Today I launched YK World, a brand new podcast about music, art and technology. I plan to use it to cover releases from yk Records but I also want to cover a wide range of topics - digital distribution, physical manufacturing, how film can inspire music creation, etc. etc. I say this all much more clearly in the first mini episode:
As I say in the show, I don't want to adhere to any strict format. I plan on having very short episodes, long episodes, episodes where I'm the host, episodes where I'm not present at all. I want to let it be a fungible experience. We'll see how that turns out! In the short term, please subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube or wherever you like to listen!
I also forced myself not to put any tracking on the show. So, I will have zero insight into the number of people listening to each episode. Part of me feels this is a horrible mistake, another part of me feels like it is the most liberating choice I could possible make. I'll speak more on that in a future episode I'm sure.
In that first episode I mention the "The Nashville 100" playlist from Lance Conzett - 100 songs from Nashville artists that he finds influential or important. Many yk artists made the list and I couldn't be more flattered. Please go follow Lance and listen to that playlist.
When Totally Real Records announced The Speed of Time from phoneswithchords, I was instantly intrigued simply by the artwork - a cacophony of crackled paint forming a topographic map of sorts. Turns out the piece is called "The Whole Kitchen Sink" - which certainly makes sense.
Truthfully, there's a RIYL in the bio that cites "The Dandy Warhols, Pixies, Flaming Lips, R.E.M. " - bands that I know Bryan from Totally Real Records would not include in a bio if it weren't an accurate recommendation. Those are lofty band comparison to make but listening back, they are a great jumping off point. I'd throw in Sparklehorse, Goldcard and Sebadoh in the ring for good measure.
Of course, comparing one band to another band should only serve as a way to get you in the door - I don't mean to insinuate that The Speed of Time is ripping those bands off. There is a delightful bedroom style production to the record but only aids in making the fuzzy parts fuzzier and the intimate parts more intimate. "Are You Asleep?" and title track "The Speed of Time" are great examples of both, respectively.
Really enjoying the record and finding that it grows on me with each repeated listen. Tracks like "I Won't Let You Down" are enjoyable pop gems on first listen but feel like a wistful, explosive, yearning for spring on repeated plays.
Get it in your ears and make sure to follow along for future releases.
I don't know how I stumbled on the work of Ian Laseter Bush (aka Banshees Ritual) but I am poring over all of the details and style in every piece being offered up to the world. Over on the Poster Shop there are a number of Dawes posters, many with an incredibly amount of fine details to enjoy. Overall, it's the fun illustrative style that gets me but that details keep my eyeballs darting around.
If you, like me, are a fan of Failure, Autolux, Year of the Rabbit and ON*, get yourself over to NoiseZone on YouTube for a treasure trove of bootlegs, in-studio performances, TV broadcasts and music videos. Rarely am I tempted to download videos off YouTube but, in this case, it feels inevitable these will end up on a harddrive for long term enjoyment.
* There's not actually any ON here but you get what I mean. Also, if you're a fan of Swans, you should click through.
If you are unfamiliar, Chewbacchus is a Mardi Gras Krewe that celebrates all things sci-fi with their walking parade. This year the parade was themed as "Rise of the Superb Owl" - a nod to What We Do In the Shadows and a great way to get special guest Mark Proksch to appear!
This 90m video is delightful. The Mardi Gras walking parades are rife with costumes and floats that unbelievably impressive and often hilarious. There may be other parades like DragonCon or even ComicCon that have similar parades but none can hold a candle to the unique style here.
I recently watched Steve Buscemi's 1996 directorial debut Trees Lounge - an excellent little indie comedy-drama with characters making questionable decisions and an unbelievably stacked cast (tho, in 1996 maybe not so obvious that it was stacked). Definitely worth a watch.
I was also quite struck by the closing credits song from Hayden! Somehow I'd never heard this or just forgotten about it in the last 29 years. Regardless, damn good song.. time to revisit Hayden.
I recently became aware of San Francisco's Martin Olive - a photographer, dispensary owner and all around man about town. He even had a little viral moment last year regarding a response to some cat-caller on the street.
I stumbled across Olive because his friends are raising funds after he was shot. I know that's a shocking way to share brand new information about a person but there it is. I look forward to his recovery.
Last October, General Trust released GT1 – a compilation of all of the music he had released up to that point, along with a cassette only bonus track and a fantastic performance video for “If I Could Change Your Mind.” All good stuff. That release actually closed out the first "era" of General Trust, now begins the second era.
Breaking the seal on 2025, General Trust unveils “Apologia” – a brand new single available on Bandcamp and Ampwall this week (and YouTube, Nina, Artcore, Mirlo and Soundcloud). The track will hit traditional streaming early next week.
The track continues General Trust’s evolution and expansion through dark, foreboding compositions driven by synth and pop sensibilities. Only time will tell how this new era folds but it’s starting off with a gripping offering.
I help produce a podcast called Devalued; a show about the balance between art and money. There are many great episodes - Damon Krukowski! Steve Albini! Mary Mancini! Suzanna Cianni! - but, of course, I recommend subscribing and listening to them all. Most recently, host Michael Ackley got caught up in a work obligation and I had to step in as substitute! Swapping Michael for Michael, a classic switcheroo.
In this episode, we talk Radio Power with Jason Moon Wilkins and Emily Young - the Program Director and Events Director (respectively) of WNXP. They were kind enough to chat for a lengthy amount of time and provide lots of insights into how radio is still relevant in the music industry, how they strive to be a bi-directional part of the Nashville community and how artists can benefit from radio play.
With all the talk of streaming's abysmal royalty rates and the exhausting march towards automation (see The Ghosts In The Machine), it's incredibly refreshing to hear from these two about how much human involvement is required to make the station work as well as it does. I was quite happy to be a part of the interview, hope you enjoy it!
I was always an avid fan of The Books, the collage / sample-based musicians with four excellent albums and a load of delightful b-sides. I'd read rumors that they disbanded around 2012 in an unpleasant way. Half of the band - Nick Zammuto - released solo music but I always wondered what happened.
This 2018 Interview with Paul de Jong - the other half of the band - doesn't really give much insight into why the band broke up but it does provide some insights into their creative process that I'd never read before. Here are a few excerpts from de Jong I rather enjoyed...
Regarding The Books sample library:
A large part of The Books' creative process consists of finding, choosing and combining the right samples. On an album like The Lemon of Pink are hundreds, maybe even thousands. 'It could be a few words, a sigh or a whole minute of babble', De Jong explains. 'Background noise or a musical note. As long as it's interesting and I have the idea that I want to have something to do with it.' De Jong now has a gigantic archive in a kind of coach house behind his house, in which everything up to the digital age is welcome, from VHS tapes to cassettes and LPs. 'But nothing is mainstream, everything is obscure. For example, there are no feature films in there, only instructional tapes, from education, the medical world or the church.' The archive consists of about 350 boxes, which De Jong digitizes one by one. For this purpose, he has built a setup of ancient computers in a separate room. 'All they have to do is absorb video or sound. In the title, De Jong types out as many words from the fragment as possible. 'Then you can simply find samples later with Microsoft's search system.'
On the lack of looping samples:
'When I listen to how samples are used nowadays, I feel very related to how hip-hop cuts and loops. In The Books we never really looped, because I am absolutely convinced that you have to change something when you repeat it. If you repeat a recording identically, your subconscious immediately notices that. That does not mean that you hear more, but actually that you get used to it the second time and hear it less the third time. You hardly hear the essence of the sample anymore, but know it. That does create a lot of space for other elements, such as text, which occupies an essential position in hip-hop.'
There's plenty more but I'll let you go read it yourself.
Stumbling on this was a nice reminder to revisit all of the old releases from The Books but also a gentle nudge to listen to the latest solo material from both de Jong and Zammuto.
Vaporwave comes in many flavors but one style I had not yet encountered is the Grocery Store variant. Yes! We're Open is twelve soothing tracks overheard through the various aisles while you browse.
It would be understandable to call this muzak but it's not quite that. Like a lot of vaporwave, there's a lo-fi production quality to it that evokes a slightly unnerving atmosphere. Similar to The Backrooms, there's just something ominous about it.
Despite that underlying vibe, I enjoy it! It's good background music while you work as it does transport you to some other strange place. IMO, it's best to start with Track 2.
Thanks to attending SXSW more than once, I'm signed up to an infinite number of PR emails about new releases from bands. It's a lot of noise and I don't envy any publicist trying to break through that but, occasionally, something does break through.
I know nothing about Atlanta band Applesauce Tears but their latest release, Balcony Confidential, is an immersive and captivating listen. The largely instrumental album is cinematic, psychedelic and dripping with vibes. If you're a fan of Of Montreal, Black Moth Super Rainbow, reverb-y sax solos and a wash of synths, I think it's a safe bet you should hit play on this one.
Turns out they have twelve albums and have been at it since at least 2010. It's a delightful new discovery all around.
I found an old note to myself to look up the album Electricity from Tobias. It's an excellent blend of bedroom production, shoegaze-y guitars, noise and pop sensibilities. It's right up my alley.
As luck would have it, the first search result pointed me towards Catalog - a platform for selling your music directly to your fans. It's a cousin to Bandcamp, Ampwall, Nina, Artcore, Mirlo, et al. Curiously, it seems that they relaunched themselves as recently as Oct 2024. As far as I can tell, they may have started off as an NFT type site and now they're angling for a wider marketplace. Regardless of the history, I'll be keeping an eye on where it goes.
HarmonyCloak is a concept for combating generative AI music.
"At its core, HarmonyCloak functions by introducing imperceptible, error-minimizing noise into musical compositions. While the music sounds exactly the same to human listeners, the embedded noise confounds AI models, making the music unlearnable and thus protecting it from being replicated or mimicked. "
It's kind of a poison pill for AI Music. The examples on the page are pretty convincing to the idea - you, a human being, do not notice anything in the "Cloaked Music" snippets but an AI trained on it produces less than acceptable results. It's a fun idea to think on and fascinating samples to listen to.
There have been other projects tackling similar problems with similar tactics. You may recall Nightshade was meant to introduce imperceptible noise to images that would make it impossible for an AI to train on the data and give good results. Again, fascinating to read about but I'm unclear on the adoption rates.
The core issue at play here is copyrighted material being used to train models with zero compensation to the original creators. Wanting to combat that from the inside is a sensible path to explore.
Thirty-four minutes of The Commercials of David Lynch ranging from a Calvin Klein series, Georgia Coffee (a Twin Peaks classic), Michael Jackson Dangerous intros, Alka Seltzer Plus, Barilla Pasta, Parisienne cigarettes and so much more. I don't think it's surprising that a director that worked for nearly fifty years has such a diverse body of work but I do find it surprising how many Lynch tropes appear in these; music, actors, shot compositions, etc.
It may seem odd to share an eleven year old interview with someone but it struck me as one of the more honest and comfortable interviews I've seen with Richard Ayoade. Generally, I catch him causing madness on a chat show
or deadpan hosting his own show or even humbly lamenting a BAFTA, he's quite deadpan and guarded. Here he has a bit of that but less performative. It's pleasant to see.
Charlie Brooker has had a hand in creating some of my favorite series - Black Mirror and Nathan Barley specifically. This gaming memories video seems like an odd topic to discuss with him but he's, obviously, quite the gamer. For someone that understands technology as well as he does, I can't say I'm surprised.
Plenty of hard news out there, let's have a little respite with some Friday videos. That's the belated David Lynch as Jack Dall above - a helluva fine performance. If you haven't watched these Lynch acting clips, do that next.
For now, let's enjoy some more distractions:
Gordon Keith interviews Zach Galifianakis - maybe I've seen these before but enough Internet Time has passed that I've forgotten. Keith is a masterful deadpan absurdist - a perfect match for Galifianakis. There's plenty moreofthese if you wanna dive further.
The 5000 Fingers Of Dr. T - a 1953 film written by Dr Seuss (story, screenplay, and lyrics). I'd never heard of it but it looks perfectly bonkers.
Halcali - Baby Blue - I mentioned the work of Nagi Noda the other day.. here's a music video from them featuring a lot of Pandas with some surprising turns.
Nintendo Power Raw Footage - you may have seen the clips of this previously but a solid 19 minutes of people talking on the phone from the late 80's is an excellent salve for whatever ails you.
UFO Exclusive (1978) - do I expect you to watch a nearly 2 hour documentary from the late 70's about UFO's? No. Do I hope that you'll jump ahead to the 5:26 minute mark and watch the psychedelic intro that unfolds? Yes, yes I do.
