Recently, I've been enjoying the transmissions of This Newsletter Cannot Save You - an every-other-week newsletter of music videos, short films and experimental art. Their end of 2024 edition contained a number of immersive works and also this 2024 Music Video Favorites playlist. I haven't been through them all yet but I'm excited to dive in.

If you haven't read this 404 Media piece covering Suno AI CEO Mikey Shulman's dumb remarks about music creation, I suggest you get your eyeballs on it! Here's the meaty bit:

“We didn’t just want to build a company that makes the current crop of creators 10 percent faster or makes it 10 percent easier to make music. If you want to impact the way a billion people experience music you have to build something for a billion people,” Shulman said on the 20VC podcast. “And so that is first and foremost giving everybody the joys of creating music and this is a huge departure from how it is now. It’s not really enjoyable to make music now […] It takes a lot of time, it takes a lot of practice, you need to get really good at an instrument or really good at a piece of production software. I think the majority of people don’t enjoy the majority of the time they spend making music.”

Look, I am not quick to criticize AI technology - I'm often an advocate for it and rally behind how it can make many insurmountable goals achievable for many folks. For instance, making music! I'm not a musician and don't have a lifetime of training and experience to help me do so. Tools like Suno and its ilk make that possible. I've used Google Labs to create music beds for my own podcast. I get the utility. All that said, I think this guys remarks are tone deaf and he clearly drank the VC investment Kool-Aid. Suno couldn't even exist without all of the musicians that came before it - a truth for all training data.

The larger point that's interesting to ponder here is the idea that technology should remove all friction. That certainly seems to be the position Shulman is making. Find audio editing laborious? Use AI instead. But the difficultly of learning an instrument is exactly why it's rewarding. Drawing is hard but you get better over time. This is true for all creative endeavors, even for those that have preternatural talent. Lowering the barrier for entry can be a good thing but as I get older, I find the argument towards removing all friction to be rather childish.

Thanks to the snow last weekend I finally gave myself time to fully comb through the yk Records Discogs listing and make sure every official release had a home there. Broadly speaking, it's all there!

Truth be told, I find Discogs terribly difficult to navigate and I find the community over there to be aggravatingly pedantic. But there's no denying that their annoying level of detail results in properly cited data and, more often than not, a well-vetted tome of information. I'm happy to have YKR be a part of that!

I imagine this may be taken down by the time you see it but it's worth sharing regardless. Back in 2007, Jack White and artist/director Nagi Noda released this Coca-Cola commercial. Apparently it aired once, was previously on Vimeo but is largely unfindable now. It's 90 seconds and feels very reminiscent of the White Stripes / Michel Gondry videos - featuring a large cast of extras holding very still (with some CG augmentation I'm sure). The Gondry comparison isn't a complaint btw, it's a huge compliment.

If the video has been removed by the time you get there; just appreciate that there are some things that are lost online. Not many but some.

Looking at the official trailer for Oto's Planet, it appears to be a uniquely stylized and pleasant-enough animated short film about a guy living on a floating rock and dealing with an astronaut that crashes on said rock. But the film is actually an interactive AR experience for both Apple Vision Pro and Meta Quest. Literally none of the official marketing makes it obvious that the film is projected into your 3D space and you can interact with it. This Phil Traut review and Cosmo Scharf walkthrough do a 1000% better job of showing off how interactive and immersive it is.

It's not redefining cinema but it does seem to be striking a wonderful balance between passive storytelling and active choices. This is literally the first time I've ever had the slightest inkling to use an Apple Vision Pro; just to try this out.

HT Chad

I will be perfectly honest, I do not understand how Ghostty will fit into my life. It's a cross platform terminal emulator that is "fast" and "feature rich." That's great but my experience using the command line isn't exactly a problem that needs fixing. That said, it looks great immediately upon installing and it seems incredibly easy to extend, should that be something you want to do! Mostly it's got a fantastic mascot and I'm largely sharing for that homepage animation - stellar.

I'm as surprised as anyone to find out that Newgrounds still exists but DOOM: The Gallery Experience was posted there on December 17, 2024 and it's worth cruising through. It's also available here and here if you have an aversion to NG (understandably!).

DOOM: The Gallery Experience was created as an art piece designed to parody the wonderfully pretentious world of gallery openings.

In this experience, you will be able to walk around and appreciate some fine art while sipping some wine and enjoying the complimentary hors d’oeuvres in the beautifully renovated and re-imagined E1M1 of id Software's DOOM (1993).

It may be a parody but a lot of work was put into this (presumably). There's plenty of art to see! Musk Cat, Sphinx of Amenhotep III, Scenes from the Story of the Argonauts! Just to name a few. There's even a gift shop.

Brilliant work from Scum Dog Games.

The Mecha Comet is "a handheld Linux computer that brings extensibility in hardware and software adapting to your needs." But let's call a spade a spade, that's a Tricorder! Obviously not exactly the functionality of the famed Star Trek device but certainly on the same path.

I have no personal use for a Mecha in my life but I do love that it exists. It's extensible, it runs on open source software and it's promoting an ecosystem of development and creativity. Win Win Win.

It's also not real! The Kickstarter campaign launches soon but everything we're seeing are mockups and prototypes. As we've all learned in one way or another, manufacturing often changes things. I am optimistic for these folks and will continue to keep an eye on it - just for pure curiosity!

Liz Pelly has written a book called Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist, that serves as a documentation on her deep dive investigation on how Spotify is replacing musicians with stock music. This Harper's Magazine excerpt - The Ghosts in the Machine - is a phenomenal overview of the subject. The TLDR is: Spotify created a program called "Perfect Fit Content" in which they partner with production companies to create sound-alike / stock music that gets placed on playlists and receives millions of plays. Because of this, they pay out less to real artists. The TLDR on the TLDR is: Spotify is in a race to the bottom.

Pelly's reporting is fascinating but she also admits it is not entirely new. This Vulture piece from 2017 talks about it and this Music Business Worldwide report from 2016 does as well. It's not that the tactic is being unearthed for the first time, it's that they've built a full-on system for it now.

How did all this happen? Well, this particular bit gives a great overview:

"In reality, Spotify was subject to the outsized influence of the major-label oligopoly of Sony, Universal, and Warner, which together owned a 17 percent stake in the company when it launched. The companies, which controlled roughly 70 percent of the market for recorded music, held considerable negotiating power from the start. For these major labels, the rise of Spotify would soon pay off. By the mid-2010s, streaming had cemented itself as the most important source of revenue for the majors, which were raking in cash from Spotify’s millions of paying subscribers after more than a decade of declining revenue. But while Ek’s company was paying labels and publishers a lot of money—some 70 percent of its revenue—it had yet to turn a profit itself, something shareholders would soon demand. In theory, Spotify had any number of options: raising subscription rates, cutting costs by downsizing operations, or finding ways to attract new subscribers."

Cutting costs to increase efficiencies and attempt a return-on-investment for venture capitalists should sound like well trodden territory at this point. Again, it's not new it's just gotten exhaustively better at being bad.

There's lots more to say on this topic but, for now, read the Pelly excerpt, consider ordering the book and give some thought to cancelling your Spotify subscription. I certainly am. *

* and before you think that X streaming service is better and would not participate in such a thing.. go read the article. Spotify is egregious but not alone.

I'm a sucker for strings + synthesizer. Add in a flair for the dramatic and I'm ready to double down. That said, encountering Rondò Veneziano - the Italian chamber orchestra that sometimes dressed like Daft Punk and played lavish renditions of classical music with some modern instrumentation... well, I'm in! Here's a few gems I enjoyed:

• Sinfonia Per Un Addio- performing on Miss Fortuna Nadia Cassini in full Daft Punk gear. Of course this is 1983, so maybe Daft Punk was in full Rondo gear? The corresponding album has phenomenal art.
• La Serenissima- apparently iTV used to show this animated bumper between shows from the same era of the band. Once again, I think we see Daft Punk's playbook.
• Rondo' Veneziano- an earlier "non" costumed appearance where the entire orchestra is still in full-on baroque apparel.

I'm sure the Daft Punk comparisons have been made elsewhere but it's all surprising and new to me. I'll continue my journey.

There are plenty of bands that definitively formed and shaped my preferences on music but it's safe to say that Failure had an outsized influence. Maybe one day I'll write up just how impactful they were but just know that by listening to Fantastic Planet I opened up doors to many other bands. One in particular was a collaborative project called Lusk that featured members of Failure, Medicine, The Replicants and bassist Paul D'Amour from Tool. I am sure I saw the video for "Backworlds" on 120 Minutes but it wasn't an album that many people had heard or even heard of. It's an album that's been out for 28 years and I still stand by how much I enjoy it and how enjoyably unique it is.

Anyway, all of that is to say that I've never really seen much written up about Lusk. I randomly stumbled on this history of the band from Alicia Berbenick that includes a direct interview with D'Amour himself. It's nice to know there are some others out there as impacted by Free Mars as I have been and even better to get this kind of insight from everything about the collaborations, the song compositions and even the artwork.

The record is now streaming on all platforms and I do suggest you give it a whirl.

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I would remiss if I did not also mention that D'Amour went on to form a band called Feersum Ennjin that released an EP with SU Records back in 2005. It is excellent, as well as the full-length album that I believe is streaming on all the things.

Welcome to v13 of the site! Well, sort of. This is a work-in-progress. I launched v12 back in October of 2022 and felt very good about. Until I didn't. As with anything, it felt stale over time and all I could see were the poor decisions I made - mostly with spacing and typography. So, time for a facelift.

Unlike every other version of this site, I'm going to work on this version in the open. I'll treat this blog post as a changelog to document what's new or what I'm experimenting with. Truth be told, the whole site likely deserves a complete overhaul - from database to API to frontend - but I'm going to stick with lighter optimizations on the backend as I work on sprucing up the front end. I don't need to overexplain it, you get it!

If you prefer the prior version, you can browse that. Or just stick to the RSS feed, where you don't need to be concerned about what this looks like at all.

• 2025-01-03 - stripped down everything to bare markup and started from scratch. Still leveraging Foundation for my framework along with a custom toolkit.
• 2025-01-04 - ensured database connection and query is working. need to overhaul these queries but that's for another day, it works for now. Blog listing, pagination and deep linking work - that's all you really need, right?
• 2025-01-05 - fixed pagination logic on the backend; total number of pages actually correct now.
• 2025-01-06 - launched skeletal version of v13. Structural CSS and light javascript in place. Things are likely broken but that's okay.
• 2025-01-06 - added back alternate tag for RSS feed; whoops!
• 2025-01-07 - Friday Video playlists should work again. Emphasis on should. Wanted to rewrite all the JS but, instead, opted to make it more sensible to my 2025 brain.
• 2025-01-08 - changed post timestamps to show relative time for the first week - i.e. "posted 3 days ago." After a week, it reverts to a normal timestamp. Title tag always full date.
• 2025-01-09 - added a rudimentary search to the footer. required updating the API (and simplifying). Added "#" as permalink but may reconsider.
• 2025-01-25 - added the IBM Plex Mono font just to see how it feels. Added support for --readmore--. Updated the header to show a random GIF. Gonna sit with it for a bit; I think these are all good additions.
• 2025-02-02 - updated the metadata on individual posts so social shares reflect the content of the page.
• 2025-03-12 - whoops, been over a month since updating anything! eek! Added the proper yewknee logo to the header. Branding!
• 2025-06-08 - some small spruces to padding on blog images. A tiny border added as well - may or may not keep it. Also, realizing I am not making much progress on this but am okay with that. There's something to read - that's enough.
• 2025-10-11 - added a new way to display album art that will make my life easier. Hopefully you won't notice. First example is here.
• 2025-10-11 - fully admit that 4 months between updates after 3 months between updates is.. not great. Let's see if I can get back to updating this more regularly.
• 2026-01-21 - checked in on the progress of all this. If I was giving letter grades, I'd give myself a C. Not great but not failing.
• 2026-08-28 - Finally pushed a bunch of stuff I'd been working on locally. Search works more obviously now and the /about page is back. More importantly, I changed the line-height and added some padding to make readability more pleasant. I'd like to get a /music page and /projects page going but at the pace of this redesign, I doubt it's on the near horizon. No shade to myself! This is a labor of love and I still enjoy sprucing it up, it's just slow going. I'm actually ready for an entirely different design.. which will actually be easier given the work that I've done with v13. We shall see.
  
  Oh, I hid the announcement from the site as well so if you're seeing this, you're really trying to find it.

We're in that lost week between Christmas and New Year's - a wonderful time of, hopefully, doing as little as possible. I'm going to post a little Friday Videos rundown (admittedly, it is Thursday) and then figure out what's next for this site. A redesign is overdue. I digress! Enjoy and unwind.

• Jacuzzi Suit - Luann Van Houten, Milhouse's mom, dons the jacuzzi suit. May we all be so lucky.
• SEIDÄ PASS KRAMPUS - I know we're outside the bounds of Christmas at this point but these kinds of Krampus parades fascinate me year round.
• World Record Skateboard Slalom 3D!! - this is the weird, inexplicable, internet we all yearn for. More of this, anytime. via Jed.
• ELECTRIC BOOGALOO: THE WILD, UNTOLD STORY OF CANNON FILMS - without a shadow of a doubt, you are familiar with Cannon Films but I've always heard the story of the guys running the show was infinitely more interesting than the movies themselves. Definitely want to check this out.
• The Party Makeup Video - Found Footage Fest rarely disappoints. Once again, a gem.
• Sitting & Smiling #300 - truly unbelievable. a man sits motionless for four hours with an unnerving smile. Motionless. I am sure there are some therapeutic, meditative, upsides to this but wow it is unsettling.

Talk soon. Thanks for reading as always.

Really enjoyed this Ethan Mollick piece, What Just Happened - a ponderance on the last month of AI developments and how it may fit into the larger landscape.

The piece does a great job of giving context to recent developments, context on what is working and what is not and never gets too overhyped. The hardest part about keeping up with these developments is the hyperbole - every new thing is the greatest new thing, which just can't be true. I digress, Mollick does not write in such a way.

Give it a read and a subscribe, I believe there's plenty of good in there.

Yes, that image is meant to look that bad

If you're a regular listener of the Blank Check podcast, you are also familiar with producer Ben Hosley. While his role in that show is appreciated, I am quite intrigued by his artistic side projects. One of which is called Slow Xmas.

The first volume, Volume 0 was released back in 2020 and it featured extremely slowed down classics. It's marked as "Vaporwave" but it's got elements of ambient and sludge throughout. It should be unpleasant to listen to but it is a captivating listen.

Over the years, more volumes were released. All of which are worth your time. It's a pretty massive tome of work to encounter but there's no bad starting point. Over the years the compilations become more original covers slowed down - a pleasant change. I mean, listen to this "Christmas All Over Again." Wild.

A little something different for your holiday listening. Hope you enjoy!

Is Panic launching an OTT channel called Blippo+ via Steam? That's my knee jerk assumption to this delightfully weird announcement video but who knows what is really going on. It's Panic! It's bound to be interesting.

Today I learned: there's a tradition called Tió de Nadal in which a hollow log is adorned with a happy face and "fed" every night starting around December 8th. On Christmas Day, the log is partially placed inside the fireplace and beaten with sticks until it defecates presents. Making this up would be much less fun than actually reporting on a thing that really happens.

Tió de Nadal translates to "Christmas Log" but is often referred to as "Caga tió" - or "shitting log" / "poo log." It even has a song. Again, I could not make this up.

Atlas Obscura has a nice writeup on it. YouTube has plenty of logs being beaten. All told, it's a delightfully odd tradition to really let yourself deep dive into.

The Film Art Gallery seems like the sort of thing I should have been browsing for the last 20 years but it only recently came across my radar. It's a huge repository of one sheets, alternate film posters and huge theatrical film designs that are, generally, a bit rare! The 1988 Japanese Die Hard poster? Got it. Eternal Sunshine double-sided one sheets? Yep. A 1986 Czech design for The Beatles Help? Surprisingly, yes.

You can browse by director, genre, title, etc. I recommend looking at someone like Bob Fosse- you will be blown away by the results. I'm not even recommending you buy anything - just go be inspired.

There's also a Star Wars archive that is relatively interesting. And a Saul Bass archive that is infinitely fascinating. I'm really burying the lede here but the Bass archive is truly wonderful. The film posters are so wildly simple but clearly, definitively, him. Even the unreleased ones. Truth be told, it's non-stop gems as far as you can click.

This Kosmosphar album from 1977, Kosmische Wellen, is a rare bit of sprawling, spacey, Krautrock from the era. Except, it's not. The album is entirely AI. Specifically, the description says:

Warning: "Everything that happens on this channel is fiction. But what is the truth? F*ck it, just listen!"

It's a shame there's no further detail on how the record was made because it's actually quite an enjoyable listen. There's even a follow-up record and other releases from the label. The channel is actually rife with music. I'd be very interested to learn how all these were made and what human decisions were involved with the creation. I am positive it's not 100% a computer running the show.

I've not taken the deep dive but I am sure it has varying degrees of enjoyment. Just like a real record label. Quite frankly I'm not sure what to make of the evolution of AI generated albums. Like a lot of generated "art" there's a lot of heady discussions to be had. This is another interesting bit of fodder to contemplate.

You would think that as of December 16th, I'd be winding things down for the year with yk Records but the treats keep rolling out. Today, we release the official video for Shaboi's song "The Day After Christmas," a Yacht-Rock-y number that serves as a reminder to take it especially easy once the holidays have passed. It's a treat you enjoy before Christmas as a salve for yourself after Christmas.

The video is a delightful blend of stop motion and modern animation with a big surprise at the end. It's also the first Shaboi song since 2010. Nothing like breaking a fourteen year hibernation! I hope it means there is more to come but, also, maybe he just drops a jam every 14 years.. only time will tell! I'm ready either way. You can pick up this track (and 19 others) over on Bandcamp and Ampwall. If you buy it, we'll donate 100% of proceeds to CASA Nashville. No pressure tho, it's also streaming. Enjoy it however you'd like!