toads and mice

i sometimes feel curious about and nostalgic for stuff from my time in high school 'being in a band,' being a part of a no-name indie band and playing with/seeing other no-name bands, putting music on the internet, etc. At the time, putting music on the internet felt very 'big and important' but relative to today was trivially small and unimpactful on the world, and today, it is for the most part no longer on the internet. this topic is related to my general interest in how things on the internet decay over time - technology changes, websites close, accounts disappear - and it impacts art disproportionately, i think. some of the decay is intentional, e.g. from deleting personal social media accounts, while a lot of it is unintentional, just the result of capitalism churning through 'useless things' to make room for new ways to generate revenue, and often 'art' is a 'useless thing' and so disappears quickly.

 i'm thinking specifically about my experience watching the only music-hosting websites i used to post my own music and my band's music slowly fail and disappear over the last ~15 years. these include 1) jones music, which was an independent music streaming/sharing platform created/hosted by jones soda, 2) purevolume dot com, which allowed artists to upload something like 3-4 songs at a time for others to stream, and 3) myspace, which more people are familiar with, so i won't really talk about it much, but which was the first widely successful social media platform for musicians.

as a young teenager, i created mostly electronic ('techno') music using a free copy of Fruity LOOPS. i then discovered more kinds of music and moved onto making different kinds of music alone or with others: noise assemblage music using Fruity LOOPS and microsoft sound recorder, an improvisational noise band recorded onto cassette tape with real instruments, and later 'indie rock' using Audacity and live instruments, both as part of a band and alone, although my friends and i also engaged in several variously-serious recording projects using computer or cassette tape, including several 'fake bands' which we would put on myspace and attempt to hoax people with, as well as one-off, more 'serious' recordings by some more peripheral friends, which we would contribute to, etc. aside from whatever is sitting on my old laptop's hard drive, all of this music is now gone from the internet, probably gone forever.

it wasn't important music. if i listened to it now, i'm sure it would be worse than i remembered. but i'm mostly interested, right now, in the experience of seeing what felt like a 'safe'/permanent way to share music online slowly die out. i did not have access to any of the old email accounts used to open the original accounts and so had no way of preventing them from being removed, if that's what happened, like with xanga, for example, which removed all accounts that had been inactive for 5+ years some time around 2013. this is a common thing i think people my age are experiencing/will experience, from old email accounts to online games like neopets to old blogs and now even old accounts on instagram, etc. but i want to focus on music, here, if that's ok.

my first experience losing my own music was with jones music, which, for some reason, seemed to selectively lose music - my main account, which i remember adding several songs to, ended up only having 1-2 songs left, while other accounts didn't seem to lose songs. i remember something about only seeing one of my songs because someone had added it to a playlist, which is maybe why it was preserved for a while, but then this too was removed. the website has since disappeared entirely, i think, and i feel sort of insane now googling it, seeing only websites for Norah Jones or bands called The Jones or something like that. at the time it felt like a semi-popular, frequently used platform, but now it's gone. i think i original discovered the jones music website through adult swim forums, probably around 2003, something like that. anyway, it seems gone now and hard to research.

[update] i have since done more googling. the website was called MyJonesMusic dot com. i found an article on business wire on the announcement of its launch, and the url for my jones music is now some sort of vaguely spammy splash page about coronavirus and sleep apnea. my jones music was launched in 2004. i'm unsure when it closed officially. i have fond memories of drinking jones soda as a preteen/teenager, specifically the cream soda and fufu berry flavors, buying them form United Dairy Farmers, and collecting some of the bottles because of the pictures on the label. the jones soda wikipedia page does not mention my jones music at all.

purevolume is a site that i remember started as very small and then growing into a more legitimate platform - i remember being excited to see the mountain goats creating a profile, for example. you could add up to 3-4 songs that would play in a little flash music player. there was no 'social' component to purevolume - it was simply a repository for music, and i think a small number of pictures and maybe video. i had several accounts for my various recording projects, and most local bands used it as well. i remember sometime maybe 8 years ago the flash player stopped consistently working, and the internet moved away from flash. i believe most new browsers become incompatible with that version of flash, and then the website never mitigated this, and then it kind of completely fell apart. looking now, purevolume has deleted all music profiles and is now functioning as a sort of arts and culture news hub/blog. the purevolume wikipedia page mentions that it both "was" and "is" a website, which is funny to me.

myspace was, i think, the first major social media network, although it was, i think, preceded by friendster, which i know nothing about. i made my account i think in 2003 at the behest of my sister, who was in college. everyone in my social circle abandoned myspace in favor of facebook around 2007-2008, which means it was popular basically during the 4 years i was in high school, which feels 'lucky' to me, in that i got to experience/benefit from a sort of consistent, singular social media experience throughout high school. myspace was for both individuals as well as companies and bands; it was like purevolume in that artists/bands could have an account with something like 4 songs uploaded into a site-internal media player, but it included direct messaging and blogging/commenting capabilities, and individual users could use a band's uploaded music as a sort of background, autoplaying song on their personal myspace page. i remember using myspace to interact with bands both as a fan (eg messaging Architecture in Helsinki) and as someone 'in a band', coordinating gigs, sharing fliers, and generally making connections. for example, i remember my bandmate Zack had become friends with various independent musicians through myspace, including Hop Along, Queen Ansleis, which is now the vaguely-critically-acclaimed indie band Hop Along. my band was named after one of their songs. i also remember making internet friends with other musicians who used myspace as a place to host passion recording projects, including some girls in a band called something like Land! Sea! Escape! many people used myspace to host images, sort of like a proto-mood board function, and musicians often had great collections of images; i remember that band had very good, evocative images of themselves hunched over keyboards in a messy bedroom, for example. myspace has haphazardly phased out the musical artist hosting component of the site as well as i think every other component. i think for a brief time those were the only profiles left intact, although, like with purevolume, the flash-based media player stopped working. looking now, this seems to be the case - my old profiles still exist and songs are listed, but the media player doesn't seem to function.

the original purpose of this post, though, was to sort of leave a record of some things that have been forgotten by the internet. the above is all introduction. i want to talk about the band Toads and Mice.

Toads and Mice was a band from the dayton, ohio metro area (i think they lived in kettering, but i'm unsure now), active from something like 2004 to 2011, extrapolating from their official discography, which consists of EP (a 3-song, self-released cd-r EP from 2005), Toads and Mice (a full-length CD put out by Squids Eye Records in 2007), and Dark Party (a self-released, full-length digital/vinyl LP in 2010).

the band was, i think, mainly a song-writing conduit for Dustin Rose, who played guitar and sang. Toads and Mice, in all the incarnations i'm aware of, also included a bassist name Bradley and a drummer named Brandon. i remember seeing pictures on MySpace of the band from before i saw them live, and they had a second guitarist with short hair whose name i don't know, but by the time i got to know them, this guy had been replaced by a guitarist named Matt. by the release of Dark Party, Matt was no longer in the band; the discogs and bandcamp pages for Toads and Mice list them as a three-piece group.

Toads and Mice was preceded by (or run in parallel with) dustin's solo recording project, i think called something like Dustin Documents, and followed by the band Drose, which consisted of Dustin and two other people in columbus, ohio. dustin documents was a 'typical' non-promotable passion project which i feel was common on MySpace/Purevolume/other music websites from before soundcloud/bandcamp, and at some point i think i emailed dustin and he sent me several albums of this music, which ranges from drone synthy music with moaning vocals to experimental kind of indie rock and soundscapes, with few, if i remember correctly, typically-structured songs (i no longer have these emails, but my old laptop should have the music). Drose is a dark, industrial kind of drone/noise thing that seemed to have been slightly popular in Europe, and a european label last year put out a special collector's omnibus edition thing of Drose's 2012-2016 music.

i was in a band from the dayton, ohio metro area from 2005-2008, and thus attended multiple (maybe 7+) Toads and Mice performances and performed with them i think 2-3 times, had casual conversations with one or more members a few times, but otherwise knew nothing about them. one time we performed together was at a large christian rec center/coffee shop in a town i don't remember the name of, and the last time was at the cd release concert for Toads and Mice. i remember being thankful and humbled to be chosen to open for them for their cd release show, and i think this performance was coincidentally my band's best performance, and the only one that was blogged about (looking this up now, the original blog post i was thinking of doesn't exist anymore. i remember it had a good review of us, something about someone spilling beer because of being impressed, but the post is gone now). i remember seeing Toads and Mice perform at other venues whose names i forget now, including the basement of a photography studio in my home town and a few bars in Dayton. we may have performed with them a third time. i left for college in 2008, and never saw them perform as a 3-piece in support of Dark Party, although i did on several occasions see them perform a few of the songs that would end up on the album. 

i have a memory of attending one of their shows with some of my bandmates, just to see them and not perform with them, and Zack had snuck in a flask of whiskey and got really drunk (we were ~17/18), left the bar in between bands, and was 'kicked out'/blocked from returning by the bouncer before Toads and Mice were set to perform. i remember feeling frustrated/disappointed, and while Zack and some others left to do other things, i stayed and watched the performance.

every Toads and Mice performance i attended included a hippie-looking guy dancing very wildly/forcefully/annoyingly in the front row. sometimes people liked him and sometimes they didn't. i also remember it became a 'thing' at their shows to try to be the person standing closest to Dustin during the song "Undress", which involved him shaking a tambourine during the verse, and he never brought a stand or hook for the tambourine, so he would thrust it into the hands of the closest audience member during the chorus (many venues where my band and Toads and Mice performed did not have stages, but rather an open floor where everyone stood together). i remember appreciating this as a gimmick. i remember spending a lot of time trying to come up with gimmicks for live performances, sometimes successfully, i think because of my and my bandmates' mutual enthusiasm for The Unicorns, an indie band that had been famous for stage gimmicks, e.g. costumes and stage antics. many bands we played with leveraged different types of gimmicks. my favorite gimmick, aside from the Toads and Mice tambourine, was when this band One Cool Kid would perform 1-2 songs, then pause to switch instruments, e.g. the guitarist would transition to drums, etc., but the drummer for songs 3+ was left-handed, requiring completely reordering the drumkit between songs 2 and 3, which took something like 4+ minutes, it felt, which is a long time for a 30-40 minute performance slot. they also had christmas lights on their drums/amps and never talked to anyone, which were all good gimmicks, in my opinion. Toads and Mice otherwise had no/few gimmicks, although they had unintentional quirks. for example, their drummer is/was a very large man, tall and wide, and he was an incredibly proficient and physical drummer, and would end up completely drenched in sweat every performance, so he always took off his pants to reveal gym shorts prior to performing, and he would drink water from a gallon jug. i remember being incredibly attracted to Brandon in a non-sexual sense, because of his skillful drumming and passion and his full beard. their second guitarist, matt, was comically incongruous with the rest of the 'working class'-seeming bandmembers, and wore his hair in an emo swoop, wore pretentious band tshirts and tight-fitting jackets, and 'unnecessarily' played a Zakk Wild-branded signature Gibson Les Paul guitar. i remember audience members would often heckle him by shouting "matt wylde" when he was tuning his guitar. i believe he was the youngest member of the band and probably left to go to college.

the music of Toads and Mice evolved dramatically from their inception to their dissolution. the three songs on the EP range from slow and sad ("Men with Guns") to bright and dancey ("Africa"), with clean, bright guitars; "Africa" was a crowd-favorite during live performances. their self-titled CD continues this, with some more repetitive, minimal, math-rock-type songs with hooks and moments of catharsis, although some songs use an understated distortion, and the final track is a sort of dark, droney, creepy thing. Dark Party is stripped-down, dark, angry, confusing, and distorted; each song sounds like it was recorded live with no guitar or studio effects, and the song titles and lyrical content are strange and provocative, with songs like "Troll Dick" and "Dick Cheese" and "Dark Meat"and lyrics like "people make me / make my / my dick / fall off" and "i saw we kill him / he's over." i remember watching a short documentary/promotional video about the release of Dark Party, seeing them perform in a small, cramped stage in a bar to a small crowd [update: i have found the video - i admire how uninteresting the interview portion is]. you can still buy copies of the limited-edition record. i do not think people liked the record, but it has ended up being one of my favorite records, listening to it now 10 years later.

as a teenager, i was incredibly excited about/interested in the band. i felt really drawn to their music, their live performance, and their technical skills. they were the first band i listened to that played with minimalism and restraint and emphasized a tight performance, which had a big impact on me. watching the video of the Dark Party release, for example, i am still impressed by the ease with which dustin sings with eyes closed while perfectly playing a complex, intricate guitar melody. the only local band that excited as much around this time was when i saw Jet Kid Committee (who i think 'broke up'/formed new bands almost immediately after), but for different reasons. i remember listening to Toads and Mice's 3-song EP on repeat during short ~1-2 hour roadtrips, for example, coming home from staying in columbus to record music with my band one weekend, without getting bored. i also remember playing Toads and Mice during a road trip with my father, and him telling me that he thought it was boring, and asking to turn it off (this also happened with other music, which i think is funny). i learned about the band Battles from them, from a myspace post once, i think of the music video for "Atlas," to maybe frame this discussion in terms of mid-00's mathrock, which was semi-popular for a year or two.

Toads and Mice had released a recorded version of "Undress" with all four members on their MySpace page, although they later rerecorded it for Dark Party. a few songs were never officially released, including a song that was originally titled "Goro" but which was later renamed to something like "Little Baby Trash Can", which i remember asking Dustin about after some performance, and he said it was because they used a whiteboard in the rehearsal space to map out the understated but relatively complex song structure, and they 'ran out of letters', or something, and arbitrarily started drawing a trash can to represent one of the sections, and then a smaller trashcan to represent a separate, shortened repetition of that section, or something. they performed this song and "Undress" for some short-lived dayton in-studio/interview video program on the internet, which i think was called something inane like "Dayton Rocks" and no longer exists on the internet. then there was the song from the cd release party, and possibly others i can't remember or never saw live.

in 2010, when i was in spain, i spent a lot of time on the 4chan music board, downloading free music and wasting time while depressed/tired. at some point there was a brief discussion about dayton bands because i posted a link to Toads and Mice, and i think Bryan Baker of the bands Jet Kid Committee/Grizzzzy Bear/Astrofang was posting, and someone else mentioned that they had several live recordings of Toads and Mice, and sent me mediafire links for ~4 full Toads and Mice concerts. i never followed up with talking to any of these people and never saw dayton bands talked about on /mu/ after that. i listened to each concert recording maybe once, as they were pretty similar. this was the year that Dark Party came out, and i ordered an autographed copy of the record and a tshirt (the tshirt was printed wrong, at an angle, and looked bad). i still have the record, and just relistened to it a few times, which was sort of the genesis of this post.

something that interests me is that, while different, the three studio Toads and Mice releases are all united by a dark undercurrent in Dustin's lyrics, vocal delivery, and, in live performances, shy/uncomfortable/haunted demeanor. i often think about what can only be understood, to me, as a self-destructive anti-performance inherent to the setlist for their CD release party, as the first song they performed was a then (and now) unrecorded and thus unfamiliar-to-the-audience, slow, long, and bleak song. it felt like a challenge to the audience or a dismissal of the celebration we were presumably taking part in. while a lot of Toads and Mice's music pre-Dark Party had what felt like a happy simplicity to it, i think it was, all, inherently dark, in unique and varying ways, which made/makes the band and their music stand out to me, although the move to make the music itself reflect this darkness - embracing dissonance, aggression, distortion, and more confusing song structures - turned people off and probably contributed to the dissolution of the band. someone on a forum post about music from Dayton describes Dark Party as "dark, minimalist jazz-metal, if ever such a thing existed"

there are two videos of the band performing live on youtube (and three videos of my band performing live on youtube). i found them trying to confirm things i had remember about how the looked when they performed. in these videos, the drummer does not have a beard, which i'm surprised to see. according to a comment by the drummer's personal youtube account on the second video, the unreleased song i mentioned is called "I am a Rider." i also noticed that the drummer's crash cymbal is set relatively high, which may be an homage to/reference to/imitation of the drummer from Battles. his personal youtube account has ~4 videos of baby chickens and a video of someone laughing. dustin rose's personal youtube account has ~10 videos, one of which is him giving himself a mullet and then 'spazzing out' in a silly manner.

doing some more googling, i learned that their drummer Brandon was in an emo band called Simply Waiting, which he left in 2004 'to join Toads and Mice'. i found a couple songs on SoundClick - it sounds vaguely like The Mars Volta, but less interesting. i also learned that the Toads and Mice bassist Bradley was/is a freelance graphic designer, who had used a specially designed package for the Dark Party vinyl release in his portfolio.

squids eye records has long since ceased to exist and as far as i can tell most of the bands from that time period have broken up with their members moving to various other cities. i read an interview with someone adjacent to the label, who summarized this, and offered little else about what happened to anyone.

i'm connected with dustin rose on linkedin, somehow. it says he lives in san fransisco now and is a mechanical engineer in the automotive industry. i considered reaching out to email over email for an interview, but felt maybe that would detract from the idea of this blog post.

ok, i believe this is the most comprehensive write-up about the band Toads and Mice on the internet. i hope someone finds it interesting.