2023: AGAINST THE PRESS CYCLE, AGAINST THE RELEASE CYCLE, AGAINST INDIE CAPITALISM...
WE STAND UNCOMPROMISING IN DEFENSE OF AUTHENTIC ENGAGEMENT WITH MEDIA (AND A FREE PALESTINE)
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:
Winter 2023//forces at work for Patrick Crouch
Spring 2023//this is the chariot!!!!! for Shane C.
Fall 2023//new harm(ony) for Maria Barrios
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.