Many new episodes of Sounds Coming Out of the Land, two reviews on Resident Advisor, general announcement about the past being dead, tapes being canceled, and a spring "mixtape" on the way.
Hi! Check it out: I know I said I was leaving Substack and called not leaving Substack ‘lazy’ in my new year’s newsletter, but I’ve legitimately been struggling for three full months to figure out a solution to this problem that works, and it just hasn’t happened. I’m extremely busy, I have a lot of work to do, and I haven’t found anything that seems better. While I’m not writing newsletters, all of the work I am doing is getting lost in the void. We can’t just wait for solutions to emerge; we have to keep moving. So, this is me doing that.
What have I done in the last three months? Well, I was really broke through the whole winter pinching mega pennies to pay my property taxes and not lose the house I spent the whole last year of my life securing, so I could focus on the work of my book about Northeast Ohio. I was trying to make my first book of essays to help raise money, but then it became clear to me that (a) it wasn’t going to be a reliable enough way to make money to warrant focusing on it, and (b) I don’t need to write an essay about the future of music and music journalism, I can just be the solution. So, I’m working on a new century of CLE magazine with Jim Ellis. The solution is to go back to the fucking hive underground and really insist on the world we want to live in by combining our own collective resources to create it. Cleveland is the beginning and it’s also the end: the solution is the Cleveland Renaissance I came back here to facilitate.
Here are some updates on things I have created in 2024 so far….
Three new radio shows:
#10: The Blues Come From Way Back
#11: Mr. Stress Blues Band, Pt. 1
#12: April Genius Day Extravaganza
They are all available to be directly downloaded for free on the radio show page of my website. I just finished the latest, which is a celebration of my birth and being from Cleveland and shit that I love relating to these ideas. Please celebrate me by checking it out, but beware in advance that it is hopelessly self-indulgent. I’ve been getting really stressed out about doing research for my radio show, to the point that I was going to cancel it this month, and I had to remind myself that it is my show and I make it for free and it’s my birthday, so I will be doing whatever I want, and I’m probably going to try to maintain this attitude going forward and spend less time feeling stuck and anxious and just go. It’s the way. You just have to begin. Fuck the plan.
I do have to say that while I had a lot of technical challenges with the making of this show, I’m really proud of it and it’s probably the best one I have made so far. It will be broadcasting tomorrow morning (Easter Sunday!) at 10:00 Land Time and 16:00 ‘Dam Time on Echobox Radio, as ever.
I also reviewed a couple serious bangers for Resident Advisor, the Optimo 25 compilation and the latest EP from Gesloten Cirkel. I’m only reviewing music that is actually really interesting to me, so it may take a while for more to trickle in. I think we’re all tired of living in the sort of world where editors ask you to write something no one else wants to write, because they feel an obligation to cover it, even though it has moved no one enough to want to write something about it, including them. Fuck that world. Bangers only.
Oh, and a major revelation! One of very many. I’ve had so many recently. Tapes are cancelled. I’m not making them anymore. I don’t have time and I can’t find any that don’t sound like shit. While cobalt mining is also necessary to the internet and all digital media, I can’t really personally do anything about how completely reliant our societies have made themselves on that. I can 100% absolutely not make tapes, though, so I’m not going to. I used to think tapes were essential to my magic practice, but I figured out that all I need is the raw power of amplification. The tapes also are not necessary anymore. They are from a part of my life that is over, but I will always return to the tapes that have resulted. They are an incredible guide. Thank you to everyone who participated in the project.
Spring 2024//behind your eyes has been in the works since February and is still not done. We’ve already been through many iterations and possibilities. We are not rushing this one; we are letting it unfold. Please enjoy many other great things I have created as a substitute in the meanwhile, if you are hungry for more!
Lastly, please celebrate my birth by listening to the 12” extended dance mix version of “Why Can’t I Be You?,” from the greatest maxi single of all time, very appropriately released during the month and year of my birth. It’s the best song I’ve ever heard and it’s in heavy rotation every April Genius Day. A percussive paradise.
<3 EMD
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2023: AGAINST THE PRESS CYCLE, AGAINST THE RELEASE CYCLE, AGAINST INDIE CAPITALISM...
Listen. It’s 2024. What’s out, what’s in? I don’t know, but you’re through. Yes, you, the “indie” musician posting a bunch of photos of you looking supremely hot in many different picturesque destinations around the globe, while telling THE WHOLE AILING, INCONCEIVABLY FUCKED WORLD that traveling is really helping you understand the interconnectivity of everything and the validity of landback movements. I tried to get a direct quote, but you already deleted it. Listen: you are the reason the pandemic will never end, you are the reason all the birds are going extinct in Hawaii. You are absolutely not an ally of indigenous people. You do not understand anything. You’ve learned nothing at all from the last three years. You are out and you’re through.
You know what else is out? Substack. They’ve done a number of questionable things over the last few years since they became the first stop on the deprofessionalization-of-writing pipeline, and I had just made one and I didn’t want to start all over again (lazy), so I ended up sticking around, but the nazi-enabling is unacceptable, so this will be my last Substack newsletter. In possibly my favorite essay of all time, “Rupture, Verge, and Precipice: Precipice, Verge, and Hurt Not,” Carole Maso writes at the advent of the digitization of media. How the internet threatened to democratize writing, to enable people to have an audience and a following without the institutional oppression of senior editors and major publishers. How it terrified the vanguard, but she saw delicious possibility, saw a future that was more female, more queer, less white, less inhibited, etc. What’s interesting to me to think about now is how the opposite is becoming true, now that the endlessly increasing monetization of the internet has actually destroyed a lot of the democratic space of the internet. I’m not sure why billionaires want to destroy the internet; it’s been so good at distracting us from all the horrors they’ve wreaked and all the wealth they’ve diverted from us over the last twenty years, after all. But social media is dying, digital media is losing its ability to be profitable, major newspapers are struggling to survive, everyone’s so desperate to make a buck from anyone, they’ll give far right lunatics a platform—and print media is expanding in the forms of small press, small run things; independent magazines; the unusual artifact. Carole and I call out from separate holes, we connect across time, space, and shifts in media and technology. (This essay was the first thing I read when the news broke that Bandcamp was sold to Epic Games in March 2022. Everyone else screamed “oh, fuck” internally, and all I heard was: “Be not afraid. The isle is full of noises, sounds and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not.”)
OKAY. A WORKING ATTEMPT AT WHAT’S OUT AND WHAT’S IN.
out:
waste— being wasteful, being wasted, wasting time, wasting resources
the internet
social media
scrolling
“indie” capitalism
taxes
business as usual
in:
mending holes
tending holes (paying attention to gaps, possibilities, ruptures, opportunities)
true DIY only
budgets
receipts
intentions
reading
stretching
doing everything you can to force a ceasefire in Gaza
Speaking of mending and tending holes, in 2023, I published my greatest piece of writing yet, Going Off-Script: On Hilary Plum’s Hole Studies, for the Cleveland Review of Books. It only paid me $70 in actual money, but I sent it to my favorite writer, Carole Maso, who I give an inscription to at the top, and as a result, got the greatest affirmation of my work I could ever receive.
This was not my only intersection with people who played the greatest role in the person I have become in this world. Black Eyes, who probably did more than anyone else toward this end, made my wildest dreams come true by reuniting. This piece I wrote for what was supposed to be a print mag, but became a Substack newsletter, and was paid $50 for, played a pivotal role. (Full disclosure: I originally pitched that piece as a ‘Resonance’ piece for Bandcamp in early 2021, which was rejected. One issue I always had with my ex-editor there was that she doesn’t really enjoy work involving difficult or noisy things. I was discouraged and pissed, but I knew I needed to write the piece anyway, and the Black Eyes reunion has had a priceless impact on countless people—they’re in the world again, they’re slowly playing more shows in more places, and they’re apparently even writing new songs which are really good and necessary to this current moment in the same way their original songs were necessary to the early Bush war years.) This is also the greatest affirmation of my struggle, my work, and my healing I could ever receive. Thank you to everyone who made it possible.
I also moved back to Cleveland, and have been putting off getting coffee with my third grade teacher for many, many moons, because life has been very exhausting moving across the country and buying a house mostly all by myself and finding a new way to survive economically in my new life without real community or reliable friends here, but in 2024, I’m going to meet up with Karen Huber, my only good teacher in elementary school and a very traumatic era of my life, who gave me endless bound books full of blank pages for me to write her stories and draw her pictures.
I didn’t listen to a lot of new music this year, because I was extremely busy the whole year navigating the complete dissolution of my life in Chicago, which cleared the way for me to come to Cleveland and do the important and extremely time-sensitive work of documenting how this region modernized American culture in so many ways between the sixties and seventies. Having clarified that, however, my favorite new release that I did check out was the debut double C-60 set It’s Back by Swisher, the opening band of the Cleveland Renaissance I came here to facilitate. Check it out, it’s truly sick. They thankfully reissued it, so my guess is the best way to buy them is probably through Haus Frau in Cleveland—let me know if you need me to pick it up and send it to you. I’m trying to move to more direct means of both trade and communication.
While I published way less writing this year as a result of the major upheaval and transition in my life, I managed to go way harder in the paint on my Mercury retrograde and seasonal mixtapes than possibly ever before. Between the Spring Into Winter; It’s a Rainy Day, Sunshine Girl; New Harm; and As Above, So Below retrograde series tapes, I made 52 tapes for people. Two of those actually doubled as my Summer 2023 mixtape, so between the other seasonal mixtapes, all double c-64s, that’s 58 tapes for people. I also made my first tape of 2024 in 2023, so that’s a final total of 60. Apparently, I’m learning self-control and need these projects less for stress relief and emotional processing, because I’m ending the latest at nine tapes and kicking the rest until spring. And that, too, is a victory.
I’m extremely proud of each and every seasonal mixtape I made this year, as well as the series making it into Marc Masters’ latest book, High Bias: The Distorted History of the Cassette Tape, which has received high praise far and wide. These tapes are the actual greatest way to understand every season of every year in my life in terms of what I was listening to, thinking, feeling, and processing, so here is a quick recap:
I also got Winter 2024//as above, so below done for my best friend right in time for the solstice, so that’s the most current zone for you to check out. It’s a psychedelic slapper. It’s also where I was processing a lot of my feelings relating to the ongoing genocide in Palestine, so I’m going to direct you there to understand where I have been with that these last few months.
Something funny I did in the total chaos of my life in Chicago’s dissolution early in 2023 was interview to do a radio show with Echobox Radio in Amsterdam in just a fancy blouse and nothing else, because I couldn’t find my phone to Zoom with them when I got out of the shower until I was a few minutes late. It was a mess, but it was the first time I felt like I got to participate in this weird aspect of Zoom pandemic culture, and I impressed them, and so I have a monthly radio show now. When they first sent me the dates in the early spring, I read them wrong because of the Euro format and thought I had five months to get my act together. I had to forfeit the first episode to attend Black Eyes Easter service at the First Unitarian Church in Philly. (I’m also really proud of surviving driving in both NYC and Philly as a person who actually follows traffic laws in 2023!!! I didn’t think it would be possible, truly.) The first episode in May was rushed and you can tell I’m uncomfortable recording my audio bits in front of various dudes, but by the third episode I was pretty much doing everything on my own and I feel confident that it’s just been getting better and better with each episode. This is a big deal for me as a person who is very techno-phobic. I’m still making everything in the most tech-minimal way I can for free in Audacity, but I’m proud of how far I have come in so little time on this front. There are nine episodes of Sounds Coming Out of the Land to check out on my website where they come with handwritten track lists of all audio played, cool photos from my research, and can be downloaded and listened to any way you like whenever you like, or streamed through Echobox. It includes the most recent episode, Burning River Blues.
SOME IMPORTANT LISTS I STARTED IN 2023
List #1: Defining a “Serious Author”
primary motivation is new forms: of writing and of living
tells the story that needs to be told, not the one that is necessarily expected/appreciated/rewarded
don’t write for the New York Times (and at the year’s end I would like to add Bandcamp and NPR…Pitchfork was always obviously included, before I ever had this thought consciously)
don’t have a massive online following
maintain critical distance to avoid being schmoozy and backscratch-y like most of the industries, all of them, but especially independent music, which is actually probably the most toxically codependent thing I can imagine most of the time (more on that in my EOY essay forthcoming in The First Collection of Criticism By a Living Female Granola Butter Factory Worker)
List #2: Book Ideas
Sounds Coming Out of the Land: How Northeast Ohio Modernized Rock Music
Boston ‘90s
This is House of Suffering: Surviving Trauma Through Music
An Astonishing Work of Punk Minimalism
The First Collection of Criticism By a Living Female Granola Butter Factory Worker
THE FIRST COLLECTION OF CRITICISM BY A LIVING FEMALE GRANOLA BUTTER FACTORY WORKER
Over the course of the next month, I will be writing my first book. It’s part of my intention to start publishing my own work and selling it directly to people who appreciate my writing, rather than writing idiotic track or album reviews or promotional guides for online music stores and techno tourism-centered websites for pennies to survive and not having the rights to any of that work. It’s also a way that I am raising funds to pay my property taxes, which do indeed threaten all of the work I have done to buy a house and resettle in my homeland, where I can have the stability to work more seriously as a writer on more longform projects like all of these books I have in mind. This house is my lifeline, so I am asking for some help as a adjust to the demands of being a homeowner while also being a pretty seriously disabled person who works a full time job, but still makes less than 25k per year. (In 2024, the government is making it even harder for people to qualify for disability, and it will result in 40% of disabled people not being counted or receiving any support.) My hope is that this will also help me reach more people who are more motivated by receiving mail/physical media, switch my focus to a daily practice of reading and writing (alone and with others), clarify my position and intentions as a working artist very much against the music journalism industry, and cultivate community amongst like-minded people. My feeling is that I create an enormous amount of valuable content for free, so on this one extremely stressful occasion, I am asking you to consider paying me a little for the work I do, only so that I can continue doing it. The book has to be done by the end of the month, because that is when my property taxes are due.
It will include my earliest essays that I still have the rights to, all of which have never existed in print before, from the years 2015 through 2023. They will probably be edited a bit and come with forewords about how they came to be about, why they weren’t published as they were supposed to be, etc. etc. etc. Included are:
Sonic Rorschach: Dance Music as Collage and Its Dancing Subjectivities for Hugo Ball, 2015
Bikini Kill Are Not the Revolution We Need in 2019: The Only Criticism of the Bikini Kill Reunion Anyone Dared to Publish commissioned and then rejected by The Chicago Reader in 2019 after Bikini Kill announced they were headlining Riotfest (a noted major advertiser of Reader’s)
‘Taste of Honey, Taste of Salt’: A Personal Tribute to the Power of the Black Eyes Debut Record for Brilliant Corners, 2021
Going Off-Script: On Hilary Plum’s Hole Studies for Cleveland Review of Books, 2023
An EOY essay I will be writing over the next week or however long it takes, on my first three years as a regularly publishing writer; being a regular contributor at Bandcamp in the exact interstices between when it became so important to independent artists and fans during the Covid-19 lockdown to when the ship began to sink through multiple sales to tech billionaires who are only interested in indie music “superfans” as a passionate base they can exploit who will spend a lot of money on their platform; what it means to be a serious writer; how to manifest the future we need on the page and back in the fucking hive underground where we all need to go, where billionaires don’t know what bands we love or why, where it makes them nothing and makes us everything; how indie capitalism shouldn’t exist and everything has to change as soon as possible
I am asking $10-20 sliding scale for these babies. I’m going to make them all with my hands. They’re going to be beautiful and inspiring. I would like to encourage all of us to avoid paying taxes in whatever ways we can to whatever extent we can, so here are all of the ways you can pay for them:
Zelle: My preference. Lots of $10-20 payments from individuals bank-to-bank will result in no taxes being taken out and none of the money exchanged being pilfered away by various apps. My email there is erindaisy@gmail.com and my phone number is (414) 248-9255. For real. Please pay me this way, if you can.
Venmo: If I make less than $600 this way in 2024, it won’t be taxed, so it’s still an acceptable form of payment. I’m @Erin-Day-1.
Paypal: An oldie, but a goodie. Smash that “friends and family” button; if I make less than $600 this way, I will also not get taxed on it. Send to missinlovewithherownfate@gmail.com.
Cash/check: I will accept cash or check, as well. I like checks. I send them all the time. I’m trying to see people more in real life. You’ll have to hit me up to work that out in person or thru the mail. Contact me here regarding any of this: comeawaywithemd@gmail.com.
Thank you for reading this if you did. Please do everything you can to make this a world in which we do not survive at the expense of others. A world in which, in our struggle to survive, we do not leave so many behind and for dead in such horrific and astonishing ways. Momentary survival in a system that is killing us all ultimately is delusional. I don’t have the answer, but I am heavily prioritizing work on a solution. May we figure out a bold, new way in 2024.
Sincerely,
EMD
P.S. I am going to move this newsletter elsewhere, but I haven’t figured out where yet. I will manually move everyone subscribed wherever it goes and leave this up for the time being.
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Sounds Coming Out of the Land #8: Dr. Judith Butler's Edward Said Memorial Lecture
Latest radio show & Echobox Radio fundraiser for Palestine this weekend & some good news about forthcoming retrograde tapes & my first collection of essays
Sounds Coming Out of the Land is still on hiatus in an attempt to force you to be present to the ongoing humanitarian crisis in Gaza. This weekend Echobox Radio is raising awareness and funds for Palestine; if you appreciate the free programming from this collective of radio makers, please forward any donations to people fighting for their lives and the lives of others in Gaza. My latest show will air tomorrow at 10:00 Land Time and 16:00 ‘Dam Time, but you can listen to it here at your leisure anytime. This week I’m presenting the Edward Said Memorial Lecture given by Cleveland native Dr. Judith Butler at the Jerusalem Fund and Palestine Center in Washington, D.C in October of 2014. Yes, I’m going to keep playing lectures by Jewish American anti-Zionist leftist scholars for as long it remains necessary. And yes, I’m quite proud that one of the greatest is from the Land.
Today there was an incredible sale on beautiful paper and cardstock at Michael’s, just a day after I began thinking about my next Mercury retrograde mixtape series, which will begin next weekend—I have my first four recipients’ addresses written down and I’ve got a week to figure out what it’s called and what it’s about. I’ll be working out my winter 2024 mixtape for my best friend in these studies. If you want a tape this retrograde, let me know!
The mix of blues is for the retrograde tapes, but I also bought many bundles of brown, cream, and tan papers to use in the composition of my first collection of essays, which I will be self-publishing and making by hand this winter to help raise funds to pay my property taxes. It’s called The First Collection of Criticism by a Living Female Granola Butter Factory Worker (all my book titles are going to be jokes about other books) and it will feature my earliest essays that I still have the rights to, written between 2015 and 2023, as well as one new essay that I am writing for the end of the year on the topic of indie capitalism—a reflection on my time as a regular Bandcamp contributor in the exact space between Bandcamp’s rise as a seemingly progressive media organization during the pandemic lockdown through its purchase by Epic Games in spring of 2022 and the more recent unionbusting maneuvers that appear to be a main function behind the most recent sale to Songtradr. There’s going to be a lot of “hot goss” and even more deep reflections. I haven’t gotten to do a lot of writing this year due to relocating across the country by myself, buying a house, and having to rebuild basically every aspect of my life back in Cleveland, so I am excited to present something new and on my own terms and to put these words in print for the first time. More details to come!
I forgot that I wanted to share this picture that I took at Albert Ayler’s grave, where I went to listen to the live broadcast of Sounds Coming Out of the Land #6: The Blast Beat Belongs to Jazz. It was an overcast day at the cemetery in September, but the sun came out just to shine on Albert and I while we were playing the Velvets internationally. I also found his grave at the precise moment his music started playing on the show. Everything about it felt cosmically ordained, which is the way every aspect of my work on Sounds Coming Out of the Land has felt.
More soon,
EMD
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Taking a very short break in between my various intense physical beatdown gigs in the Land and the endless news of various worsening situations to let you know that I finished my last retrograde series tapes, New Harm. 14 tapes that all went to support my evolving understanding of what I needed to attend to in my world and the composition of my last seasonal mixtape of the year, fall 2023//new harm(ony). You can check out each at those links. Optic Sink, who just came through Cleveland on tour, found the new mixtape to be “the perfect fall van soundtrack.” Bang it in your van or wherever else you enjoy properly deep sonic experiences…
In consideration of the ongoing atrocity in Gaza, I felt a responsibility as an American to use my broadcast hour on Amsterdam-based Echobox this month to play some excerpts from Noam Chomsky’s full lecture on Israel and Palestine which thoroughly explain the conflict, historical precedents for various things, wildly predict the last decade of events relating to this conflict, and make clear the United States is the only nation in the world that could realistically stop what is happening. Maybe we will learn about Burning River Blues next month, if the world improves, but we seem to be marching right off a cliff, so we’ll see. I spent so much time listening to this lecture over the weekend that I got rhetorically inspired about writing a critical essay on the future of independent music, so look out to see if I make good on this emerging desire. In the meantime, try to avoid spending money on the Bandcamp platform, so as to avoid rewarding union busters with your cash flow and contributing anything to this Total Piece of Garbage’s salary. You can download Sounds Coming Out of the Land #7: Noam Chomsky on Israel and Palestine here.
In solidarity with everyone getting buried and feeling lost right now,
EMD
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Free Jazz in Cleveland, Free Jazz as a Major Proto-punk Influence, and a Contemporary Tape Encompassing All of the History!!!!!!!!
Sounds Coming Out of the Land #6: The Blast Beat Belongs to Jazz now available, review of the latest Burning Plastic Blues Band tape, fall 2023//new harm(ony) in very active gestation
Attention: Northeast Ohio is beautiful. The leaves are starting to change, everything is bathed in a golden light, today there was a monarch butterfly in my backyard, and we finally got the fence up I ordered in May. Importantly, I found new jobs that I’m hoping will better enable me to actually write the book I relocated here to create! I’m planning to be working a lot more steadfastly on that this fall and winter, now that I am feeling settled in here and don’t constantly have way too many immediate and stressful or exhausting things demanding my attention. When I told Robert Kidney of 15-60-75 (The Numbers Band) that I was moving here to research and write this book, he was like: “but uprooting your whole life is a lot of work!” Tell me more. ;)
There’s a new episode of Sounds Coming Out of the Land, which you can download more directly here. I think it’s the best episode yet! It’s about the history of jazz in Cleveland, with specific spotlight on the sixties avant garde jazz scene here, as well as free jazz as a central common influence of all major foundational proto-punk bands. It will also drop on Echobox Radio tomorrow—10:00 Land Time and 16:00 ‘Dam Time, for those who wanna hear it as “live” as it can be as a pre-recorded show—and if you wanna tune in, I’ll also be on Bluesky Social doing live commentary related to the show from Albert Ayler’s grave. (This is my way of getting around the time limitations of broadcast radio; please come to my special lecture.) I bought some sax reeds to bring to him.
I’m planning to finally get down to the real work of my oral history of Cleveland record stores for Maggot Brain, which was due in May for the Fall 2023 issue and which I have written multiple emails about and never heard back from, so (joys of freelance writing) I will proceed writing it (??) assuming that it is still actually commissioned (??), knowing I will have literally endless possibilities for what I can do with this information as long as I get it while people are still here to provide it. It’s the same philosophy that undergirds my approach to the book, which I’m working on without getting a publishing deal first due to limitations of time and also complete boredom and furrowed exhaustion with the music journalism industry. I’m also planning to devote more of my time to applying for grants to fund working on my book and less time to freelance music writing offers. I have to focus what I am doing to accomplish an undertaking of this magnitude, particularly with the clock ticking so seriously. I’m pretty sure the next episodes of the radio show will be on the founding of Mr. Stress Blues Band and the Numbers Band and the Kent State Massacre, so we’re like…maybe done establishing background for the real focus of the show, which is really cool. There was a lot to cover in order for people to understand what comes next, which I feel is a sure signal of the richness of our legacy. There could be so much more—and there will be. I feel like I’ve grown so much through every episode of the show and it’s kind of wild to listen back through them, honestly. Thanks to everyone who has been following it and giving it praise.
One of my music writing victories recently, though, was convincing the editor of what is probably the most important outlet for coverage of electronic music online to let me review the latest tape from Noah Depew’s Burning Plastic Blues Band project, Spiritual Latency. It’s the one year anniversary of Noah captivating me so tremendously with his Peculiar Refractions in the Fullness of Time tape on Jayson Gerycz’s unifactor label and me being so frustrated by my inability to find coverage for it or even get someone else to cover it. Like, I liked it so much, when I couldn’t find coverage for it myself, I was literally pitching it to other writers to pitch to their editors. Rejection and things just not working out in pretty random ways are a really shitty and constant experience of being a working artist, but all of the best pieces I have written that I am the most proud of are pieces where I had to fight for them, or fight for my specific choices within them, and care enough to win. And when you win those struggles, it feels amazing. Burning Plastic Blues Band really kind of synthesizes the musical legacy and overall spirit of Cleveland through the past, present, and future in a way that I’m really into and feel specifically honored to be chosen to describe. And now Noah’s self-released tape is getting an “RA Recommends” spot alongside the last album I reviewed for them, which is on (the very established independent label) kranky! I scream for Cleveland.
I was telling my mom about my new jobs and my mom said, “you need your jobs now, so I hope you like them. It’s a balance with multiple jobs, but don’t give up your writing. That’s your gift.” All of the groundwork I’ve been laying all for the past year is to have the foundation secured for extended work on a project of this magnitude. I’m used to working more in like states of rapture late into the night on short-term assignments that are due soon or overdue, so it requires major changes to my process and how I work. I have to become very disciplined. But it feels really good to finally be in a place where stability is even possible in my life, as well as to be so close to the level of it that I need to truly embark on what I consider to be the real work of my life.
In other news, I’m finishing up the Mercury retrograde mixtapes. It’s been an extremely retrograde retrograde: I had to replace my car, a stereo amplifier, find new jobs…had a budding romance explode all of my patterns of codependency in my face…but I also got a lot out of this ass kicking, and I think I learned that they work in your favor if you really lean into them, rather than fighting them. I feel very strong and confident and I just went to the store and bought like every fresh vegetable, which is the most supreme mental and emotional health indicator for me. The new stereo amplifier is here—I just bought a cheap one for working on these tapes until I can get the $1200 Marantz I bought in the spring investigated properly, so hopefully it doesn’t sound like total horse shit—and I’m about to sign off here to get to work on the last of the tapes, which are studies for the fall 2023 seasonal mixtape I’m writing presently, called new harm(ony). Expect it to land in the next week or two.
I wrote a whole fall mixtape and had to rewrite it, but not entirely. The core idea is still the same, just a very different twist in how it does what it does (and what it means). It’s the conclusion of three years of this project and I’m planning to end it with a very big bang. I feel like when I face a lot of challenge and turmoil in creating the tapes and when I have to rewrite them after I think they are done, they are always stronger. Just like arguing with editors. I like the local Cleveland band, Swisher, so much that Side C has been all of Side A of their double cassette It’s Back on both versions!!!! They are kind of a secret Cleveland band like the Easter Monkeys, so it will be most of y’alls first opportunity to hear how sick they are. They are the opening band of the Cleveland Renaissance for sure. The turning point in this mixtape was when I changed the direction it went in entirely with the addition of “Get Thy Bearings” by Donovan, a track I am only familiar with because of a track list to a mixtape Jim Jones sent Pere Ubu on tour in 1990 then sent to me many moons ago by Allen Ravenstine…and that seems very fitting with being truly ready to settle into this work.
I have to go work on tapes before bed. Thanks for reading this if you did.
Yours in music,
EMD
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