Hello! A little bird told me I should have an email list! At a certain point, it becomes necessary to ask myself how much social media I am willing to do in order to try to get maybe one person to buy a Kicking Giant album, but I have been reminded that human beings are very strange, so I have to find every possible way to communicate with them online, accounting for the people who might only read an Insta story, those who might only read an Insta post, those who might actually never close Twitter, those who refuse to click links (to blogs), and those who only check their email and have made the very healthy decision to exit social media forever! (Congratulations!) Facebook appears to be basically dead, which is Very Good.
I am planning to just use this as a way of periodically aggregating my sonic adventures and analysis for the people who would access this content better as an email. It will be a culmination of my work on Very Good Haiku: A 2021 Music Writing Experiment, Bandcamp Day recommendations, and any new work I have published recently. Expect updates 1-2 times a month!
I polled the birds on Twitter and they agreed that I should stop allowing my Bandcamp Day recommendations to be lost to the void there, so last night I put all the February recommendations into a place it can live forever, or as long as I can afford my blog domain.
In addition to many Very Good Haiku reviews, I composed two crowd-sourced musical haiku essays, and I am very proud of this new experimental writing genre I have pioneered. I think it is pretty powerful, actually. The first is on birds, music, and America, composed on January 6th, a Noted Intense Day in America. The second is on snow and consciousness, composed from songs and related memories of snow submitted by folks, and written overnight between January 27th and 28th, as a way of processing the husband of one of my oldest friends taking his own life (becoming the eighth person in eight years I have known who has died from suicide or overdose.) Both of those are available on Page 2 of Very Good Haiku, but you have to scroll around a bit due to the nature of how I set that up. (The dates should help you locate those.)
Lastly, I published my first pieces of writing with Bandcamp in the last month: the 20th anniversary reissue of Mountains review that Mary Timony so deeply deserved and a label guide to one of my favorite labels, Atlantic Rhythms. I love the editors there and have been having very positive experiences working with them. (I am also happy to report that my teenage impression that the DC music scene was too cool for school and would probably be mean about it, based entirely on the cover of No Kill No Beep Beep by Q and Not U, appears to have been quite incorrect. I have received many notes of gratitude from the DC/Baltimore area’s music-loving folks for spotlighting their community, and they constitute the very best morning coffee reading I am aware of.)
Thank you for your interest in my thinking, writing, and listening. The music is always the way forward.
-EMD
Note: To catch you up if you are new, I have been giving every month of this year a theme song, and they have really been supporting my intentions for the month. January was “Mystery Achievement” by the Pretenders and February has been “Stereo Hi-Fi” by Kicking Giant. You can learn what March’s bit of sonic inspiration will be in my Bandcamp Day Reccos a week from today.