends to comments on Twitter, Facebook, and all the rest. His prescription? Block or mute. Or, even better, reply with something like, “That’s interesting — thanks!” and then block or mute. Craig calls that technique “The Dalai Lama Stance.” 

In the essay, Craig makes this case for ignoring dingdongs, no matter how tempting: 

… dingdong engagement has a very low energy-in to positivity-out yield. Almost zero. In the exceedingly small chance that you end up in a fruitful back and forth with a dingdong, it’s likely you’ll look back on that tête-à-tête and wish you had been doing literally anything else with your time.

It’s true! I remember when I was active on DJ and electronic music forums in the early ’00s. I got in so many stupid arguments. And even in exchanges with dingdongs where I felt it was my duty to set things straight, I came out defeated. I remember eventually thinking, “Has anything useful or positive ever come out of arguing in an internet forum?” Once I had my answer, I logged off for good. Now I follow my friend Zed’s advice: I don’t argue on the internet. [LINK]

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David Lynch is relieving his lockdown boredom by posting videos. He gives weather reports (nothing new for him), baffles fans with what he’s working on, and declares a daily magic number. If only I could get a couple of hundred YouTube views from pulling numbers out of a jar.

In addition to documenting these quaint activities, Lynch’s team is also posting a series of short films under the David Lynch Theater series. I don’t think many, if any, of these are new, but most are new to me.

So far, my favorite is the deceptively simple one-shot video, The Spider and the Bee. The mini-movie consists of a close-up shot of an unfortunate bee caught in a web as a spider enacts its fate. There’s no semblance of Hollywood production here, and it’s a solid guess we’re looking at an undusted window sill in Lynch’s house. It’s Lynch, not Attenborough, after all.

The scene lasts for eight minutes, a challenging length for a real-time display of a struggling insect. But I found the video transfixing, my attention aided by the remarkable sound design. Evocative use of sound is a Lynch trademark, dating back to the hisses, hums, and whirrs found in the Eraserhead score. Sound is dramatically and innovatively used to accent images and nestle implications through Lynch’s entire oeuvre, right to the recent Twin Peaks series. If you pay attention to final credits, you’ll notice Lynch is always partly or solely responsible for the sound design on his projects. And The Spider and the Bee is an experiment in sound design.

With only natural sound (or no sound at all), the video’s nothing special, a ‘circle of life’ home movie shot on a lazy day. Add the sound — the bee’s hapless buzzing, the spider’s cartoonish clicking, the swoops as the spider slides — and the story becomes compelling. The viewer is brought into this, too, as the camera thunders as it quickly changes angles. I jumped out of my seat the first time that happened.

Sound is an effective contextualizer, and inventive sound design, even when subtle, can transform a visual storyline into something heightened and unreal. It’s a fun trick played on our brains.

Bonus points: check out the documentary Making Waves: The Art of Cinematic Sound.

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On Friday, my 8D Industries label released something new on Bandcamp. Titled Lessening, it’s the debut album from Scottish guitarist and ambient producer Ralph Kinsella. I’ve written about Ralph before — I discovered him after he reached out to 8sided.blog with his music. A few months ago, he sent the demo for this album, and I haven’t stopped listening. An antidote to lockdown — this is travel in a small room.

The last paragraph of the press release does a great job of describing Ralph’s music:

Kinsella’s guitar is the even thread, sometimes bare and then often processed, awash in texture and synthetic glares. Tracks like “In the In-Between Light” use the guitar to express enormity — of space and emotion — before the song is gently brought close by calming lines and reassuring synth patches. There’s also a soft tension in songs like “Lung Noises,” sharing the masterful slow build of the shoegaze genre’s finest practitioners. Lessening‘s closer, “Born on the Cusp,” offers a resolution — chiming guitars and reverberant tones signaling both loss and promise. This is the sound of an uncertain present feeling its way to that better world.

I hope you’ll check it out. Lessening is available now exclusively on Bandcamp and, like all 8D Industries releases, is set to ‘name your price.’ [LINK]

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This week I also spoke to Orlando DJ provocateur Nigel John, who records high-concept multi-genre music under the name Kurt Rambus. If one can bond over an email interview, we definitely bonded over the effect the TV show Night Flight had on John’s musical upbringing. Night Flight regularly featured films and programs like New Wave Theater, Urgh! A Music War, and early music videos from weird (for the time) labels like Some Bizarre. Speaking for myself, seeing (and hearing) these from the isolation of Central Louisiana shattered any notions of musical or artistic restraint.

A few years ago, area music-scribe Jason Ferguson wrote about Night Flight for the Orlando Weekly. I love this paragraph:

It's important to understand just how crushing and omnipresent the monoculture was at the time; even for the raddest, most punk/avant/weird motherfuckers in your town, information and media moved incredibly slowly, via occasional visits to the big city record/video store and, of course, fanzines and the mail-order bonanzas that would happen when you actually found them. For all but the most devoted freaks, salvation came in small, discrete doses, and most of those doses came on weekend nights thanks to Night Flight.

I guess this newsletter’s come full circle, with all this talk of insular scenes and how secret knowledge was shared in the days of yore.

Be sure to check out my interview with Kurt Rambus and listen to his wild new EP, curiously titled The Misadventures of Hayek Von Pinochet and his Men Of Action. [LINK]

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Oh — I almost forgot. Here’s a list of things I listened to on Bandcamp over the past couple of weeks. [LINK]

And that does it! Thanks so much for reading. I hope you’re doing fine, staying safe, and doing the fun things whenever you can. Are we getting the hang of this lockdown thing yet? No? Yes? As always, feel free to reach out to say ‘hi’ and let me know what you think of my digital text scribble. Ahoy! And I’ll see you on Oct. 25 — if not before. 🚀

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btw — I'm Michael Donaldson and you can read more about who I am and what I do here.

• If you dig this newsletter click the heart at the bottom. ♥️
• If you have a groovy pal who might like this, click the share icon. 📩
• And please leave a comment if you'd like to chat about this. 💭  

Hi, friend! I'm Michael Donaldson, and this is my weekly newsletter about music-listening, music-making, and the technicolor culture around those things. Thanks for completing this week's Ringo quorum. We couldn't have done it without you.

Yep, I took last week off. A lot is going on here, including helping to plan the renovation of my mom's freshly bought house. So busy. And, as I explain toward the end of the newsletter, I might keep this at an every-other-week pace for a couple more episodes. Just a heads up.

This episode of Ringo is more rambling and self-referencing than usual (if you can believe it). If you're a new subscriber — and there's a few of you, so welcome! — then know that Ringo 027 is an odd man out. Our regularly scheduled programming will commence soon. But this time, I've got a few things on my mind. Let me tell you what I'm thinking about.

But first — Every episode of Ringo Dreams of Lawn Care has a theme song. This one's not new (again, so busy!), but it is a short favorite. "Regular on the Blast" was part of my Tiny Accidents project a couple of years back. It sort of reminds me of an instrumental Tom Waits outtake circa Frank's Wild Years. Which is cool. 

When recording the Tiny Accident songs, the idea was to note which of the sketches got stuck in my head months later. Then I would develop those remarkably sticky tunes into longer, releasable songs. "Regular on the Blast" was more of an earworm than most. So one day, I went into the studio hard drive to open up the sketch's files. And they were missing. Other songs' files were missing, too.

It's strange because 97% of the files on the hard drive were intact. Most of the Tiny Accidents song files, which shared a folder with "Regular on the Blast," were there. But that song was gone along with 4 or 5 other Tiny Accident songs. And also vanished: a long experimental track I was working on, intended to flow like a DJ mix over 45 minutes. I was halfway done. Poof. I don't even have a test mixdown of that (unlike all the Tiny Accident tracks) and no memory of how it sounded.

Back up your hard drive, kiddo. Here's "Regular on the Blast" — have a listen and then let's go on a ramble.

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I'm thinking about Letterboxd. I joined this trendy film lover's platform a few weeks ago, and — hey whaddaya know — I'm enjoying it. Here's my profile. I'm logging the movies I watch and the ones I want to watch, which is my main reason for using Letterboxd. (I've gone through my journal and back-tracked some movies I watched in the past year before I joined.) Now I'm starting to enjoy the platform's social aspects and how it's a powerful place for film discussion and discovery. I even wrote my first review on the site this morning (it's nothing special). 

Film critic Scott Tobias wrote an informative article on Letterboxd and its culture for The Ringer. Here's a paragraph from that: 

"Diary" was one of the words Matthew Buchanan focused on when he and his cofounder, Karl von Randow, were conceiving Letterboxd in the years before it launched in 2011. The other word was "Lists." Those were the building blocks of the service, and they're almost embarrassingly true to how the cinephile mind works to compartmentalize the films that pass through it. The common denominator among Letterboxd users tends to be a compulsion to log and order the things they've seen, which many of them were already doing using spreadsheets or pen and paper. Letterboxd is a social media site that opens up those habits to public scrutiny, but the trade-off is that it also functions as a vast warehouse of opinion and hard data, an opportunity both to survey reactions to popular films and head down various rabbit holes. "Social film discovery" is how the homepage labels it—a phrase that's in keeping with the no-frills, unassuming nature of the site.

Die-hard movie fans and fanatical music heads are similar. That paragraph could easily be talking about album collectors. The article also contains this quote about film buffs: "There's still the delusion that you can see everything, that you can really have an encyclopedic knowledge of the entire expanse and breadth of the medium, which is not really on the table when it comes to literature or art." Literature or art but not music. Because music collectors have the same mentality.

Where's the Letterboxd of music? That's an excellent idea. Replace 'movies' with 'music' and imagine a musical Letterboxd to keep track of and discuss the albums we listen to. We'll make themed or best-of lists and professional music critics will rub shoulders with amateur and aspiring critics with their opinions. And, like on Letterboxd, the pros can be looser (and funnier) in their comments and reviews than on their employers’ sites, which makes things fun.

As mentioned in The Ringer article, another feature is no film (or album) is too old for discussion. "Release dates don't matter at Letterboxd, and conversations can happen about any film at any time, which gives it an advantage over formal publications, which peg their coverage around embargo dates …" It's like hanging out at the indie record/video store. The new releases might be the first thing we talk about, but our discussion eventually turns to rating the classics and obscure favorites.

For music, this kinda sounds like the lovechild of Last.FM and Discogs. But, while those sites have their particular focuses ('scrobbling' and marketplace) this musical Letterboxd is solely about music nerds and fans congregating and talking about music. Am I missing something? Is there something out there like this? Let’s make it happen.

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I'm thinking about what Darren Hemmings had to say in a recent Motive Unknown newsletter. It's not a secret that I'm no fan of social media (esp. Zuckbook). You might not know that I'm presently doing a lot of research into how a label or artist can effectively promote music without social media. I'm convinced it's possible, but not without a fair amount of legwork and reconsidering music marketing traditions. So it was with great interest to see Darren, who runs a marketing consultancy representing the likes of Run The Jewels and Moby, state the following:

… there may be quite a fundamental shift starting here - albeit in very, very early form. It strikes me that some artists are increasingly tiring of existing on other people's platforms where their relationship to fans is always compromised. Instead, platforms like Bandcamp and community hubs like Discord allow them to sell directly and build a home for those fans that is not subject to algorithmic control over who see their message. They are tiring of social media and tiring of other platforms controlling who they can reach. [...] Where I think this could get interesting is when we see the first artists really break through with little support or presence across both DSPs and social media in general. I think many would see that as an impossible notion right now, but to my mind that is something that may happen sooner than we all realise.

I agree. And I would love for some of these breakout 'first artists' to be emerging rather than established (I mean, if Bruce Springsteen decided to do a Bandcamp-only release, it would obviously do well).

I also think the anti-platform sentiment that's loudly brewing isn't only about lack of direct fan access. There are also political concerns, especially among a younger crop of tuned-in artists. In Spotify's case, there are problems with the platform's unsupportive moves against musicians. And issues with Facebook (which, remember, owns Instagram) are so plentiful that the platform's contributions to things like, uh, genocide are now old news. 

It isn't easy to find optimism right now, but I'm optimistic about this. Artists and labels are starting to take control. They're learning that the tools exist, for the first time in history, to reach new levels of independence (and interdependence). You know that thing I like to say: It's the punk rock dream come true … if you want it.

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I'm thinking about my home office. A few weeks ago, I ran across the newsletter Workspaces. It's a simple newsletter, featuring photographs of the desk set-ups (and room decor) of various creative and tech workers. These days, most of these photos show the 'home office.' Most of them are way too organized, which frustrates.

As mentioned in the last Ringo, I'm feeling the burn(-out) and finding it difficult to motivate myself. I know part of it is being here in my home office every day for six+ months straight. No more coffeehouse sessions to break things up, no travel every couple months to reset the mind, no temporal markers like concerts or memorable get-togethers with groups of friends. 

So, inspired by Workspaces, I decided to rearrange my home office. I'm now facing the opposite direction (away from the window now, but there's more light on my desk) and added another bookshelf behind me. I also created a separate 'reading area' — a comfy chair in a corner where I can take reading breaks away from the computer screen. I'm hoping this will fool my lizard brain into thinking I'm in a new place. Au revoir to that lonely room I was trapped in for six months.

It's early days, so I can't gauge the success of this mental trick yet. But the initial feeling is positive. Hey — I'm writing now, so I suppose that's something. My environs do seem new. And I love the screen-isolated reading area, which I'm hoping will inspire more books and less iMac. 

Once I'm confident that this layout is a keeper, then perhaps I'll post a Workspace-style photo and overview of my office set-up here or on the blog. I'm not sure if you're interested in anything like that, but let me know, and I'll get on it if you are.

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I'm thinking about the blog. Blogging about blogging is a thing. It might be even more of a thing after months of lockdown. I know this is supposed to be a newsletter about 'music-making and listening and how technology changes the culture around those things." But I've only had my own navel to gaze at for a while, so please bear with me as I figure this out.

I've blogged on-and-off since the late '90s. That is a little bit of an exaggeration — more off than on, really. I had a Q-BAM section on the Astralwerks site in 1998-ish, where I occasionally posted 'hellos' and updates and short tour diaries. My own site eventually had the same, maybe one post each month. Embarrassingly, I was more prolific on my MySpace blog — but those posts are now lost in digital dust (let that be a lesson, friends — don't post anything worth saving solely on Facebook, etc.). 

A few years ago, 8D Industries started as a Squarespace blog. I opted to switch to a self-hosted WordPress platform in November 2018, and 8sided.blog was born. 

8sided is my most stable attempt at blogging. I've had post-a-day streaks for weeks at a time, only to fall back to once a week or less. Lately, it's more of the latter, but it's nothing to beat myself up over. I'm happy to be a blogger and, in turn, a writer, no matter how prolific. I love it, and I love the practice.

Austin Kleon has steadily blogged for 15 years. He recently posted about this achievement, listing three main reasons why he blogs: to leave a trace; to figure out what he has to say; and because he likes it. I share all those motivations, but, for me, the second one is most important. Austin says this: 

Every time I start a new post, I never know for sure where it's going to go. This is what writing and making art is all about: not having something to say, but finding out what you have to say. It's thinking on the page or the screen or in whatever materials you manipulate. Blogging has taught me to embrace this kind of not-knowing in my other art and my writing.

I've also written about blogging — many times! — and explained my intentions this way: 

Why blog? As I wrote here previously, blogging is "an exercise to notice more, to observe the day with intention, to create firmer opinions and ideas, and to cope with the fears of uncertainty and of time passing." It doesn't matter if no one is reading — the act of putting your thoughts down in a public arena is medicine for gathering ideas and inspiring confidence. 

The newsletter is like a blog, but it's not quite the same. I imagine a blog as immediate, bursts of transmissions at unexpected intervals of varying lengths and effort. The newsletter is deliberate, organized, thought-out. I suppose these qualities aren't set in stone, but there is a distinction in my mind. 

My future-planning thoughts about 8sided.blog include an increase in post frequency, a broadening of topics, a stronger presence for my personality, and a dramatic (but not radical) redesign. I hate to rank this alongside Ringo, but the blog comes first. It's my number one. I want it integrating with this newsletter, with Ringo as an extension of the blog rather than the other way around. Lately, it seems like the latter. 

As I wrote yesterday in my journal, the blog is where I plant ideas and interests to watch them sprout. And then, I take the best fruit that grows from these and use them in the newsletter. I'll add exclusive fruit that wasn't grown on the blog, too. So the newsletter is a fruit salad. Have I told you that I'm terrible at metaphor? 

This story is a LONG way to say that I'm focusing on getting the blog ship-shape over the next week, maybe two weeks. I'll probably continue the newsletter on a fortnightly (every two weeks) schedule for the next couple of episodes as I figure this out. There may end up changes to this newsletter. And, of course, I may surprise you (and me) the next time you hear from Ringo. I'm going with the flow here. 

It's all a bit exciting. I think my blog's cool already, but it's gonna get a lot cooler. I feel a little like I'm growing a MEDIA EMPIRE over here, so I'm going to marinate on this for a couple of weeks. A report via Ringo is imminent.

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EDGING →

• This new track from Kelly Lee Owens is excellent, and it features vocals from John Cale, who just sounds great. I want to hear from him more often (just as this vocal cameo from Brian Eno makes me want to hear him sing a lot more). And, since the early days of MTV, I've aggressively disliked music videos that mix in dialogue and in-video sounds over the music. But this music video is the exception — I love it so much. [LINK]

• Deradoorian is Angel Deradoorian of Dirty Projectors, and her new album Find The Sun is super good. But, as I mentioned yesterday on Twitter, the best part is it reminded me of that band Th' Faith Healers — remember them? — so I looked up their cover of Can's "Mother Sky," which I hadn't heard in maybe a couple of decades. Mind blown once again. (Add this one to the list of music not available on Spotify etc. btw.) [LINK]

• I mentioned Tom Waits' Frank's Wild Years above. It's one of my favorite albums. In 1988, a concert film from this album's tour was released, titled Big Time. The movie is beautiful, and the performances of the songs are creative and mischievous. It's as good as Stop Making Sense in my opinion (that Talking Heads concert film was probably an influence on Big Time). Big Time has been missing all these years, only available via used DVDs and extremely low quality torrented files. But! Without fanfare, Big Time suddenly appeared to stream on Amazon Prime Video at the beginning of this month. Watch it. [LINK] (Side note: fingers crossed Laurie Anderson's digitally unavailable Home of the Brave follows soon.)

• In the last episode of Ringo, I posted an excerpt from an interview with Elijah Knutsen of Memory Color. He discussed the Japanese ambient sub-genre Kankyō Ongaku and dropped lots of knowledge and recommendations. The full interview is live on 8sided.blog, and there's a lot more in there for your perusal. It's one of my favorite interview pieces on the site — please check it out. [LINK]

• And, here's a list of some of the Bandcamp music I've been enjoying since we last did the Ringo tango. [LINK]

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Thanks for reading. These past couple of weeks were difficult — note to world: you're not helping — and it's probably getting more difficult from here. Someone, please pass the cocoon. It might be useful to sleep for a year or two. But! I'm encouraged because we're in this together. We're keeping on like we always do, and our optimism is a potent form of resistance. It's a nose-thumbing adamance that things will get better. In other words, hang in there. I'll see you in a couple of weeks. 🚀

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btw — I'm Michael Donaldson and you can read more about who I am and what I do here.

• If you dig this newsletter click the heart at the bottom. ♥️
• If you have a groovy pal who might like this, click the share icon. 📩
• And please leave a comment if you'd like to chat about this. 💭  

Hi, friends! I'm Michael Donaldson, and this is my weekly newsletter about music-listening, music-making, and the sometimes exhausting culture around those things. Thanks for subscribing and hanging tight with the Ringo squad.

Every episode of this newsletter has a theme song. Sometimes I stress out about this tune — last week, without warning (sorry), I didn't do a Ringo, and part of the reason was that I hadn't recorded a song. There were other factors why there wasn't a Ringo last week, including busy-ness, some family responsibilities, and burnout (see below). But the lack of a theme song pushed me to decision. 

Again, it's a busy, busy week, and time's scarce. As I write this, there are only a few loop ideas on the computer. It sounds cool, but it's not a song, and I'm not sure what I'll have for you. This weekly theme song pledge is tough! But I'm going to give you what I've got, even if it's only a minute long. And I'll give you a new pledge: even though I love doing these songs and it's a good exercise for me, I won't hold up Ringo if there's not a theme song. So, in the future, don't be surprised if there's no accompanying song. Or if there are more guest songs, like I did with Gemini Revolution a few weeks back.

OK - it's a half-hour or so since I wrote the paragraph above, and I've got a minute-long track I'm randomly calling "Stubs." Short but sweet. Listening to it now, I think this was inspired by a fantastic podcast interview with Cabaret Voltaire's Stephen Mallinder I listened to this week. I can totally hear him doing his patented whisper-growl on top of this. Have a listen to this quick burst of "Stubs," and then let's get into this week's episode.

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Last week I received a recommendation from my friend (and friend of Ringo) Kara — host of Le vital corps Salon podcast. She thought I'd enjoy the episode of the Ezra Klein Show titled "Work as Identity, Burnout as Lifestyle." Yes, it's a lively and thought-provoking discussion (which is often the case on Klein's highly listenable podcast). And I uncomfortably identified with the dilemma of leisure activities becoming fodder for work. You know, a byproduct of creating that thing we call 'content.' 

Case in point: As I listened to the podcast, I couldn't help but think about how to fit it into my blog or this newsletter. Rather than merely enjoying, I'm always plotting. I guess we all are. When I read a book, I'm highlighting. When I'm watching a movie, I'm connecting it to the week's topics. When I'm listening to music, I'm considering a review. I'm not saying this, in itself, if unhealthy. But, as pointed out on Klein's show, this work-mode posture, always in the background, can lead to burnout. Now, more than ever, we need to find things to do for ourselves. 

Kelly Reichardt's First Cow is presently at the top of my 'favorite movies of 2020' list. First Cow is available as video-on-demand from various movie streaming platforms, and you should see it. On the surface, it's a warm story of friendship set in early 1800s Oregon. A skilled frontier cook and his newfound friend, a Chinese immigrant, form a business making 'oily cakes' for the settlers. These biscuits are a sensation. And there's a secret to this success that could mean big trouble for the pair. 

But the movie also conveys observations about work, commerce, and capitalism. When the cook makes his first biscuits as an offering to his friend, the friend's immediate comment is, "How much do you think someone would pay for a biscuit like that?" It's like when your friend knits you a scarf for your birthday, and your compliment is, "You could make money on Etsy making these." Don't feel guilty — we all do it.

It's not lost on me that I ended up mining First Cow, a movie I watched for intended enjoyment, for newsletter content. Again, that's fine. I still got pleasure from First Cow, and the film effectively transported me out of the world's orbit over its runtime. What more could I ask for? However, I feel like I need something — a hobby! — that is free of analyzation. 

For this reason, I started reading science fiction novels in the evenings, catching up on books I would have enjoyed reading when I was younger. (Ezra Klein's mentioned getting into comic books as there's little in the Venn diagram to his day job.) But even those can't escape — I was able to work in passages from The Cyberiad in a newsletter rant about FOMO if you remember.

I thought about this some more, that I need a hobby without screens and removed from writing and thinking — something to take me out of my head. I've landed on cooking. I'm going to learn to cook. Vegan cooking, to be exact (as that seems a little more challenging).

I'm not making a radical decision here. It seems like everyone else knew the importance of the 'get your mind off things' hobby before I figured it out. All that sourdough baking, and gardening, and ukulele playing — you folks had it figured out from the beginning. I feel like the people working from home for the first time due to lockdown did a much better job at this than us remote working veterans. Speaking for myself, I initially saw lockdown as an opportunity to do more work.

So, yeah. Burnout. That's the cusp I'm on, the edge I was balancing for the past five months. And I'm getting through it. I have high hopes that learning (and enjoying) cooking and time-blocking my work will help. An antidote may also mean cutting back on Ringo — I might go every two weeks instead of weekly, at least for the next month or so. I know I've teased this before. Rest assured, I'm not giving up as this newsletter is now such a delightful cap to my week. The challenge of publishing the newsletter has been a personal boon during The Strange Times.

Tl;dr: Please take a step back and check in with how you're doing, especially if you're a seasoned work-from-home person or 'content creator.' Come up with a hobby or something you can do that work-thoughts won't intrude upon. Don't end up like me, in burnout denial and mentally working during all waking hours.

A couple more notes about First Cow:

• After watching the movie, read this article in The Playlist that examines First Cow's underlying themes about societal greed. It's a fantastic piece of writing. But — please don't read it until you've seen the film as the article is a snake pit of spoilers. [LINK]

• The soundtrack to First Cow is by guitarist William Tyler. One of the very last concerts I saw (before lockdown) was Tyler at Third Man Records in Nashville. I hadn't heard of him yet but was immediately a fan. Tyler's 2016 song "Highway Anxiety" is a #Worktones favorite. And his work on First Cow is terrific. I look forward to hearing him on other film scores. [LINK]

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(Old man voice:) Remember when we recorded mixtapes in one take, two turntables recording to a cassette, and that cassette duplicated to cheap tapes to give/sell to friends? If you messed up, you had to start over again — kind of like the first two attempts to film Russian Ark. 

In the summer of 1997, I recorded one of these mixtapes, and, yes, started over a few times due to flubbed beat-matching. Finally, I ended up with one of my most popular tapes. This recording was a special session — only recently had I found my ‘sound’: a floaty, jazzy psychedelia hinged on downtempo and mid-tempo breakbeats. I enjoyed the tough Mo Wax’ian trip-hop of the time and the phased-pad soundscapes of the dreamier drum n’ bass productions. I settled on a vibe that combined the two, which inspired my first records and Feng Shui. Anyway, this mixtape was a documentation of my favorite songs of the time that expressed this style.

I lost all copies of the tape and haven’t heard it in perhaps a couple of decades. Then, Friday afternoon, I’m cleaning out some old folders on a dusty hard drive and find an MP3 labeled ‘Summer 1997 Mix.’ I didn’t think anything of it and clicked to preview the file. I heard the opening didgeridoo of the Wagon Christ remix of Nåid’s “Blástjarnan.” OMG, this is that mix!

I have no idea where this MP3 came from. I don’t remember ripping it from the cassette — I didn’t really have the means to do that until recently. Maybe a fan or friend sent it years ago, and I filed it away to listen to someday, then I’m immediately distracted and forgetful? No idea. 

But what a find. The audio quality isn’t the best — it’s a rip of a cassette tape, after all — but THESE TUNES. I love them all. I have the fondest memories of playing these at Knock Knock, in the backroom of Phat N’ Jazzy, and, with increasing frequency, in dark rooms across the globe. (Nostalgic sigh.)

This might be my favorite mixtape I ever recorded, which is really something as I had another 20 years of mixing ahead of me at this point. Here it is, and I hope you enjoy it as much as I have since its rediscovery. 

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Portland-based producer and label owner Elijah Knutsen recently alerted me to his terrific Memory Color project. Titled Blue Sun Daydream, the album features gentle and assuasive ambient textures interspersed with field recordings lifted from various southern Tokyo locations.

The album is a tribute and continuation of the Japanese strain of ambient known as Kankyō Ongaku. The subgenre was recently popularized in the west by the label Light In The Attic through the compilation Kankyō Ongaku: Japanese Ambient, Environmental & New Age Music 1980-1990. But Kankyō Ongaku doesn't end there or with the artists featured on the collection.

Elijah's knowledge of this music is extensive. I interviewed Elijah for 8sided.blog for a feature that will appear in the coming week. In this excerpt from the more extended interview, Elijah reveals his take on the history of Kankyō Ongaku and offers some listening recommendations. Prepare yourself for links and rabbit-holes:

I would say that Kankyō Ongaku is simply a particular type of ambient music, focusing on "background noises" and environments as a whole, and including the natural sound of life into its compositions. Infused with synth and sometimes guitar elements, the melodies are simple yet evolving (and sometimes not even there).

It started in Japan in the 1980s as an offshoot of more contemporary ambient music and quickly became its own form of art. The music from this genre is generally an explorative and calming soundscape, with bits and pieces of melody blended between long stretches of environmental noise. Synthesizers are typical yet used carefully. The patches and sounds used are soft and straightforward, much like the compositions.

Artists like Hiroshi Yoshimura and Takashi Kokubo are probably some of the most well known in this genre. Yet, there are many very talented artists from this genre that weren't featured in the compilation. Right now, my favorites are Yutaka Hirose, Tetsu Inoue, Kensuke Mitome, Takao Naoi, and Kazuo Uehara. 

I feel that the art of Kankyō Ongaku has been greatly overlooked, and only now is it becoming apparent how special it is, especially to western audiences. The artists of the '80s continued making their music, and many went on to work in the film and video game industry (Joe Hisaishi - Studio Ghibli). However, the specific type of Kankyō Ongaku explored by Light In The Attic is mostly in the past. But Hiroshi Yoshimura's final album before his passing in 2003, Four Post Cards, sounds directly taken from one of his earlier works.

The sound of Japanese ambient in the 1990s was defined by the artist Tetsu Inoue. Tetsu worked with Pete Namlook and his pioneering FAX label, releasing groundbreaking new albums like World Receiver and Ambiant Otaku. These albums did away with the simple melodies and defined the genre in a very different way. Instead of programmed synth arpeggios and babbling creeks, Tetsu's music clouds your head with dense textures of sound, set upon an ever-evolving noise sheet. Tetsu, unfortunately, dropped off the radar in 2007 and hasn't been heard from since. 

The best part about the whole genre is how encompassing it can be. There may not be another artist exactly like Hiroshi, but there are tons who can fit the idea of Kankyō Ongaku. One of the more experimental artists I've been listening to is Tamako Katsufuji, a sound artist from Osaka, Japan. Her albums are incredibly eclectic pieces of sound art, focusing on field recordings, cat sounds, and singing bowls, all arranged in a strangely calming fashion. Although her music varies significantly from Four Post Cards or Tetsu Inoue, her work is as "Kankyō Ongaku" as the giants of the 1980s.

Be sure to check out Memory Color's Blue Sun Daydream. It's a fantastic and soothing album that fluently carries on and pays homage to the Kankyō Ongaku tradition. 

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My first exposure to Silver Apples was through Howie B. Howie came to Orlando on holiday around 1994 and wandered into my record shop. We hit it off, and he joined me for a few drinks that evening. At one point, Howie asked, “Have you heard of Silver Apples?” I said no and, shocked, Howie stood up and enthusiastically commanded, “Well, you’ve got to hear Silver Apples!”

Silver Apples keep popping in and out of consciousness. They were so weird, so ahead of their time, it’s easy to doubt they ever existed. Silver Apples reemerged last March when the excellent YouTube channel Bandsplaining spotlighted the band in this video:

That video has well over a million plays, an extreme case of unexpected virality for Silver Apples. Outside of getting name-checked by the likes of Stereolab and Portishead’s Geoff Barrow, this might be their most significant moment of exposure. There’s a lot of fresh groovin’ to “Oscillations” going on.

I bring up Silver Apples as Simeon Coxe, the last remaining member of the original duo, passed away this week. The Guardian has a glowing obituary which features this historical note on the Simeon’s sizable innovation: 

In the late 60s, Coxe introduced a 1940s audio oscillator into his group, the Overland Stage Electric Band. “Besides the drummer Danny [Taylor] who later joined me, no one in the band was amused,” he said in 2012. The change in direction prompted the departure of his band members until only he and Taylor remained. They changed the band’s name to Silver Apples and established their pioneering, proto-synthesiser setup: nine audio oscillators and 96 manual controllers – pieced together in part from discarded second world war equipment, Coxe once said – fondly known as “the Simeon”.

Simeon had a loose Orlando connection, collaborating with local art-punks Obliterati and playing the city regularly. About three years ago, I saw him perform with his longtime companion and musical partner Lydia Winn LeVert. He was in his late-70s then (he was 82 when he died this week), and it was remarkable how experimental and ambitious his performance was. But it wasn’t a throwback — Simeon accompanied Lydia with electronics and samples from his laptop. Apparently, some of the samples were the drums of his late bandmate, Danny Taylor. 

I was lucky to have a short conversation with Simeon afterward. He was fun to talk to. I remember thinking, “I wouldn’t mind doing what he’s doing when I’m in my ’70s.” And I’d like to believe, if not for his passing, he’d be back and enthusiastically continuing his sonic experiments into his ’80s and beyond. Inspirational.

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Let me close out this newsletter with some musical recommendations (as if there weren’t enough of them linked above). Here are some things I listened to over the last couple of weeks on Bandcamp. → [LINK]

And, with that, thanks for reading this episode of Ringo Dreams Of Lawn Care. I’ll be back next week or maybe in two weeks — I can’t quite say but I’ll let you know either way. In the meantime, please let me know if you have any thoughts on this newsletter or anything you’d like to tell me. I’m all ears. And, above all else, take care of yourself. Do something fun — it’s okay to take your mind off things and leave this planet for a moment or two. See you soon!

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btw — I'm Michael Donaldson and you can read more about who I am and what I do here.

• If you dig this newsletter click the heart at the bottom. ♥️
• If you have a groovy pal who might like this, click the share icon. 📩
• And please leave a comment if you'd like to chat about this. 💭

Hi, friends! I'm Michael Donaldson, and this is my weekly newsletter about music-listening, music-making, and the sometimes confounding culture around those things. Thanks for subscribing and spreading the word of Ringo.

Each episode of this newsletter has a theme song. This week we're getting groovy with a snaky stomper to get the juices rolling on this last Sunday of the summer months. In other news, summer's almost over (what). Have a listen to "Created a Baronet" and then dive into this week's potpourri of topics.

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The terrific documentary about Other Music popped up on Prime Video this week. I've wanted to see this for a while — the NYC store, much mythologized, really was the ideal of an indie record shop. It had it all: a niche selection curated by the owners and staff, records filed under sometimes-baffling genre section names, cards with reviews filled to the edges with jumbled handwriting affixed to releases, store layout and organization to the point of disorganization, and so on.

The documentary made me miss New York City (I'm so happy I got to visit a few months before The Strange Times) and, of course, browsing in record stores. But, most of all, I miss the communities and interactions that revolve around great shops. This aspect of music culture was fading, along with independent retail stores, with or without COVID interference.

Record store clerks get a bad rap for being smug jerks, judging customers' musical tastes from behind the counter. Sure, I know a few of those —perhaps on a bad day, I've been one of those — but I think the cliché is overblown. As the Other Music doc shows, record store employees are often helpful experts in their chosen fields. As Caroline said as we watched the movie, “I could listen to them talk about records all day.” They know a lot about music, they listen to a lot of music, and their favorite thrill is turning someone else on to great music. People who work in record shops live for that.

There's a moment in the documentary when a customer says to the clerk, "I'm looking for something like Lou Reed that's not Lou Reed." We wait for the side-glance, or a snarky response, or the indignant huff. The legends and depictions of pretentious record shops train us to believe this might be a terrible thing to ask. The customer is brave even to bring it up. 

But record store staff enjoy questions like this. The request is open-ended but has a launchpad. It's an invitation to explore, and, most of all, it's the customer saying, "I trust you to turn me on to something I haven't heard yet. And I'm inclined to love it." Maybe that's just my own experience (I owned a record store once, remember), but I think I'm right. 

I can't imagine the response if that person asked for "something like Lou Reed but not Lou Reed" on Facebook or Twitter. Maybe he'd get a handful of helpful replies in the spirit of a record shop clerk, but the snark would cover those over like a storm cloud. I don't know of an internet equivalent of a space where one stranger can ask another for an open-ended recommendation without fear of trolls or insults or intimidation. 

Record stores are places of generous expertise. It's sad that the concept almost seems quaint in this volatile age. And that's what I miss the most about stores like Other Music. Hopefully, these stores — Other Music not included, unfortunately — will be around once we get out of this mess. In the meantime, watch the documentary. If you ever had — or have! — a favorite record store, this movie will move you.

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Yesterday 1200 record stores participated in Record Store Day. I don't need to tell you that this was a weird edition of the annual tradition. Record store day occurs typically in April but, this time was pushed to June, as there was a thing called "wishful thinking" back then. As that plan fizzled out, we're now celebrating RSD 2020 through three 'RSD drops' on the last Saturdays of August, September, and October. (One wonders if this monthly schedule was inspired by 'Bandcamp Days.') In part, the idea is that spreading it out will thin the crowds showing up at actual record stores. This schedule, in theory, will also help space out the releases, so they're not all hitting on a single day. I'm not so sure.

The decision exists in our current retail paradox of 'less physical customers, more physical sales.' The dramatic lines in front of record stores (which you can see in photos from a year-old blog post of mine) are no longer welcome. Elbow-to-elbow bin browsing is not allowed. That's a shame as peeking at the person's selections next to you is how vinyl junkies make friends. 

Most record stores won't open their doors to the record-collecting masses. The RSD organizers frowned on online orders of exclusive releases, but this year it's acceptable. Stores are trying to restrict orders of these limited items to local addresses, which sounds like a losing battle. Some stores are using a lottery to determine which customer snags a rare vinyl release or who gets to step in the store for an allotted time. Others are using platforms like Instagram, posting a photo of the record. Then it's 'first come first serve' among the commenters. And, appropriate for this year of live-streaming, Zoom-led RSD tours from stores are happening.

In Variety, Mick Pratt of the Northeastern US indie chain Bull Moose says of the challenges, "I choose to be optimistic about it and hope that it will be great and it will not result in too much stress, either for staff or for customers who are like, 'Damn, what I really needed to get through 2020 was this record.'"

How did it go? It seems like it went okay, but shifting vinyl fans from crowding the stores to crowding the internet had foreseeable problems. Here's a tweet from Damon Krukowski, whose old band Galaxie 500 released the live album Copenhagen for RSD:

Regardless, the point is to support these stores (among all the other independent businesses you're supporting) during this difficult time. You don't need to wait for the next Record Store Day to do so. We can't lose these places of generous expertise: the record stores, the bookshops, the locally-owned restaurants, the farmer's markets, etc. I have the feeling once we get out of this, we'll need these places more than ever. I don't know how we'll manage if they're gone.

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John Shepherd has a generous expertise. You've probably heard about the short documentary John Was Trying To Contact Aliens by now. So you know Shepherd's expertise wasn't only his musical selections. Though I'm not convinced all those knobs and wires and screens and machinery actually did anything, you know, scientific. You might also know that his generosity extended to alien life forms. He DJ'ed to the great unknown, an audience that may or may not be out there. I know the feeling — I used to have an overnight slot on college radio.

As evidence of my embarrassing music-nerdom, the most crucial part of the documentary, to me, is when, in vintage footage, Shepherd pulls Musik Von Harmonia out of his vinyl collection for a local TV crew. As obscure as that album is now, it was but a rare fossil when that television 'human interest' piece aired — sometime in the '80s is my guess. Shepherd's geek move was strategic. He knew this would go out on television, potentially to an audience in the hundreds of thousands. So what album does he choose to show? And then he plays some of the music, announcing "now here's a song from Harmonia" into the microphone. Shepherd's audience is now more than extraterrestrial, and he knows it. 

Like making friends with the person browsing next to you at the record store, John Shepherd aims for connection. He's satisfied if that connection is with aliens or a TV viewer left dumbfounded at a Harmonia album on the evening news. The film's director, Matthew Killip, speaks about these connections in The Guardian: 

Killip was interested in extraterrestrial life less as scientific inquiry than cultural phenomenon – "if you make a film about someone trying to contact aliens, there's an in-built narrative problem, which is that they don't contact aliens," he said. But he found Shepherd's lifelong interest in contacting someone, or something, in outer space to be "deeply romantic", and more universal than a guy rigging thousands of dollars of radio and electrical equipment in his grandparents' living room might seem. "We're all sort of sending out a message hoping that someone else will pick it up and understand us and understand who we are," Killip said. "We're all trying to make contact."

The compact but poignant documentary John Was Trying To Contact Aliens is streaming now on Netflix. And, John is right — Musik Von Harmonia is an album worth hearing.

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EDGING →

• To prepare for the imminent release of the album The World Will Decide, legendary culture-jammers Negativland have released a Chrome Extension version of the first single, "Discernment." This extension is a "downloadable work of media art" that, upon clicking the extension's icon, seizes your browser, turning any website into a remixed visual accompaniment to the song. As the band teases, "The real fun begins when you load up your favorite trusted news source and watch recognizable fragments of today's news cycle mulched into something just as meaningful as the ads placed beside each of the facts." The extension is only available for Chrome at the moment, but you can (and should) use it with the compatible and more privacy-minded browsers Brave and Vivaldi. At the 40th anniversary of Negativland's first release, the band/project has earned the 'venerable' designation. It's inspiring that Negativland remains innovative and surprising, and still capable of wry commentary on the current era. [LINK]

• Cássio Vasconcellos takes hundreds of extreme resolution photographs from "the right angle of a helicopter view." Then he stitches the images together, often repeating and geometrically arranging the photos. The effect sometimes resembles fractal art, other times — from a distance — abstract pointillism. The press release states, "Vasconcellos instigates a visual debate on the urban chaos of modern civilization by exploring jam-packed situations typical of our society." The subjects are our roadways, our machines, and us. These are the impressions we chisel into onto the surface of our planet. The kaleidoscopic airplane ones are my favorites, and the piece with all the crammed-together people is a big discomfort trigger in pandemic times. As the photo from an exhibit in Beijing shows, these works are especially impressive in person. [LINK]

• Once again, here’s a list of music I checked out this week, all recommended for you to peruse and enjoy. [LINK]

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That's all for this week's episode of Ringo Dreams of Lawn Care. I hope you liked it. This one was especially fun to assemble. After 25 of these, I think some sort of system is starting to come together. But what do you think? I'd love to hear your thoughts and comments on this newsletter. I'm also curious about your experiences with this weekend's Record Store Day, whether online or in person. How did it go? How did you do? 

By now, it goes without saying, but I'll say it anyway: hang tight, stay safe, and keep a mask handy (David Lynch has some wonderfully creepy ones). Be generous in your expertise, no matter what that is, and stay open to contact from those who are alien to you. I'll see you next week.

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btw — I'm Michael Donaldson and you can read more about who I am and what I do here.

• If you dig this newsletter click the heart at the bottom. ♥️
• If you have a groovy pal who might like this, click the share icon. 📩
• And please leave a comment if you'd like to chat about this. 💭

Hi, friends! I'm Michael Donaldson, and this is my weekly newsletter about music-listening, music-making, and, as with this episode, memories of mail delivery. Thanks for subscribing and setting up a tent in our Ringo camp. 

First of all, I'd like to celebrate that, this morning, I finally grabbed 8sided.com. I noticed the previous owner let the domain expire in June and, thanks to a repeating a.m. reminder, I’ve been monitoring its purchase availability daily. Finally, after two months of persistence, this morning 'Make an Offer' was replaced by an affordable price. Huzzah! I want this to accompany my 8sided.blog domain, mainly to use for my blog email address. I figured people emailing me would accidentally type '.com' in a michael@8sided.blog email address, making the .com domain a necessity. And now I've got it. Anyway, I'm excited and wanted to tell you about it.  

Each episode of this newsletter has a theme song. This week I present "Begunan," a song that starts pretty and becomes intense but remains kinda pretty. The roots of this are from an unfinished sketch from a couple of years ago, fleshed out a little into a longer piece. Have a listen to "Begunan":

I have a lot of unfinished sketches, and I think most of them have some promise. I just need the motivation — and a method — to revisit them with completion in mind. There was something I read from Brian Eno about how he handles all the sketches in his hard drive. Here's the paragraph where he describes his process:

What I do is that I put it all into my iTunes' archive. I have a great big, many-terabyte hard disc hard drive, and I store everything on that. I have it all backed up as well. So the pieces stay in two forms. One is the working form which is usually in Logic. I work in Logic much of the time. Whenever I'm working on anything, even if I spent five minutes on it, if I am putting it away, I always do a quick rough mix of it. Just so that I can remember that the piece exists and what it is; otherwise, if I don't do that, it just gets lost in the computer forever. I always bring everything to a little conclusion when I am working on it. That's a good practice because when you think that something isn't finished, and you do a quick mix of it, you listen to that mix a few months later, and you think, "Hey, that's really got something. That is kind of finished, actually." The big tendency with computers is to, as you say, is to tinker far too much.

I may adopt something similar. I like the idea that this provides a mindset to casually 'finish' the sketches to mix them down but without the pressure of public scrutiny. And then you might later realize they're finished after all. 

That whole two-years-old interview with Eno is pretty good, despite being on a site called 'Celebrity Access.' You can read it here.

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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 PO 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 PO 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 PO 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 PO 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 PO 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! 

(By the way, only a handful of people ever knew I was behind this activism campaign and the owner of the PO Box. Now you know, too.)

My fourth PO 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 PO Box.

In the early 2000s, I moved across town, which meant a new post office and PO Box. I started my music publishing business, so I was using my PO 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 PO Box that's only used for business. You'll find it listed at the bottom of this newsletter. 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 PO 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.

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EDGING →

• I wrote about This Heat in an early episode of this newsletter. I mentioned their influential releases were only available on Bandcamp. They're still there, but as of Friday, the This Heat catalog is sitting on all the streaming places. As I noted on Twitter, if you're gonna stream, stream This Heat. If you're not familiar with the band or don't know why you should listen, here's an excellent beginner's guide from Grayson Haver Currin. [LINK]

• Australian experimental musician and Room40 label person Lawrence English updated his 2011 broadside A Young Person's Guide To Hustling (In Music and The Arts). He gives great advice for staying sane and staying 'real' as a practitioner of non-commercial art. There are lots of nuggets and takeaways, and I recommend it highly to readers of this newsletter. Headphone Commute published the update in three parts. You can also download the PDF at 'name your price' via Bandcamp. BTW - that's a cool alternative way to use Bandcamp, even though Lawrence has to include a sound file to make it work. [LINK]

• 🎧 Here's some great music I listened to this week → [LINK]

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I feel like I'm forgetting something, but let's stop here so I can get this in your inboxes before we get too deep into the afternoon. I've got a (socially distanced) cook-out to attend, too. However, one more thing related to the post office: I'm repeating my offer to send you a vintage postcard from Florida. Just reply to this email with your mailing address. Let's see how long it takes to get to you. Unfortunately, I can only send to US addresses right now. (And I apologize to my international readers for the primarily US-centric nature of this newsletter episode.)

Stay safe. Hang tight. As Bukowski wrote, "There is light somewhere. It may not be much light but it beats the darkness." And if you're having a cook-out, make sure there are vegetarian options (my friends have me covered). I'll see you again next week. 

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btw — I'm Michael Donaldson and you can read more about who I am and what I do here.

• If you dig this newsletter click the heart at the bottom. ♥️
• If you have a groovy pal who might like this, click the share icon. 📩
• And please leave a comment if you'd like to chat about this. 💭

Today I'm taking a coffee break. The coffee of choice is NeuRoast Classic Roast Mushroom Coffee. That's not an affiliate link — it's just something I enjoy immensely, and I'm enjoying it at this very moment. The reason for the coffee break is a busy weekend helping some family move to a new place. And I hurt my back, though that had nothing to do with the moving. I'm not as much of a mess right now as I should be, but I am exhausted. So I'm taking this Ringo coffee break and will return with a full episode next week. 

Now there's an insane lightning storm happening outside my window. More insane than usual, I should say — this is Florida, after all. Last week lightning blew out our thermostat. Right now, lights are flickering, and the internet connection is spotty. Let's make this short.

BUT — I don't want to leave you empty-handed. So I'd like to suggest distant travels in a small room. 

First, there's Drive and Listen. Click the link and then pick a city. Using dash-cam footage pilfered from YouTube, the site takes you on a ride through the selected city. Local radio plays — as if you're listening in your car — and you can change frequencies if the selected station isn't your bag. Other options include street noise if you'd like the experience of 'windows down,' and you can increase your car's journey twice the speed. Drive and Listen is surprisingly calming, and it's nice to get lost in a foreign city (sigh) while sampling the local airwaves. [LINK]

There's also Radio Garden. Here's global radio with many more options (some quite exotic) and without the city streets. Rotate the globe and pick a radio station in some faraway place. Listen and know this is happening right now somewhere in the world. I've just stumbled across a call-in talk radio show in Zambia. The host is having lots of audio problems, callers disconnecting, or not hearing him. I can't understand a word they're saying. It's so fascinating. [LINK]

Equipped with an impressive lockdown beard, Brian Eno mentions Radio Garden in this Zoom discussion about the act of listening. Nitin Sawhney gives an enthusiastic thumbs up. Laurie Anderson seems like she wants to check it out. Brian uses Radio Garden to listen to religious choral music broadcasting from the center of Russia. Of course, he does. [LINK]

For me, part of the appeal of these sites is the global randomness. You click, and you're transported. You have certain expectations when you select a radio station in Tajikistan, but you'll still hear something surprising, I assure you. And in the repetitious locked-in day-to-day of The Strange Times, surprises are especially refreshing. Which is why you should also head over to Astronaut.io. The randomness is still global, but any bearings you had before are entirely lost. The preamble on the site explains:

These videos come from YouTube. They were uploaded in the last week and have titles like DSC 1234 and IMG 4321. They have almost zero previous views. They are unnamed, unedited, and unseen (by anyone but you).

Astronaut.io is intoxicating, and it's hard to click away. Every ten seconds brings an unexpected moment. It's a sea of new faces — quite a novelty right now — in the middle of what they do for fun or in their daily lives. Sometimes they point their phone-cams at something so mundane the fascination is in how someone, somewhere found it fascinating enough to film. There are a lot of animals. And people playing sports and musical instruments. There's also a chance you'll see something you weren't supposed to see. I can't stop watching these — just one more, I say to myself. It's the internet's version of a bag of potato chips. [LINK]

Some might imagine distant travels while stuck in their small home environments. Designer Lydia Cambron executed such a thing in her Brooklyn apartment, filming 2020: An Isolation Odyssey. This twelve-minute video takes the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey — the part after the infamous light and color freakout — and adapts it to lockdown ennui. This video is probably the coolest piece of art in response to The Strange Times that I've seen. Essentially a remix (or maybe a cover song — like when a song reinterpreted with different instrumentation), we get a scene-by-scene comparison to amplify Cambron's masterpiece. I enthusiastically celebrate anyone so inspired during this stifling summer of discontent. [LINK]

One more thing before I go: I forgot to give you my music recommendations playlist in the last episode. Here you go, featuring swell albums from Kramer's Let It Come Down project, Oneness of Juju (who I wrote about on the blog), Erik Hall, and more. [LINK]

Thanks for joining me for a cup of afternoon coffee. That seems like an odd drink for the middle of the August heat during a lightning storm, but it turns out there's nothing better. I'll see you next weekend for a juicier episode of Ringo. Until then, stay safe, keep focused, and enjoy your travels.

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btw — I'm Michael Donaldson and you can read more about who I am and what I do here.

• If you dig this newsletter click the heart at the bottom. ♥️
• If you have a groovy pal who might like this, click the share icon. 📩
• And please leave a comment if you'd like to chat about this. 💭

Hi, friends! I'm Michael Donaldson, and this is my weekly newsletter about music-listening, music-making, and whatever the voices in my head tell me to write about. Thanks for subscribing a being a part of our Ringo team.

Last weekend's break was lovely. I did end up writing an article for my blog — I had some opinions on the future of music's middle class and those contentious comments by Spotify's Daniel Ek. No heavy topics this weekend, though. I thought I'd go the other direction in this episode. You see, a long interview I read — coupled with lockdown-induced pining for my concert-going years — inspired the main topic and last night's tweet:

As Pedro Almodovar said at the beginning of The Strange Times, "It’s the downside of being stranded at home, one is easy prey for nostalgia."

I'd also like to introduce this episode's theme song. I've taken on a guest band to deliver our theme, the brotherly duo named Gemini Revolution. This song is named "Pure Air" and it does sound like the theme song to something ominous but hopeful. A winning combination, I think. I'll tell you more about Gemini Revolution at the end of this email but first, have a listen to "Pure Air." And then let's get into a couple of tales about the most mind-bending band I ever saw.

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I encountered Kramer through his band Bongwater, and his production work with Galaxie 500, Low, Daniel Johnston, and many others, all recorded at his Noise New York and Noise New Jersey studios. Kramer’s label Shimmy Disc was a trove of curiosities and, yes, treasures — a label as distinctive as Factory and early 4AD but perhaps even more surprising. The identifiable sound of Kramer’s production (those drums, that reverb) balanced an unpredictable and eccentric A&R taste. Shimmy Disc was a paradox because, when buying one of the releases blind, you sorta knew what it would sound like without having any idea what you were getting into. The genre or style of each record was a mystery until the needle touched the vinyl.

I’ve been fascinated by Kramer’s activities for a long time. Perhaps even more now that he’s living Florida and has established his Noise Miami studio. If I had a band, I would totally take advantage of the fact that Kramer is a four-hour drive away.

I was excited to discover an interview with Kramer, conducted by the writer Rick Moody, on the Believer Magazine site. Then I was disappointed to find out the interview is only three questions long. But that disappointment was short-lived once I realized Kramer answered those three questions with over 10,000 words covering his music story’s early years. And what a story it is — Kramer is an excellent writer, and almost every paragraph is gripping. I’m in for one of the top pledge tiers on Kickstarter if he ever decides to self-publish a memoir.

Kramer’s long answers to the first two questions are terrific and filled with entertaining stories. He talks about his early touring band experience with psychedelic trooper Daevid Allen and the band Gong, and then his entrance into the avant-garde, rubbing shoulders with the likes of John Zorn, Karl Berger, Tom Cora, and (hilariously) Ornette Coleman. In a previous episode of this newsletter, I discussed a long-form interview with Jim O’Rourke. This second part of Kramer’s interview is like that — it’s ridiculously rich in recommendations and rabbit holes. There’s also lots of folksy wisdom, such as this nugget: 

Never expect your heroes to be fine people. It’s far better to expect the exact opposite. Then you can be thrilled to death when you meet someone who treats you just as you would treat them. Hang on. Hang on just a little bit longer. You’ll meet good people. Eventually.

Kramer is such a great storyteller. Reading this piece had that feeling of a novel you can’t put down. Mesmerized under Kramer’s spell by the first two sections, the third question shook me back to consciousness. Rick Moody asks, “How did you meet Butthole Surfers, and what was it like touring with them?” No doubt, this ride was about to become a roller coaster. 

I find it challenging to explain the Butthole Surfers to anyone who didn’t see them in the ’80s. I saw them twice in 1988, and the effect — especially that first show, with Flaming Lips opening no less — was life-changing. They weren’t the same band for me once they went from two drummers to one, which is a hipster-y “before they were cool” thing to say, but that really did change their sound. During the time I saw the Butthole Surfers, there wasn’t any comparable band. Maybe that video of Throbbing Gristle doing their last concert at Kezar Stadium comes close, at least in intensity. But it’s still a different animal.

The first time I saw the Butthole Surfers was the second ‘real’ concert I ever attended. Someday I’ll tell you my first but now’s not the time. I grew up in Central Louisiana, remember, and we didn’t have many concerts. Well, there were a few — Elvis played our town a few months before he died. But I didn’t go to any live shows throughout my pre-college years. Then I got talked into a road trip to see the Surfers in Houston. That’s a five-hour drive, folks — I just double-checked as I find it hard to believe that we used to drive five hours each way for a concert. It was the first of many of these drives.

I remember not being that excited to see the Butthole Surfers. I thought they were some comedy punk rock act (years earlier I wouldn’t have been that off base). But I read about the first Flaming Lips album in The Bob, bought it, and loved it. I got in the car to see them. 

The Flaming Lips were terrific. Their now-infamous visual show was pretty low-tech back then. They turned on multiple fog machines, creating a thick white cloud on the stage. And then the band played with a bright light behind them, dark shadows within that cloud. We never actually saw the group. When they finished, I remember thinking, “That was the weirdest thing I ever saw.” I had no idea that it would move a notch down to the second weirdest thing in about 20 minutes.

Remember how I said it was difficult to explain the Butthole Surfers? I’m not going to try. There’s a bootleg recording of the concert here, but that’s only half the story. The sounds they were making were unreal — Gibby’s vocal manipulations alone, via the SPX1000 and a digital delay unit, blew my mind. Add the visual overload happening on that stage with the backward projected movies, the cymbals on fire, the eye-patched topless dancer (it’s true) — I wasn’t the same after all of that.

The audience added to the surreal scene, repeatedly climbing tall speaker stacks and jumping tens of feet into the crowd. I never saw mayhem like this before. After the band finished their encore, Gibby came back on the stage and yelled at someone in the audience to approach him. Gibby bent down and exchanged harsh words with this individual. He suddenly pulled a bottle out from behind his back, smashed it over the guy’s head, and walked away.

I’ve thought about that moment a lot. What was it about? Was that guy okay? How could the band get away with that? And then this Kramer interview revealed the secret to me over three decades later:

Gibby clamors back onstage and runs behind Paul’s guitar amp, only to emerge a few seconds later with a large plastic box which I immediately recognize as a case of breakaway bottles we’d been lugging around Europe for weeks … breakaway bottles look like real bottles, but they are actually props made of sugar to be used in theater, film, the circus, etc… you can smash them against someone’s face and no one gets hurt.

There you go. 

I saw the Butthole Surfers again in Houston less than eight months later. My friend David joined me and shot this gorgeous 8mm footage, recently digitized and uploaded to YouTube: 

David writes about this footage and his experience filming it here. And I’m with the YouTube commenter on the show — I’m pretty sure it’s December ’88 at Ensemble Hall, not Numbers (which is where I saw them the first time). But I digress.

When you drive five hours to see a concert you want to make the most of the experience. That’s partly the reason why we used to smuggle tape recorders and 8mm cameras into the shows. We also always tried to blag our way backstage after the concerts. My friends and I all volunteered at the college radio station, so we often used the trusty “we’re here to interview the band” ruse. It worked more often than you’d think.

And we made our way backstage at this second Butthole Surfers show. I remember Gibby towering over a flock of adoring punkers, grinning maniacally as they shouted his name: “Sign this for me, Gibby!” I wandered into a side room, and King Coffey, one half of the drumming duo, was sitting alone. I sat down and struck up a conversation. The Ensoniq EPS sampler was released that year, and we talked about that. King had purchased one, and I wanted to know all about it.

After a few minutes, I decided to do some actual radio business. I pulled out my recorder and asked King if he’d do a ‘radio ID’ for my show. That entailed King saying who he was and then ‘you’re listening to …’ followed by the station’s call letters. He asked me for the station info. “KLPI in Ruston, Louisiana” I replied. King told me to hold on for a minute, and he sat back, deep in thought.

I couldn’t figure out what King was doing as he was visibly making some sort of calculation in his head. Then he quickly leaned forward and said, “I’m ready — start the tape!” I held my recorder to his mouth, and he says, “This is King Coffey of the Butthole Surfers, and you’re listening to KLPI in Ruston, Louisiana, which backward is …” And then he spouted a couple of seconds of nonsensical gibberish.

We laugh, I thank him, and then my friends and I get in a car and drive five hours back to Ruston. 

A couple of days later, I go to the radio station to transfer my recording to ‘cart.’ If you’ve seen WKRP In Cinncinatti, then you’ve seen Johnny Fever take what looks like an eight-track tape, stick it in a slot, and a commercial or radio ID plays. Pre-digital, that’s what radio DJs used. The cart was always cued to the beginning, playing the audio at the push of a button. And, for some reason, to get my recording on the cart, I first had to transfer it to reel-to-reel tape.

I successfully transferred King Coffey’s routine to reel-to-reel, and I readied it for the cart. His fake ‘backward’ talk got me wondering … nah, there’s no way. But the thing about reel-to-reel tape is you can flip a switch, and the tape plays backward. So I listened to the tape in reverse and — you guessed it — King actually did say the station call letters, city, and state backward. Perfectly. It sounded like I was playing it forward. That band made my mind reel even days after the show.

It was about fifteen years later that I picked up Michael Azerrad’s essential history of the US 80’s independent music scene Our Band Could Be Your Life. There’s a chapter on the Butthole Surfers, and, casually, Azerrad throws out the trivia nugget that King Coffey has the unusual ability to translate any sentence backward accurately. 

There you go.

But this is about the Kramer interview, which you should now go read. It’s kind of a love story — a love for music, adventure, and adventures in music — and Kramer closes the piece with these words about the Surfers:

I will love these people long after I am dead. And of that death, thanks in great part to my months alongside them in 1985, I will not be afraid.

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On an entirely different musical planet, the other night I watched the new documentary about The Go-Go’s. The doc shares the name of the band, and I don’t know why that apostrophe is there, but it’s there, and it drives me crazy. Another thing that drives me crazy is when bands don’t evenly share songwriting credits (and, in turn, publishing royalties) and end up acrimoniously splitting up. Yes, one person may write all the songs. But that person didn’t come up with that drum part or that bass guitar riff, and the song wouldn’t be the same without those. 

This is a prime example of long-term thinking, as bands that swallow their pride and share songwriting credits are the ones that stay together for a long time. Just ask U2 — which you might find surprising as they’re known for having a singer with a Jupiter-sized ego. But U2 splits their songwriting credits four ways.

If you need further convincing, listen to this interview with REM’s Mike Mills on Brian Koppelman’s The Moment. Mills was a principal songwriter in that band from the beginning. And he explains that it took a lot of coaxing to get him to share songwriting credits on his songs equally with his bandmates. In retrospect, he’s thankful he did as he owes this to REM’s long career and continuing friendship.

And the other side of the coin — The Police.

If I were a band manager, this would be the first thing I’d tell any new band I took on: share your songwriting credits and share your publishing. Thank me in ten years.

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Here’s some more about Gemini Revolution. I helped release their new album, Supernova Remnant, on my 8D Industries label. It came out on Friday. The brothers Dedric and Delaney — from the cool Kansas City combo Monta At Odds — lead this project. We call Gemini Revolution their ‘alternate timeline band.’ I described this album to a friend as “kosmiche-styled space jams, ambient builders, and textured dream-droppers.” I won’t back down from that description. Have a listen in the player below, and if it strikes your fancy — it should! — then please head down to Bandcamp where the album is downloadable at the special price of ‘name your price.’

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Thanks again for reading Ringo Dreams of Lawn Care and this week’s stumblings down memory lane. Will the next episode tackle more important topics? Perhaps. But I want to let you know that I may take another break as next weekend I’m helping some of our family move house. I admit that I’m tempted to make this an ‘every two weeks’ newsletter — which was the original plan if you remember — but I do like the weekly rhythm. We’ll see.

I’m the meantime, hang tight and stay focused. It’s madness out there. As James A Reeves said on his fantastic blog, “Best we can do is keep our vision clear. Do whatever it takes to stay healthy, rational, and present.” I’ll see you soon! 🚀

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btw — I'm Michael Donaldson and you can read more about who I am and what I do here.

• If you dig this newsletter click the heart at the bottom. ♥️
• If you have a groovy pal who might like this, click the share icon. 📩
• And please leave a comment if you'd like to chat about this. 💭

Hi, friends! I'm Michael Donaldson, and this is my weekly newsletter about music-listening, music-making, and whatever else comes to mind. Thanks for subscribing a being a part of the Ringo squad. 

First off, I wanted to let you know that I'm probably taking a Ringo break next weekend. I say 'probably' as who knows, right? But I'm planning to reset 8sided.blog over the next week and get a few other professional procrastinations sorted, and I'd like to make sure the runway is clear. If you don't hear from me next Sunday, that's the reason why.

Last week's theme song was sort of a downer, sure, so let's lighten things up this time. I'm titling this week's tune "Snags," and it's a leftover from a commercial content scoring project that I worked on last month (yes, that's something I do). Though we didn't use this sketch, it's hella catchy, and I love the spacey synth melody. When I have the time, I might expand it into a REAL SONG. For now, listen, enjoy, and then let's embark on a ramble about info-overload.

Note: Yes, this issue’s title is taken from this old favorite. I guess this episode has two theme songs.

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This week I read Stanislaw Lem's The Cyberiad, a book of short stories written by the Polish author in 1965. Most of the stories feature Trurl and Klapaucius, a pair of 'constructors' able to invent machines that do fantastic, sometimes god-like things. The book's setting is a strange, distant future (or maybe a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away) where there's a mix of space travel and medieval-style feudalism (probably standing in for criticisms of Poland's state communism of the time). Each story is an adventure or a 'sally' (as in, sallying forth across the stars), with the constructors usually enlisted to make a machine to serve a king. It often goes awry.

In one story, titled “The Sixth Sally,” our heroes are captured by the hundred-eyed pirate Pugg. They assume a pirate always wants gold and offer a gold-making machine in exchange for their freedom. The pirate refuses because he's a Ph.D. pirate, and what he wants to hoard is information. Pugg won't let Trurl and Klapaucius leave until they've given him all their information. That would take decades as the constructors are geniuses with a lot of info to give. 

Thinking fast, the constructors offer to make a wondrous machine for Pugg if he lets them go. They propose 'a Demon of the Second Kind,' a machine that pulls information out of the atoms that make up the universe. This Demon will supply an endless stream of info, reliable gossip, and factoids. Pugg accepts. The pair construct the Demon, and Pugg sits down before it. He's drawn into the device, and the constructors make their escape. And then this happens:

… and little by little his hundred eyes began to swim, and it dawned on him that all this information, entirely true and meaningful in every particular, was absolutely useless, producing such an ungodly confusion that his head ached terribly and his legs trembled. But the Demon of the Second Kind continued to operate at a speed of three hundred million facts per second, and mile after mile of tape coiled out and gradually buried the Ph.D. pirate beneath its windings, wrapping him, as it were, in a paper web, while the tiny diamond-tipped pen shivered and twitched like one insane, and it seemed to Pugg that any minute now he would learn the most fabulous, unheard-of things, things that would open up to him the Ultimate Mystery of Being, so he greedily read everything that flew out from under the diamond nib …

One could interpret a few of The Cyberiad's fables as analogous predictions of today's emerging technology. There's a story about a poetry-writing machine that analyzes poetry's history to create its own, learning and constantly improving to write the most beautiful poems. The non-machine poets get angry and shut it down. Sounds like today's musicians' worries about AI music, right? In a later tale, there's a machine that a king plugs into to experience predetermined dreams. He assumes the perception of a character or object within the dream and is in danger of losing his sense of reality, trapped within and addicted to the dream-world. Fears of virtual reality, anyone?  

But Pugg's fate welcomes an interpretation that hits home. He's all of us, scrolling through that newsfeed, swiping down to refresh on our phones, and digging into algorithmic playlists of seemingly unlimited music. We're all captured by the Demon of the Second Kind.

Newsfeeds are one thing. We are scrolling endlessly through Twitter or Facebook; our need (FOMO) boosted by the companies' devious application of behavioral science. Remember that TV commercial where the guy reaches 'the end of the internet?' In 2002 — when it aired — the concept was quaint and maybe even seemed possible. Now it's just cruel. The platforms train us to keep going as if there's a finish line. We know there's no end to this firehose, but we keep drinking. Newspapers have endpoints. Books do, too. But newsfeeds will only bury us, as the Demon buried Pugg in coils of info-tape.

It's not entirely the newsfeeds' fault. The information itself is seductive, and it's everywhere. We've never lived in a time when all this information is at our fingertips — the phenomenon is only a couple of decades old, really — and human-folk haven't yet learned to cope. I'd even argue we're just now figuring out that we need to cope. We've reached a time when esteemed thinkers — people who trade in information, such as Cal Newport and Greg McKeown — are encouraging us to put on blinders to narrow our intake intentionally.

Another of these thinkers is Peggy Orenstein, who, in 2009, likened information overload with a scene from Greek mythology:

Not long ago, I started an experiment in self-binding: intentionally creating an obstacle to behavior I was helpless to control, much the way Ulysses lashed himself to his ship's mast to avoid succumbing to the Sirens' song. In my case, though, the irresistible temptation was the Internet. […] Those mythical bird-women (look it up) didn't seduce with beauty or carnality — not with petty diversions — but with the promise of unending knowledge. "Over all the generous earth we know everything that happens," they crooned to passing ships, vowing that any sailor who heeded their voices would emerge a "wiser man." That is precisely the draw of the Internet.

The Industrial Culture Handbook, published in 1983, featured the quote, "The next war is the information war and it is being fought now." I doubt the author imagined the war would be fought not with information, but against information itself.

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Music falls under this vast category of 'information.' We once accepted there was only so much music we could hear and, frustrating as that was, it guided our listening choices. Now, there isn't infinite music, but it sure seems like it. Has this affected the way we listen? Have our choices become fleeting and especially impulsive, as music enters and leaves our lives with accelerated frequency? As with the over-saturation of information, should we shield ourselves from 'so much music?'

In an article for The Telegraph, Ivan Hewett writes about people who are ambivalent about music. To you and me, that's crazy talk — how can someone not care one way or the other about music? But Hewett claims these people exist, and their numbers could increase. He believes a growing amount of options counter-intuitively discourages choice. All these musical choices paralyze the listener, diminishing the experience of fandom. Hewett sums it up in the closing paragraph: 

We no longer have that guidance, so we're driven back constantly on personal choice. Choice relies on appetite – I want this and not that - but when faced with an infinity of options, appetite is baffled, and choice soon shrinks to mere whim. Every listening experience is enfeebled by the thought that if I flip from this song in iTunes to the next, I may like it more. Appetite, when led by social norms, is a way of prompting decision and action in conditions of scarcity, which is humanity's primordial state. When everything is available, and the only action required to access that infinity is a flick of the finger, appetite is bound to ebb away. Which is why my hunch is that the hidden, shamefaced tribe of people with no feeling for music will grow and grow.

This paragraph makes me think about the early '90s when I was a music director of a radio station while I also worked at a record store. I was rolling in free music. When friends visited my apartment, their eyes would bug out at my always-expanding wall of CDs. And I would think 'today I'm going to check out those new albums' or 'I'm going to listen to something new I haven't heard before.' But, flummoxed by all the options, I always fell back on the same ten albums I always listened to.

Is there a solution? I don't think we need to go as far as Orenstein's self-binding. But some intention in our listening habits might help. 

I tried an album-a-day experiment for several months, but it didn't work out — just like what happens when one solely follows playlist recommendations to guide listening, nothing ever stuck. And lately, I've been thinking about deep diving into artists. For example, taking a couple of weeks going through Miles Davis's discography, reading about each album's history, and taking notes during the exercise. But it seems like a lot of work. Can't I just listen?

There's a fascinating essay from the beginning of 2018 on NPR's site. Writer James Toth, feeling this 'too much music' frustration, decides he's going to listen to one album non-stop each week. He won't listen to any other music during that time, hoping each album will sink in and become a memorable addition to his mental library. Toth will pour over liner notes and learn about the records, aiming to capture his teenage knack for remembering everything about an album — the names of all the players, the producer, the studio location, and so on.

Spoiler alert: Toth's experiment lasts three hours. The alerts from artists, the email updates from labels, the constant flow of Bandcamp Daily pieces, the recommendations from friends — everything is a temptation, and sampling any of this sudden music is a click away. 

I can't decide if that's dispiriting or amazing. I mean, I love having 'all the music' available to me. In that article, Toth mentions the Lafayette Afro Rock Band — I just typed that into Apple Music, and now I'm listening to them. I wouldn't trade that for anything. 

As far as developing a personal canon of favorite albums and obsessing over band member names and all of that super-fan stuff — is that a condition of our youth? Our coming-of-age music will always be the best music ever, and there's no need to fight that. Is wanting to recapture that feeling just an admission of what's lost, now that we've crowded our minds with adult responsibilities?

I don't have the answer. But I do know we should be intentional in our information intake, whether that's from newsfeeds or YouTube videos or music coming at us from all sides. We don't need all the information — we'll never get to the end of it anyway — and, as Pugg learned, it's not healthy to hoard it. Of course, I'm thankful for the abundance of knowledge, the wealth of music, and the access granted to us. But this is a new moment in our history, and I suspect our minds aren't ready. There's a necessity of pausing, leaving room for thoughts about what we're taking in. Take your time and enjoy yourself — the music's not going anywhere.

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EDGING →

• Our COVID-times have lasted long enough that now there's a whole subset of albums inspired and recorded during pandemic lockdown. Music historians will look back at these releases as a sort of genre, offering clues about 'what it was like' through the lenses of our artists' compromised creative lives. But, while not directly influenced by The Strange Times, nothing says 2020's mood to me more than 'comfy synth,' recently uncovered by Bandcamp Daily. The full package — the music, cover art, and presentation — of these artists say, “fantasy, but not too fantastic.” This music is a soothing escape, sure, but it's best not to get too outside of your head as no telling what's going to happen next, and you might want to stay ready for it. I hear a little bit of the A Clockwork Orange soundtrack here and there, which is also fitting. Also, isn't Bandcamp Daily like Simon Reynolds on steroids these days when it comes to identifying and naming new genres? [LINK]

• While on the subject of perfectly summing up the mood of this time: I'm not into sportsball but these photos … omg, 2020. [LINK]

• And speaking of Simon Reynolds, he posted this gallery of artwork and design from the heyday of Trevor Horn's ZZT label. It's inspiring how fully realized that label was at its beginning, despite completely losing its way within a couple of years. [LINK]

• Related to how we remember songs from our youth, here's a fascinating graph showing how well certain ages recall the names of the biggest songs from the '90s. I grew up in the '80s and, looking at some of these song titles, I'm amazed how little of them I know. Though that said, I can easily name a dozen or so obscure New Zealand bands that were releasing 7" singles in 1992, so there's that. [LINK]

• Iceland scream, you scream, we all scream into this app (sorry). [LINK]

• More evidence that Brian Eno has the best artist's life, allowing him to do whatever the hell he wants. The dude now has his own wallpaper. [LINK]

• I know I just ranted about lessening your music intake, but if you want to steel yourself against additional temptation, here's a list of my listening recommendations for this week. [LINK]

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Thanks again for reading my weekly ramble! I’d love to hear what you think. How are you dealing with all this music? Is your experience different than mine? Do you have any tricks or routines to make your listening ‘intentional?’ I’d love to know.

Again, it looks like Ringo Dreams Of Lawn Care will take a two-week vacation so don’t feel left out if your inbox is empty next Sunday. Until then, stay safe, reach out to those friends you haven’t seen or spoken to in a while, watch a few classic movies you haven’t seen yet (that’s one thing I’m doing to stay sane), and hang in there. I’ll see you in two weeks! 🚀

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btw — I'm Michael Donaldson and you can read more about who I am and what I do here.

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