death egg

in early september, i published Death Egg by nathaniel duggan via back patio press. this was the first back patio book since sad sad boy, which i published in March 2022.

background and editing

i had maintained a loose email correspondence with nathaniel starting sometime in 2020, i think based on him sending me a poem for the quaranzine. we talked about our lives and poetry and indie lit drama for a while after this. i had given him editorial feedback on various poems during this time and encouraged him, i think, to make a collection.

looking at my email, on february 3rd, i gave him editorial feedback including "these are just great. great poems", a suggestion to change the name to death egg, and general praise such as "i really really find the thematic preoccupations and imagery compelling. the deployment of sci-fi intergalactic, video game, deep see, apocalypse imagery all mesh well, different hues of a perfect purplish blue. i think it's perfectly executed - the video games are not reddity wining or pop culture genuflection but are used as something to comment, i feel, on the larger cultural fuckedness, the integration of escapism into the despair pondering that feels subtle, effective, and non-clichely contemporary -- video games as the 'television of today,' etc. i can't say praise right, ever, i sound insane saying nice things, but i hope this makes sense[...]thank you for letting me read it. whoever publishes it won't do it justice." he did not pay me for these edits; i have also edited various versions of his short story collection manuscript, which i think a bigger publisher should put out, because it's very good.

after back patio fell apart in 2021/2022, and after i published some books unrelated to back patio, i felt more confidence in restarting the press mostly without cavin, and asked nathaniel to publish his book. before this i had suggested another limited-run book like orz, but then felt like trying something new/normal. cavin gave me his blessing to reopen the press in may. i reached out to duggan in june, i think, over twitter DM, to confirm my interest in publishing it as a back patio book.

once he agreed, i edited the book some more over maybe 3 rounds of edits, and then later 2+ minor edit rounds to clean up formatting and stuff. most of my edits were about sequencing, minor punctuation changes, a couple additional lines (partly through talking over DM and misremembering things from the poems, which he thought were good changes/ideas). some edits include "what about an exclamation point at the end of the first line?" and "recommend replacing last period with ‘, etc.’"

i only later learned that death egg is also the name of a spaceship or something from sonic the hedgehog. i do not know if this was intentional when he wrote the poem/lines about a death egg. i think it's a good, evocative, hard-to-say title that made the book feel unique. the sonic connection is mostly funny, and resulted in some good riffing online.

design

i did the inside layout and cover design. i used ms word and ms powerpoint. we iterated on the cover, manically, for like two weeks, before settling on the general cover we ended up with. stylistic themes to drive this work included bear parade/classic alt lit minimalism and anime. for a while there was a cracked egg on the cover, but this was eventually scrapped.

he wanted it to be yellow because he liked gg rolland's book on clash, which is mostly yellow. some versions accidentally used the same pink and yellow and font as my band's cassette three trucks, which was funny, but unacceptable to me, but, frustratingly for nathaniel, one of his favorite versions.

early on he had shared with me an image of an anime title card that he liked the look of. this is what influenced the final typography on the cover - the mix of japanese and the severe all caps serif font. another source of inspiration was the dvd cover for FLCL, with its bold yellow and black. i did not have the budget or interest to get a custom-drawn manga-style cover. i remember struggling with recreating manga-style 'beam attacks' using a free picture of a satellite with powerpoint for a while, then giving up.

the drawing on the final cover is from the public domain, i think from some lost in space comic, or something. i used similar pictures for interstitial art in the quaranzines. i get most of my free graphics from publicdomainvectors.org

the japanese on the cover is mostly from google translate, but some of it is the direct translation used from sonic the hedgehog for 'death egg.' i don't know much about japanese. an early ARC version we sent out had a 'pretend bad translation' synopsis that was embarassing, and which i thought i didn't include in the ARCs i had printed. the arcs were, additionally, very poor quality paper-wise and had a lot of formatting errors, and made me laugh a lot.

we decided on sans serif fonts on the inside to evoke classic alt lit aesthetics, because of the lineage of the poems/style and our shared appreciation for early alt lit. these aren't alt lit poems in any classic sense but have many shared reference points. i imagine someone more engaging than me could write up a better analysis.

i think the final product looks good and am proud of how it turned out.

promotion - ARCS/blurbs

i asked duggan for a list of potential blurbers and reached out to folks on his behalf. everyone had kind things to say, even if they didn't end up blurbing in time for the final printing. i enjoyed corresponding with people that i think/assume dislike me to this end. maggie nelson responded, unexpectedly, and gave me an address to send a book to, but clarified she didn't really do any blurbs anymore.

i also sent ARCs/final copies to people who do podcasts/reviews, but so far we never heard from anyone about these, although one person posted a picture of the book on twitter. i included a small press release, which i confided to josh sherman as "embarassing to write," not because of the book, but because of the vapid futility of writing press releases for small press books. i sent an ARC to the heavy feather review, but it was returned to me because the editors moved/changed. i also sent a free copy of the book to ~3 authors who i just thought would enjoy it, without expectation of promotion.

Promotion - local media

i reached out to several local maine venues for promotion, including duggan's alma mater university creative writing program to organize a reading. i was ignored by all of these leads except one daily maine-based blog, who requested a physical copy. one of the venues, a local tv channel, automatically blocked my email address.

Promotion - piss

the back patio twitter account reached out to several internet sex workers asking to send them books to pee on, as a promotional video effort, but this corresponded to the same week, or possibly day, that twitter made DMing people a bluecheck option only by default, so it's possible no one ever got the messages. this also includes dasha, a podcaster i don't know anything about. but we didn't ask her to pee on any books; we just asked if she'd like a copy, because she had posted about the same anime that inspired the cover design.

we also tweeted asking for folks to pee on the book if we sent an extra copy. i had forgotten who replied to this/was unsure how serious anyone was and only sent out one extra book, to coleman bomar, who peed on it and posted a video. later someone else from tennessee ordered a book and asked for some of coleman's pee, which i do not have access to. i am unsure why pee was a central theme for the book promotion, but it worked out well, i think, and made me laugh a lot.

Promotion - preorder bundles

we also offered a bundle of a shirt, magnet, and book. the shirt making has been a shitty, still unresolved saga, wherein i tried to have them made locally to support local businesses and save money on shipping. but i ended up working with perhaps the shittiest shirt printer in the state, who would ignore my emails, ghost me, forget to email me, argue with me, etc. currently the shirts are in a store location i cannot access until friday, and they will likely not be open on friday. i regret not going through the florida-based printer we used for the liver mush shirts, who were professional and easy to work with. i opted to send the books/magnets separately from the shirts, losing ~$70 on redundant shipping costs. i ordered only 40 shirts after announcing 50 bundles, based on the total sales (~14), and will keep one for myself and send one to nathaniel. the shirts will ultimately, i feel, be a net loss, and i will probably eventually offer them for sale at cost just to not have them in my closet anymore.

Promotion - misc.

i posted links to a few excerpts from other magazines from the book via the back patio account. none of these resulted in the original publisher promoting the book or, seemingly, liking the posts. we later made tweets tagging magazines that hadn't published the poems, saying they published them, in an attempt to trick the publication into promoting the book for free and/or make people laugh. only one publication liked their corresponding tweet, but didn't retweet it.

i made a new website for back patio to collate the press/reviews materials and book descriptions. i then reached out to kevin at powell's who asked for just such a list, so i secured a small order of back patio books, including five copies of death egg, resulting in a small section of shelf space dedicated to back patio books. the tweet about this got high engagement. i should reach out to more cool stores.

i placed a quarter-page ad for the press, including a highlight for death egg, in maggot brain magazine, a print magazine published by third man records and edited by the guy who wrote the 33 1/3 book about loveless, which should be out around now. this cost me $187. i would be surprised if it ends up paying off, but it seemed like a fun thing to do, and i like the magazine a lot (i also get a free copy of this issue, apparently). some of the other ads are for punk/diy record labels based on bandcamp, which is cool, in my opinion.

josh sherman invited me and nathaniel, and other people, to read at his chapbook release reading as part of misery loves company, which we hijacked, to comedic effect, i think, to promote death egg. nathaniel did a good job reading and i posted the order page a few times when people were talking about josh's book, which made me laugh. we got ~3 book sales during the reading. we've also scheduled a back patio mlc reading for 9/29, which will include, nathaniel, cav, dan, graham, kurt, tj, and troy.

i regret not reaching out to more internet and irl places early on for reviews/interviews. however, this time period corresponded to a family crisis which resulted in me taking time off of work and not doing anything much aside from acting in 'crisis mode' for my family for over a month. i spent ~1-2 hours/week during this time working on death egg. to this end i feel guilt about not being able to do more for the book/nathaniel.

finally, we opened the magazine for web subs just prior to announcing the book. this was a partly cynical/manipulative move to drive up engagement for the press and potentially sell more books. however, i am unsure this resulted in any sales we wouldn't have otherwise gotten. but overall it was good for everyone. we all enjoyed reading and editing the pieces we got and we have published, and will continue to publish, some really cool writing. i'm glad we reopened and we will probably do it again in january. i owe kurt a lot for taking on a lot of this effort when my life fell apart in august.

sales - preorders

we announced preorders sometime in august and i shipped the preorder books around september 7th. there were 62 preorders at the time, 12 of which were for tshirt + book bundles. we have since sold a few more of each.

the free promotional stickers for orders included random mixes of black and white stickers ("i love shitty poetry", "alternative literature", "death egg cover", and "back patio press logo"), glitter stickers ("back patio in barbie font on a gun"), holographic stickers (misc. "cyberwriter" series, featuring sebastian, derek, bram, and nathaniel), and a bold yellow (but small) "ask me about the death egg" sticker. i used sticker guy for the black and white stickers and sticker mule for the fancier ones. sticker guy is very cheap but slow, and their website is difficult to navigate. sticker mule can be expensive, but offers interesting products and has frequent sales.

only 3 of the death egg orders included other books/items: one person bought my book bundle, one person bought liver mush, and one person bought good at drugs.

i sent free back patio books to ~10 random orders, and gave free art or bonus stickers to people i know/like from online. as far as i can tell this resulted in ~3 promotional twitter pictures and one goodreads review for non-death egg books.

around september 7th i sent nathaniel $301 in royalties.

sales - amazon

around when i started shipping books, i sent nathaniel all the raw book files and manically worked with him to set up the book on amazon kdp as a print and ebook. amazon kdp/ebook setup is a pain in the ass and required several different types of files and arbitrary changes. for the ebook, i had to manually add page breaks (instead of using the keyboard shortcut, for some reason) to get them to register. we set up the amazon book using his own account such that he'd by default receive all the amazon royalty payments. this approach was modeled after sebastian castillo's book SALMON and inspired by the fact that it's a huge pain in the as to do amazon royalties (especially after taking over for cavin - setting up a new bank account, etc etc). in exchange nathaniel gets a smaller royalty split on the books that i sell. since being put on amazon, we've sold 2 copies of the book through flat dog distro but seemingly many on amazon. i hope nathaniel considers the money aspect equitable.

the book peaked at #53 in the contemporary fiction (books) category on amazon, spurred on by duggan's manic promotional tweeting and "post weird twitter" networking. he had also purchased twitter blue in anticipation of the promotion cycle, which he claims de creased his post engagement, ironically.

nathaniel says he's sold 45 copies on amazon since we uploaded it, which is impressive, i feel.

sales - conclusion

so far we've sold a little over 100 books during the first few weeks and gave away ~10, which is, in my opinion. very good numbers for indie poetry that doesn't take institutional promotion tactics very seriously. incidentally, unrelated, i saw that clash had sold over 12,000 copies of some stupid looking horror novel during this time. i hope that people who may or may not be seething about the death egg hype cycle, its participants, and its aura of success consider this disparity when subtweeting/shittalking those involved.

i anticipate the book selling more copies over time, especially if we see continued press interest from local or online avenues, and natural interest in the book as people talk or post about it. it currently has 3 amazon reviews and 8 goodreads reviews.

thank you to everyone who has purchased the book.

songs i liked 2022

 starting some time in early spring 2022 i started making monthly playlists on spotify to share the music i was then enjoying with my friend nick. he'd do the same, and we shared a lot of music this way. the music, for me, was usually just 'new to me' stuff but sometimes things i liked from a while ago and would revisit. most of the newer music or new to me music came recommended by the bl0wjob boys, but sometimes would come from spotify's recommendations, or just new music from bands i like, or listening to the radio, or hearing about stuff on music podcasts like Indiecast or 60 Songs that Defined the 90s.

here is a (probably overly ambitious) write up of each song that i put on these playlists. i put the playlist on shuffle and tried to write about each song while it played. note there are sometimes 2-4 songs by a given artist, usually because of new album releases, and i would have a hard time picking just one song by an artist to share with nick.

Blessing - Alex G: I had never really listened to Alex G before this song. the hype surrounding it/the new album made me curious. i liked its ridiculousness immediately, the random "whuh!!"s and the whispering, the nu-metal music video, then came to appreciate the composition, lyrics, and sonic palate. enjoyed thinking of the album as something that would be insane and weird, and while this wasn't the case, I did end up enjoying the album a lot.

Here Comes the Hotstepper - Ini Kamoze: this is a famous 'sports song' that i was reminded of due to that pat finnerty youtube series about bad songs (this was, he noted, a good song). he, i think, described the song as consisting of 3 hooks and nothing else, which feels insightful and true. catchy, funky, fun. had it stuck in my head for ~5 weeks over the summer. enjoyed learning that algorithmic playlists categorize it as 'sports arena song' and not reggae or ska or whatever, it's always grouped in with 'thunderstruck' and that queen song.

Runner - Alex G: catchy, simple, pleasant. the piano and guitar reminded me of that tupac song. i remember enjoying thinking of this album as basically being alex g's rap album, in spite of the lack of rap. i enjoy all the weird production quirks re vocal delivery/manipulation. watched a live video and was very bored; felt similarly trying to play it myself on guitar.

Twin Plagues - Wednesday: crow turned me onto wednesday after sharing the semi-viral tweet about them losing money playing sxsw; i was dismissive of the complaint because they don't include merch sales in their budget - you can sell band shirts for like $15 markup. crow was very defensive of the band and i bought their album sort of jokingly, but then listened to it for real; my old address was saved on bandcamp and i never got the vinyl album, and i was refunded without being aware. i have lost several records through moving, most annoyingly the 2016 repress of the lovesliescrushing debut album via kickstarter - it was delivered to my old apartment and disappeared, is now worth probably $100+. anyway i like this song and most of wednesday's music i've heard. forerunner 'country shoegaze' shit, which seems really hot right now. good riffs in this song in particular.

I Poured Sugar in Your Shoes - Horse Jumper of Love: i love this band and have seen them live 3x, really got into their first album for a while. Felt mild disappointment with their second album. This is the lead single from their third album, which i have found myself going back to often and enjoying despite originally not liking it as much. this is a simple pop song that could/should have had wide radio play on alt stations, but maybe their PR engine wasn't up to snuff. or maybe it's too slow. i like its simplicity and earnestness in spite of some of the traditional HJOL weirdness.

I Feel So Weird! - Cheekface: Heard another song by them (elsewhere in this list) on a local radio station. I enjoy their style. This is from their 2022 album which has more fun production choices - i like the cash register sound and drum machine tones on this one, and the shouting/whispering. Otherwise it's a typical cheekface song, a bunch of dry one-liners delivered over a sort of uptempo cake-like powerpop. this album has a lot of eerie similarities to my book, so i sent them a copy based on danielle chelosky's intervention on twitter.

Cruel Summer - Bananarama: Heard this on the local radio station that plays B/C-tier 80s/90s minor hits often. Never knew anything about the band except their dumb name. Enjoyed this because it reminds me of The Casket Girls, who were on Graveface and had minor radio play on WICB ~2015. I feel like I have a fraught relationship with 80s synthy music. There's a lot of shit going on in this song, composition and production-wise. But I think it's good, makes me wanna dance, and is catchy, in spite of being broody and minor key.

Genius of Love - Tom Tom Club: i have slowly been getting into talking heads since ~2018. have heard this song discussed on various music podcasts, felt intrigued about the idea of this band being a talking heads spin-off that made hip hop. some podcast mentioned how often this song has been sampled in rap music, or recreated without proper sampling, and then last night i heard one of them on the local throwbacks/rap radio station (big energy by latto). the original song is basically just carried by the synth/guitar hook, everything else in it feels superfluous. insane that it's over 5 minutes long.

The End - Glitterer: listened to this album based on a spotify suggestion. enjoyed its mix of vaguely screamo vocals and cheesy/bad synth sounds. later determined it's a solo project by one of the guys from title fight, which makes it all make sense. listening to it now with headphones for the first time, the hard-panning on everything is horrific, would not recommend. sounds good in a room, though. bought this and another glitterer album on vinyl. i like the song title.

Northern Exposure - Cheetahs: a vaguely generic nu-gaze revival band from like 2014. randomly found this song on spotify i think. mostly enjoy the chord progression in the chorus, the unexpected second chord. enjoyed hearing ian cohen randomly mention this band/album on indiecast just after i had listened to the album a few times. the album is mostly whatever but this song is good. reminds me of japanese shoegaze from the 00s, something like cosmicdust, with the vocal treatment, guitar solo, and programmed drums.

Pig - Sparklehorse: Have enjoyed sparklehorse off and on since ~2008. Unsure why i relistened to this song and put in on the playlist - i think it's just really fun and good. i like the chorus a lot, and how it's one of the songs where he sings really high/weird. sparklehorse fucking rules, in general. everyone should listen to some sparklehorse. even though i don't think he ever did a perfect album, i think he's done some perfect songs.

Hey Now! - Oasis: my brother loves oasis, i never really did, but i like some of the singles. i keep randomly trying to get into them. this song seems good. i like the vibe of it, the slower, looser sound, doesn't fit in either their design-in-a-lab pop side or their generic bluesy rolling stones ripoff side. i like the sliding guitar lines and the way the verse bars end, with the bum dun dun dun. fun move, and the bar that's only 2 counts before the prechorus(?...haven't studied the composition of this song that much). insane it's almost 6 minutes long.

Toontown - MJ Lenderman: great parallelism in the verses (a standard in good country music, i learned via podcast) and wordplay (i typically don't like wordplay), bleak slowcore-style composition. he's in Wednesday, weirdly is doing a solo career that seems to be getting equal acclaim as the main band at the same time. i think he's a great lyricist on this album even on the songs i don't get into that much. seems like an iconic song for the burbling genre revivals going on, a mix of shoegaze, slowcore, and alt country. laughing at the idea of it being manufactured in a lab for maximum hipster cred in 2022.

He's Seeing Paths - Parquet Courts: bought their light up gold album in ~2013 when it came out because of a review on npr, i think. never heard this song before this year but it's now included on the spotify version of this album. really catchy, really great dumb casio keyboard drum loop, fun feedback usage and dumb noises throughout, its basis on a great bass line and drum pattern. in spite of all the neoliberal pretentious whatever about this band, i think they've made like 11 perfect songs and this is one of them. i also like the evocative dadaism of the title/chorus lyrics.

Party Drugs - Jessica Lea Mayfield: crow seemingly binged this song after i didn't see him talking about it originally, had no idea what he was talking about when he brought it up again. incredible song. i like the sparseness and warped guitar sound. sounds like cat power mixed with this particular bedhead song; i keep expecting a bass drum +high hat to come in on the first beat like in the bedhead song. enjoyed this album a lot, enjoyed listening to it while walking alone at night.

Buchona Vibez - Jenny69, DJ Morphius, Muzik Junkies: my alexa-enabled device played this randomly when i asked for something completely unrelated and i think it fucking rips. fun spoken word/interview sample mixed with an incredibly dumb-sounding synth line and a two-note synth bass line. will not speculate on the genre, which i am sure is a complex and complicated endeavor.

Noodles - Cheekface: powerful move to make such a good song that's just two chords and the only lyrics being "a big cup of noodles (yeah) / a giant cup of noodles." the clipped screaming in the second half is a great sound. the song ended before i could write this whole blurb. am writing this part while listening to...

Blackout - Boris: forget why i decided to listen to pink this year. i remember it was popular on /mu/ in like 2007-2011 but i hadn't gotten into doom or even shoegaze much by then to appreciate it enough. but it's good, and this song was kicks ass. big and loud. i like the effect of the single short guitar delay where the echo has unity volume/gain with the input, seems innovatively simple. this song made me want to start a band again.

Rockets - Cat Power: i think troy was talking about cat power. never listened to her before. impressed by this album's contemporary feel and similarities to early modest mouse guitar-wise. i think i listened to this album while outside on a summer day working on fixing the chicken coop. i like the slow build of this track, how it seems to be recorded live, how the individual parts meanderingly change.

Ted Talk City - Cheekface: this is the song i heard on the radio. i thought it sounded like they might be giants and it was stuck in my head for a day. looked it up and felt a mix of interest and dismissal. i was eventually fully won over. i like the pun-based prechorus. i find myself singing variations of the title about other things, like "wet butt baby / can change your life." i think they're good at recording/production, curious if they use an outside producer.

Peng! 33 - Iron and Wine: this is an old cover of an older stereolab song. i forget why i relistened to it in 2022. i think i wanted to explore some more quiet folky stuff for autumn days and vaguely remembered iron and wine, who i had never listened to when they were popular. more people should cover early stereolab. this is the only iron and wine song i know or care about.

There's My Dini! - Ovlov: got int ovlov this year because of buds. i like the vocal delivery ("don't forget your uuuuuuuuuuuuuuniform!!") on this one and the whole sound of the chorus, with the droning guitar line over the bass. i think ovlov's earlier work in general is like 85% for me...something about the sameness of the production and some of the tame vibes in spite of the blown out sound. this one, and some others, stood out to me from Tru. could see myself getting really into them over the next year, maybe.

Our Team - Big Kids: unsure why i bought this album but i did and it kicks ass. it's like a 2010 twinkly emo take on blink-182 vibes. i think i was looking at stuff on the same label to justify purchasing a random teenage cool kids album, ended up really liking this one. big hooks, cathartic shit, no melodrama or attempts at being overly clever. i like the album cover a lot, too.

Stampede - Hotline TNT: the latest band/project by the guy from Weed, so it was brought up in the bj chat. i get big astrobrite vibes from this album, with the vocals and guitar tone. it's like higher-fidelity astrobrite, in 2022. in live videos, their drummer kicks absolute ass, but on the recording it's mostly nondescript pre-programmed drums.

Hunned Bandz - Tanukichan: this is a spotify rec, came on randomly and i thought it was great. big blown out heavy fuzz bass and guitars. unfortunately it's one of the few compelling songs on the album. i like the descending chord progression and the sound of the guitars. reminds me of something but idk what. the lead guitar lines are understatedly complex and compelling.

Robert Frost - Mal Blum: random spotify rec, i think based on cheekface (the algorithm has decided that cheekface is contemporary queercore, i think). i like the simple 4-chord punky approach and melody. read later that they were semi-popularized due to that annoying podcast welcome to nightvale, i think. have enjoyed mal blum records since hearing this song but haven't really done a deep dive. good background music. i appreciate the vocal range on this song incl. the self-harmonies, feels unique.

Gobbledigook - Sigur Rós: only great sugur rós song. good memories listening to this in my dorm room on my macbook in 2008/2009. unsure why i relistened to it. running out of energy to write these. it's not actually the only good sigur rós song.

Fumble - Architecture in Helsinki: relistened to this song/album because of trying to figure out what song that part in Bad Habit by steve lacey sounds like, remembered how much this song rules, especially the chorus. saw them live in ~2006 and they were great. in classic AIH fashion the core of the song is only ~1.5 minutes long, followed by a ~1.5 minute interlude/outro

Chores - feeble little horse: another spotify rec. i like the glitchy guitar sound and the drop/open tuning based riffs. the lyrics and vocal delivery are fun/unserious, including the dumb rhyme in the chorus. i like the inclusion of the singer laughing, seems underutilized in contemporary music. this song feels representative to me of subtle movements in computer-recorded rock music in the early 2020s, feels like there should be more critical discourse re genre and music production based on this....something about katie dey, 100 gecs, spirit of the beehive, they are gutting a body of water, other shit i'm not cool enough to know about...

Lights On - Hatchie: this album was recommended on indiecast and described as something like "mall shoegaze" and made me curious. it's definitely like a late 90s alternative pop singer-styled album...hard to articulate what this sound is...definitely sounds familiar to something i listened to when i was a kid...but with cooler/warblier guitars and synths. this one is simple in its catchiness and repetitive chorus but with maybe 2nd/3rd level complexity in the composition over normal pop music. impressed that it takes over an entire minute to get to the chorus.

A Forest - The Cure: never really deep dived into the cure until this year, because of this song, seeing a live version of it from 1981. i remember really being blown away by the fullness of sound achieved with the flange on the guitar and delay on his vocals over top the simple bass and drums. just recently bought 17 seconds on vinyl, slowly getting more into it in spite of the sort of over-the-top gothy moodiness in it. this song's great though. am now a fan of the cure. the live video also helped reset my image of robert smith as a young sexy 20 somethings guy instead of how i had always known him, which was an old fat man sitting in a bed (some press photo in spin magazine ~2005).

Ammohead - Shelf Life: troy recommended shelf life. i like the marching vibe and needlessly harmonics-heavy lead guitar line. vocally reminds me of LVL UP and something else i can't place. this song also samples fred durst shouting "fuck off!"

Freak Like Me - Adina Howard: heard this on the hip hop throwbacks station. enjoyed its g-funkiness and how she sings instead of raps, feels unique in that way. also a big fan of the 'pump pump!' backing vocal track. enjoyed feeling very confused reading her various wikipedia pages. i like the slight emphatic delay she puts on the word 'freak' throughout this song.

Sister Ray - Velvet Underground: never really listened to VU. saw some joke tweet about how white people love songs where lou reed goes "suck suck suckin on ding dongs" so i looked it up and enjoyed the song (i am white btw). i like how influential this song must have been for btoh stereolab and parquet courts, in different ways. prefer the first half with the motorik beat more than the second half with the 2-step beat. made me walk around muttering "suck suck suckin on ding dongs" for a week.

"Listen to Your Heart." "No." - Cheekface: great song. "a giant pretzel could make you feel better." highlights my main complaint with cheekface is that the pre-choruses reuse the same lyrics in a way that feels underwhelming since lyrically the songs don't ever really differ between verse and chorus, everything's a disassociated one-linger. not gonna keep writing about cheekface.

Hold - Infinity Girl: harm is probably one of my favorite albums. really dug this album in late 2016, randomly relistened a few times this year. this is their best album imo, and this song boasts some of the coolest guitar tones and playing on the album.

Natural Devotion - SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE: came on randomly on spotify once and i thought the part where the fuzz kicks in kicked ass. have enjoyed replaying just that part really loud alone in my home.

Space Ooze - Happy Diving: this band kicks ass. listened to them pretty regularly for the past few years, even though they only have like 2 albums. i just love how loud and blown out it all is, and the weirdly low vocal range. great melodies and riffs. i remember having a hard time picking which happy diving song i'd send nick, unsure why i settled on this one. enjoy the confidence of ending a song on a guitar solo, feeling like i have a strange negativity associated with songs ending on long instrumental passages. unsure why. but this one's good.

Sitting on the Porch at Night - Horse Jumper of Love: i like the driving stomp of the verse and some of the vocal delivery during the verses, like when he goes "ooh!" and "uh!" and "roars like!" and "look! through!" idk the more i listen to this hjol album the more i like the approach to songwriting. i think they're slept on.

First Drum Set - Pedro the Lion: really liked this song but didn't really dive into the new album. since 2017 he's been making these autobiographical albums about his childhood. this one's a simple one about getting his first drum set. several parts/lines make me emotional, but i also acknowledge that i'm more put off by the overly dramatic delivery on most of this album. been slowly getting into the pedro the lion discography since ~2018 when i heard a song from phoenix at a coffee shop. i like that he plays a drum fill when he talks about learning how to play drum fills. this is one of ~3 songs that nick unknowingly put in his playlists to send back to me, ostensibly forgetting that i'd shared them with him first, which makes me laugh.

Bug House - Momma: i think crow shared this one. i like the guitar and bass sounds a lot. good, broody, 90s-influenced indie rock with interesting melodies and counterpoints between vocals and guitar. have enjoyed this album a lot but haven't relistened to it recently. i think i was let down by their album after this one, that came out in 2022.

Cheer Up, Chihiro! - Ovlov: sold me on the sax solo. got me into ovlov.

Dissembler - Cloakroom: this song kicks ass. it consists of 4 distinct sections and bears a lot of narrative weight in the concept album that it appears on. but mostly it's like a perfect mix of doomy stoner metal riffage and boot scootin' line dance. this is either my 1st or 2nd favorite song on the album. i think the 3rd section helped me come to appreciate the cure more, as well. my baby has taken ~85% of naps to a playlist/burned cd based on this album and i rock my baby to sleep for nearly every nap, so i've listened to this song 1-3 times per day since, possibly, last january.

Got the Life - KoRn: i liked korn when i was ~10-11, decided to revisit them a bit because of troy. this song's great. i like various minor components of it throughout, from production to performance to composition. rewarding to listen to with headphones. the bridge around 2:20 sounds like a modest mouse song. imagined listing all ~50 specific moments i like in the song and going insane.

Bull Believer - Wednesday: a long, epic, propulsive, catchy, cathartic, boundary-pushing song. makes me excited for the next wednesday album. cemented for me the perfection of slide guitar as an instrument of shoegaze mayhem; the slide guitar lines are consistently my favorite parts of this song. the full-band parts sound rich and cohesive. interested in the totally dry vocal treatment, how well it works throughout. rarely actually listen through the end, with the prolonged screaming, but it's worth listening to at least a few times.

SICK OF IT* - Jean Dawson: crow randomly shares contemporary rap/hip hop i would have never otherwise heard. he seems weirdly tapped into new rap. this is more like pop music, that weird niche of rappers making pop punk, kind of, but this has much more interesting production, guitar and synth textures throughout. watched a video of him performing live with a band and he stands still the entire time, barely moving - an incredibly unengaging performance, just blisteringly bad. 

Southern Sky - Alex G: i really just love that piano riff at the start, and then other later piano riffs. have referred to alex g as a 'riffmaster' to people. considered being a guy whose favorite alex g album is house of sugar just to confuse/piss people off.

Nightshade - LVL UP: great band, this is from their first album i never got as into, but it's a great song. like the rest of the album, it's very short and is based on a pixies chord pattern. there's a great live version of this song recorded in an arcade.

Mortal Bus Boy - Shelf Life: from a pretty eclectic cassette of home-recording-type indie songs. i think this one has a really good set of melodies and delivery. reminds me of vaguely generic 00's indie music like girls in hawaii, in a good way. the distorted guitar part toward the end is great.

Oblivious - Jessica Lea Mayfield: it's like cat power but with grunge guitars. i just love the two-chord bum bum bum deee dee dee dee part. just a great guitar line. could listen to it for days. too much reverb on the vocals. this album is pretty great overall. feels impressively 2022 in vibe but was released in like 2014, seems insane. she's a visionary.

The Brazil - They Are Gutting a Body of Water: mostly just love it for the 'doot doot doot / doot doot doot' sample. have enjoyed TAGABOW as fuzzy background music in Q4 2022, i think because of an indiecast reference. crow hates indiecast and whenever he recommends music that ian cohen recommends on the show, i tell him that ian has already told me about it just piss him off; crow recommended this EP after i heard it on indiecast, is why i bring this up.

Bad Habit - Steve Lacy: also discussed on indiecast, how, unexpectedly, this song had become so popular, and made me curious. really catchy and with shitty chillwave/indie production from like 2009 which appeals to me and contributes to the incredulity at it being so popular...like it's shocking such a cluttered, murky, unpolished sound can attain number one hit status in 2022. helps me feel fully disassociated from the modern world in its entirety. the vocal-only bridge part sounds like either an architecture in helsinki or bilinda butchers line, with the delivery and melody. every time this song is on the radio, my older kid tells me to turn it off, unsure why...i think because my kid instinctively hates things i like.

Tame - Pixies: randomly revisited this album after getting really into it ~2013 after getting into their greatest hits in ~2008. i like the 3x bar structure of the chorus and the way he squeals, and the breathy uhhuhhuh part. the pixies ruled.

Hangover Game - MJ Lenderman: probably my favorite lenderman song. i like the lyrics a lot. great lyricist. something really moving and open about the way he sings "yeah i like drinkin' too / i like drinkin' too." it also sounds a bit like a sparklehorse song. enjoy the michael jordan reference-basis of the song; have made joke videos for the bj boys where i write spoof wednesday/lenderman songs about random shit from the nineties.

I Don't Know How I Survive - Death Cab for Cutie: never got into them when they were big aside from rando singles. i hear their new singles on alternative radio stations all the time. i still check in on new, post-hype albums by big names from the 2000s indie wave. this album is imo the best one in recent memory, in spite of its flaws and sometimes soulless, quantized production; leagues better than the latest modest mouse, arcade fire, andrew bird, etc etc etc albums. but i like how loud the chorus gets on this song. it seems like they tried to have fun and lean into some ideas on this album in a way that's encouraging for such a legacy act. i also like how this song, and some others on the album, incorporates guitar feedback. someone on a podcast maybe mentioned how uncommon it is to hear guitar feedback in pop music, i think in part due to how over-produced and computerized everything is. have been doing a slight deep dive into their discography because of this song/album.

Godzilla - Fu Manchu: spotify randomly recommended the 'this is fu manchu' playlist and i got into it, very dumb, fun stoner metal riffage and stupid lyrics. this song is basically built on the 'smells like teen spirit' chords and is about godzilla. "oh no / they say he's got to go / go go godzilla" is such a supremely dumb and great lyric. would enjoy being in a stupid stoner metal band like this, too, i think.

Lost in the Supermarket - The Clash: heard this on that radio station that plays older b-tier hits. felt surprised that it was by the clash (i had never knowingly listened to the clash). had it stuck in my head for a week. i like the guitar tone a lot, feels impressively contemporary, and the bass part is good. you're laughing. i'm writing about discovering the clash when i'm 33 and you're laughing.

Talk Me Out of It - Pope: i love pope. randomly heard them on /r/shoegaze in ~2015 and have followed them since. just excellent 90s alternative-influenced post-shoegazey rock. great rhythm guitars, lots of hooks. i like the conceit of this song, lyrically, and the vocal melodies. highly recommend their album fiction and their first ep, known weed smoker. 

Love Without Emotion - Pissed Jeans: ben devos got me into pissed jeans when i interviewed him about the bar is low, which is named after a pissed jeans song from this same album. i like this song's hook, how the first chorus is actually a guitar solo, the image of him eating ice cream and complaining about bad food. really catchy overall.

There's Nothing - Shout Out Louds: this is from a 2005 album i was into ~when it came out, based on seeing music videos on tv. it's their only album that sounds like this, with the cool guitar work and more standard indie rock elements (their second album is basically a mid-career cure rip off). unsure why i picked this song specifically, as i don't like it as much as some of the other songs. maybe i really just like the bendy and fucked up guitar line throughout.

email vs blog

i want to write something for my blog that isn't just a book review, but i also have many emails to respond to, from friends. i enjoy writing and receiving long emails, but i also, for whatever reason, get paralyzed by the task of responding to a long email. i have been thinking a little bit about what i choose to say in emails vs what i choose to say in a blog post. i think direct communication with someone where you have context, historical precedent, and some amount of mutual vulnerability is freeing in a way that a blog can't be.in an email to a writer, i mentioned writing lots of emails to other writers, and then later included random excerpts from those emails, which was funny to me, sending things i wrote to other people to someone else.

for this blog post i've decided to just list some non-sequitur-seeming lines from emails i've written to other authors. in compiling this, it sort of reads like a bunch of tweets, which seems interesting

excerpts of emails i've sent to other writers

i like the idea of peeing as a defense mechanism, and how effective it's been. it's like it's his niche combat move to compensate for being slow and fat, like a pokemon or something.

i've read some random good things by various people. 

there's a great little scene where the characters are watching some video footage of a riot and a guy beats this other guy's ass, knocks him out cold, then pulls down the dude's pants and psray paints his cock and balls, and the characters watching are like "what the fuck," talking about it, and the one guy is like "yeah no spraying the guy's cock was retarded."

feel like i felt that way and said something to that effect to you a long time ago but now i feel differently. 

the most depressed i ever felt, maybe, was when i was applying for jobs to get out of grad school, but part of that was also knowingly applying for jobs i knew i was unqualified for, in academia, which i'd only get if i could also finish my dissertation, which i knew i couldn't do. 

bruiser is dope (heh)

i go back and forth. i try to send some stuff out throughout the year to stay 'engaged' and like i'm 'contributing' or something. always bummed me out when my favorite authors stopped sending shit to indie mags so i wanna keep doing that to spite them

you gotta trust toddlers

i have some vague conviction that how gen z uses social media will change things in the next few years - there's that push to decentralize/publicize social media but gen z is doing it via public and private networks/accounts. and people are being sick of being sold to, of everything being monetized, of everything they say being potential fodder for retribution in 1-10 years

feeling embarassed about you 'already knowing' birds have 2000+ feathers

i've only seen one person directly/indirectly shittalk me/the book

i've been waking up every day at 5:45 to do chicken chores for months now and do i breathe in the bright morning air, look at trees, smile and think of god in the details? no, i just blearily carry out my duties and then try to go back to bed as soon as possible. it's stupid, and i feel stupid for thinking it'd be different.

every time i think of the author, eugene marten, i think of the comedian, eugene merman, who did this stupid and weird internet show in like 2008

i remember listening to george saunders on otherppl and him saying something like "what you want to write might not be what people like - you should find what people like and write that" and it left a bad taste in my mouth. i don't think i care about what people like in a broad sense, and am more interested in what interests me or feels innovative or interesting based on my experience or perception of writing.

i get uncomfortable meeting people or talking to strangers

brief book reviews

feeling weird because for the last couple weeks i was unable to read as much as i usually do. part of this was because i suffered from a prolonged, acutely painful gout flair up that lasted ~10 days, preventing me from walking my dogs in the mornings, which is usually when i am able to read almost uninterrupted for ~20 minutes each day. and then shortly after that subsided, my toddler stopped sleeping well, and now most nights i have to sit with my toddler to induce sleep and wake up and repeat one or two times in the middle of the night, making my own bedtime chaotic and ruining my energy level throughout the day, meaning reading books at night in bed is harder than usual.

anyway, here are brief reviews of the last 3 books i've read:

Blood-Soaked Buddha / Hard Earth Pascal by Noah Cicero (Trident Press): i've been slowly reading through noah cicero's catalog of books. i think i read nature documentary first (which i liked a lot), then the human war (which i didn't find super gripping at the time but appreciated that for its time was rightfully impactful), then go to work (which i liked the first half of more than the second half, but i admired noah's confidence/ambition in writing the second half the way it is written), then give it to the grand canyon (which i liked a lot, and interviewed noah about on vol. 1 brooklyn), then best behavior (which i really liked, and pestered my friends about for maybe a week while reading it). i'm thankful that he has such an extensive and varied bibliography and that i can continue to find and enjoy his writing for the foreseeable future. i like how small the book is and often kept it in my back pocket. i thought it was funny that it lists an editor in the credits (nate perkins) but is kind of edited poorly, eg it consistently uses "everyday" when it should be "every day", etc., but it was also edited better than best behavior, which i think maybe wasn't edited at all. the book is non-fiction, basically an open, concise, and lucid philosophical text about noah's views on spirituality/life outlook and his personal experience with reading/understanding buddhism. he spends a lot of time more or less critiquing aspects of american religion/spiritualism/conservatism which is familiar to me as someone who also more or less grew up in Ohio. i felt like his invented examples of people/outlooks and experiences, while reductive and cartoonish, were still effective in communicating his points and made me think in terms of how i view people and where i could use more compassion/understanding in my daily life. i like that he accepts that he doesn't know everything, that he has no authority over anyone. i liked his simple, often playful, sincere tone, for example one paragraph ends with the line "Comets are cool!" and another ends with "I was super annoying!" I also liked his honesty and personal details, and once you get past the first few chapters full of nietzche and sartre and buddhism quotes, he grounds his argumentation in his personal life and experiences and those of his friends and family. i personally find a lot of value in autobiography/memoir/autoficiton and i think noah is very good at writing this way. i also accept that, now, having read many of his books, he often writes about the same things and events, but i think it's interesting to think of his body of work as interrelated, non-discrete, offering various looks at the same topics but from different perspectives in style, eg nonfiction vs fiction and in time/place/experience. i can't compare this book to other books on the topic of buddhism; it's my first and only text on buddhism that i've read, but i found it insightful and helpful. i've been recently struggling with my emotions, anger, feeling tired/drained, feeling present and engaging with family because of things like my toddler's inability to sleep through the night, the global pandemic, etc., so it was good for me to read about this and think on it, get some help/tips on being mindful, etc. I think if i instead read a book about buddhism that just presented a bunch of those 'hard to understand' quotes with nebulous morals or points, like...about a guy hitting someone with a stick...or about someone eating a corpse in a cave...without the grounding of noah's emphasis on explaining things well, i would feel frustrated and turned off. i feel ok admitting that as a white man from ohio, i benefited from having a white man from ohio explain some aspects of buddhism to me as an introduction to the topic. i will probably try to read some more of the source texts that he references, in the future. my brother in law is a buddhist, but we haven't talked much about it. he is a person of many great passions (hiking, thrifting, board gaming), who has many collections (music boxes, minerals, instruments) and works as an arborist, which i think is cool. i know mike andrelczyk knows a lot about buddhism and talks about zen a lot. he's a lot more zen than i am, probably one of the more chill people in indie lit.

Heck, Texas by Tex Gresham (Atlatl Press): i bought this book on a recommendation from cavin, who was very enthusiastic about it, i think because cavin had/has been excited about reading/writing books that experiment with form, especially screenplay-type structure, like that jin woo book on 11:11, and a book that cavin himself has been writing/editing that's written sort of like a hybrid screenplay thing. tex and i (and cavin, haha) had some short pieces in a bad lung press digital zine last month and i liked tex's piece the most out of the whole zine, i think, so based on that and cavin's rec i bought Heck, Texas. i'm writing all this to sort of illuminate aspects of my book-buying system, so i can better understand myself re: what influences me to buy a book and maybe leverage that to help sell more of my own or others' books. aside from a Mike Kleine book, this is the only other book on Atlatl i've read, and the press feels, in my head, kind of like a smaller and less gimmicky Inside the Castle because of this (every time i think of Atlatl, i think of joe bielecki saying it out loud on his podcast, and the sound of it sounds funny to me). anyway, this is a book written mostly in fragments across 3 sections, basically each page is a separate fragment, with different font, format, etc., with some illustrations and handwriting, stuff like that. it's generally based on vignettes centered on a nowhere shithole town in texas, with a lot of non-sequitur-seeming vignettes about really bleak things, mostly (brutal) death and violence, hard drugs, flagrant homophobia and racism, inflicting trauma on kids, all to (satirically) condemn a lot of aspects of american (small town) culture, i think. as brutal as some of the scenes/vignettes are, i think they're effective in reminding me in different ways, that the 'real' world differs from being online, in that while absurd/satirical, and while a lot of the scenes (esp. around classrooms) feel like experiments in 'dead baby joke'-style black comedy, a lot of it also feels very realistic, probably is happening right now all over the country, etc., and is effective in condemning things via the explicit brutality. the 'narrative' during the first two sections, as much as there is, is 'unreliable,' with different perspectives/imaginings of the same (bleak, violent) events. stylistically, it isn't really a book i would pick up on my own if i didn't have some personal relationship with the author or someone like cavin to recommend it. i think part of what made it hard for me to really enjoy is that the constant shifting of focus, topic, characters, events, etc. without any grounding or framing makes it hard for me to feel invested in any particular passage. each new page requires caring about the page as a generally independent piece of prose/poetry/art/whatever, and the lack of narrative movement made me feel more apathetic as i read. another thing that sticks out to me, which makes it hard to feel invested in starting each new page, personally, is that tex frequently uses the same set up + punchline combo of an 'intense' paragraph set up followed by a one-line punchline that diffuses everything, e.g. a dense paragraph of a man 'madly' pontificating about existentialism to, it turns out, an apathetic stripper, or when a Black man monologues a heartfelt confession about race relations to a white man who's just talking to him, we find out, to mug him. this happens frequently in the first section, and after the first couple times i felt myself feeling like "ok i get it" after the first 2-3 sentences and then skipping to the last line for the 'joke' which i knew was coming, so i could move on. in this way i think the stylistic decisions sort of interfere with each other -- the narrative ticks and recurring structure undermines a lot of the actual writing, which i think in a different context would maybe be more impressive/powerful. not sure if this makes sense. overall the texts range from sort of schlocky serious/spooky to flippant black comedy -- while some of the attempts at being mysterious or whatever don't feel super effective (like the 'creepy' slanted handwriting throughout), there are a lot of different kinds of jokes, and many of them i felt were pretty funny, and some i didn't get i think because i don't know much about cinema (there's some recurring joke(?) about a johnny depp movie which may or may not exist). the third section (written as a screenplay) is my favorite part of the book, as it has a narrative arc, is based on a single (interesting) character, and is more consistently funny and enjoyable to read, imo, and i guess in retrospect requires the first two sections, to some extent, to create the setting. i wish the third section were longer, i think, in that it ends kind of arbitrarily (something something comment on purposelessness/arbitrarity of life). overall it makes sense to me that tex would reach out to werner herzog for a blurb (which he got, which is rad imo) -- it feels like a book someone into experimental film would read/write. i like tex and i like some of his writing i've seen online, i just don't think i'm the target demo for this particular book, which is fine, because this kind of writing is sort of designed to challenge/put people off; i'm not a particularly cool person and i don't really watch or care about movies. this kind of book also feels 'vaguely popular' right now in twitter-centric indie lit, with atlatl, inside the castle, and now apocalypse party and other online venues investing in horror-adjacent, fragmented, 'visual' narratives, or something like that, i think. my favorite parts in the first two sections were the craigslist/facebook posts about sex and missing persons and stuff like that and the long paragraph about popping a zit.

Two Against One by Frederick Barthelme (Grove Press): this is the first frederick barthelme book i've read. i picked it up based on that tao lin tweet about the authors who wrote the most books he'd read, and barthelme was like number 3 or 4. i've also seen, maybe because i'm paying attention to the name more, some discussion in my twittersphere of his short stories, which i'm curious to read. i think this book is unique in many ways and i can see how it influenced tao lin and earned the term 'k-mart realism', as there is an emphasis on consumer culture being wholly integrated into the daily life of every character, and barthelme spends a lot of space in the prose on things like buying/using consumer products, eating snacks (and a lot of frozen/microwaved foods), thinking/talking about furniture and decorations and home appliances, considering minute details of car interiors and how people drive, and the contents/appearances of strip malls/other roadside stuff. all these things feel unique to read, to me, as opposed to in other books where most of these things are glossed over if they're not central to the plot. here though i think they are kind of central to the plot, in the way that 'nothing really happens' and all the characters live explicitly purposeless lives such that buying and using consumer products is kind of like all they have to depend on in breaking up the monotony of their otherwise pointless lives. some of these scenes, and some of the wording of things (at some point the protagonist feels like 'his life is fucked', which was good/funny/encouraging phrasing to read) are very very appealing to me, while a lot of the plot points (like some digression's about the protagonist's mother) and bits of monologue/dialogue seem extra pointless. when some chapters began, i'd feel excited, while when others began, i'd feel like putting down the book to take a break. toward the end of the book i felt like it could have been edited down significantly, and i kept thinking about how sebastian castillo tweeted that barthelme reportedly often skimmed books and assumed other people did too, or something like that, and it made me wonder if his books were written 'to be skimmed' or something like that, hence this book's slow/undirectional nature. i appreciated the way that 'how i felt' about the central idea of the plot -- the protagonist's semi-estranged wife trying to convince him to agree to an ill-defined, non-sexual, three-way marriage -- kept changing based on the introduction of 'new evidence,' in that i would go back and forth in my head on whether what was happening was 'unfair' or not re: infidelity and companionship. i liked that everything, for everyone, at all times in the narrative, seemed ambiguous/vague, even though this sometimes made for a sort of frustrating reading experience. i also think barthelme is exceedingly talented at identifying and writing about small details, including facial/body movements, and i wouldn't be surprised if this were influential for sam pink, for example, who, to me, is exceptionally talented at describing face/body movements (and many other details about people/the world). something that did stick out to me though is that a lot of the dialogue is confusing, i think because of how tone isn't really conveyed sometimes, and characters use idioms or phrasing that's unfamiliar to me, so, like, someone will give a little monologue about their feelings, and someone else will respond with like (i'm making this up) "That's a lotta fresh coffee on the stove," and then some other person will be described as looking hurt and be like "Ok now don't get mean," and I will have to try to figure out from (limited) context clues what the fuck "that's a lotta fresh coffee on the stove" is supposed to convey, to what degree it'd be read as mean, etc. After maybe the first third, i was unsure how it could possibly end, but i think the ending was good in a weirdly cathartic, funny, and sort of rushed way. i sort of had the sense that he didn't have a particularly good idea of how to end it, and went with one of the funnier ideas that popped into his head, which appeals to me from a writing perspective.

 

thank you for reading my book reviews. i'm currently reading a joy williams collection, mallory smart's poetry collection, and since i laid my burden down by brontez purnell. i picked up, briefly, the knausgaard book about munch, but didn't feel compelled to continue reading it, although i had been independently thinking about how i like how he describes people and artwork as 'open' or 'closed', and in the ~3 pages i read, he used these terms to describe artwork, haha

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.