Bandcamp have recently made some default pricing changes and based on their reasoning I have opted to change my own pricing strategy (as hinted at previously). Previously I had a kind of complicated and largely vibes-based approach to pricing, but it was doing me no favors. From now on, all of my albums will be $1/track up to $9, and individual songs will be $1.50/track, with occasional exceptions for certain considerations.

Anyway, for this Bandcamp Friday, you can get 25% off anything in my catalog (including my full discography, which is also always discounted) with the discount code “MAYDAY25.”

Also, as usual, here’s some of the stuff I’ll be buying this month:

• The music of Alex Graey
• The music of YonKagOr
• Deadnames by PER INK (not to be confused with my album of the same name, gee it’s like we’re both trans or something)

And here’s some of my other recommendations for things I already own:

• Baby Trans by Kookie
• Tiger Pop Ten by John Brodeur
• Birthday Cake and MEEMS by Miracles of Modern Science
• Expert in a Dying Field by The Beths
• Things Take Time, Take Time by Courtney Barnett

This weekend, on Saturay, May 3, my real-life choir is doing a fundraiser show. I will be performing in two pieces, singing tenor in a rendition of Vienna Teng’s The Hymn of Axciom and doing a minimal jazz piano rendition of my own song Repair My Heart.

Then in June, I have a whole bunch of stuff going on:

• Furality is taking place from June 5-8, and I have a booth in the dealer’s den, where I plan on having some small impromptu performances; you might also find me out and about throughout the rest of the convention, in which case, feel free to come by and say “hi!”
• My choir will be performing with Rainbow City on June 6 (which I may or may not be a part of, depending on how badly this conflicts with Furality)
• I will be performing a Pride show with Refraction VR on June 7 May 31!
• The choir will be doing a preview of our pride show on Vashon Island on June 13 (which I will be a part of)
• We are also doing our full pride show on June 20 and 21 in Seattle

And I may have another concert happening in June as well! Watch this space! (or better yet, my show calendar)

For each album that you want to change the prices on:

1. Open up your album’s editor

2. Open up your browser’s Javascript console (usually using ctrl-alt-I on a PC, or cmd-alt-I on a Mac)

3. Paste in this bit of code (assuming you want to set the price to 1.50 per track in your local currency; change the '1.50' to whatever value you want it to be otherwise) and press Enter:

   document.querySelectorAll('input.price[name^="track.price"]')
       .forEach(e=>{e.value='1.50';e.dispatchEvent(new Event('change'))})
   

4. Verify that the prices are the way you want them and then click “update album”

Note that copy-pasting random Javascript from the web is generally unsafe to do, so I’ll explain exactly what this code does:

1. document.querySelectorAll asks the browser to give a list of items on a webpage; in this case, the query input.price[name^="track.price"] asks for all of the text inputs which have a class of price and a name starting with track.price, which is how Bandcamp marks a text input as being a track price
2. forEach runs a function on each of the text inputs; in this case, for each one, it
   1. sets the value attribute (which is the text in the box) to 1.50
   2. notifies the browser that the value has changed (which is necessary because Bandcamp is using custom validation and data binding logic)

Anyway. This is still not great, process-wise, but it’s a lot easier than having to edit every single track manually.

As such, I’ve set up an elasticStage page where you can order my stuff on vinyl! I’ll probably add more albums as they come.

I’m still waiting for my test copies to arrive (and they likely won’t arrive for a little while) so if you order a copy right now it’s at your own risk, but all of the reviews I’ve seen of the service are incredibly positive. On Refactor in particular I’ve scheduled it as a preorder to be released on June 14, which is both the 10th anniversary of the original release of the album and also my birthday.

I’ll definitely be reviewing the test copies when they arrive, and if you want to take a chance on something unproven, right now is the time to order, as the actual manufacturing lead time is currently around 6 weeks.

My album Transitions (and its companion Deadnames) are perhaps the most obviously on-the-nose trans-related albums of mine, but it’s woven into the DNA of so much of my music. The songs All Tan, Adding Up to Nothing, Hypnagogic, Material Change, and Fool in the Middle are all quite specifically about gender feels, but being trans has informed everything about my life and my existence.

Here are some other lesser-known trans musicians of note (in no particular order):

• Bedussey, self-described as “bedroom pop-punk”
• elizabeth veldon, a noise/drone artist
• ella guro makes ridiculously awesome abstract chiptune soundscapes
• Jennifer Vena Wood goes more for affirmational acoustic folksy stuff which feels super underrepresented in trans music these days and I’m 100% here for it
• Kookie sings a bunch of songs about being trans, and about being a Linux user, two things which are super entwined in my experience
• Left at London does a super interesting fusion of classic and modern forms
• Patricia Taxxon does incredible weird experimental music
• Ratwyfe makes fun songs about all sorts of things; definitely check out cryptid (mothman) which is super relatable
• Trust Fund Ozu makes some amazingly lush musical textures in what feels like an amazing balance between rock and hyperpop

There are of course many, many more out there; I put out a call for recommendations and was absolutely overwhelmed by the number of trans artists I was pointed to! It was super difficult to pick just a few to showcase here, and it would be a disservice to let them go without further mention. Thank you so much to everyone who shared their own picks.

Also, please check out the Seattle Trans and Nonbinary Choral Ensemble, a choir I am extremely proud to be a part of.

To that end, I have a new album out, which you might be interested in if you’re seeing this post.

Other than that, there’s what I’ll be buying today:

• The entire discography of Vulthra
• I’ll be doing catchup on err:Rawr’s discography
• And the entire discography of Balance Lost, a Song Fight!er of note

Sharing is caring!

Unfortunately, as things stand, bluesky is really just not a great substitute for a proper feed reader, so I’d suggest getting one of those instead rather than trying to have a single social feed be your one view to the universe.

(Following my actual bluesky profile probably is a better experience overall, anyway.)

You can also use recordings of things other than acoustic spaces for interesting effects; Logic’s Space Designer comes with a whole bunch of impulse responses that are used for various effects, including drum transformers, ghost rhythms, and other such things. A lot of my more sound designy stuff makes heavy use of this.

But what if you use whole songs as an impulse response?

Here’s some results I got while messing around with it just now:

The way I did these in logic:

1. Create an audio track with the source audio
2. Add a Space Designer plugin, and drag the convolution audio onto it
3. Set the “dry” level to Mute, and the “wet” level to 0
4. Create an empty instrument track, and make an empty region that’s roughly the length of the convolution audio that starts at the end of your source audio (to give it a proper reverb tail)
5. Apply the Mastering Assistant
6. Bounce!

This seems like a really good framework for experimentation, especially for drone tones and ambient soundscapes. I’d be super interested to see what other people come up with!

• The We ♥ Katamari soundtrack; specifically I have an old gamerip that unfortunately has the full per-level runtime tracks which get kind of old after a while, but it was surprisingly fun to listen to while driving for some errands
• Psychic Realty (Revisited): An amazing remix album of one of Jeremy Blake’s already-amazing albums
• … and that’s it, that’s everything I listened to this week

Sometimes I just gotta give my ears a break, I guess.

• Benny Benassi - Electroman: I bought this because “Good Girl” was on Lumines Electric Symphony for the PS Vita, pretty much the only game that I spent any significant amount of time playing on that doomed system. The album as a whole seems like it’s a lighthearted parody/homage of all of the dance music styles that were popular in 2011. Or at least I found a lot of humor in it.
• Disappear by Revengeday
• The Rainbow Disconnection by Sad Kermit: I absolutely cannot believe that this album is allowed to continue to exist. I could have sworn it was DMCAed at one point. Also back when I got it, it was a free download from the artist’s website, I think. There’s more tracks that have been added since my acquisition.
• The Weekend EP by This Mess is Mine
• A Certain Distance by Lusine: some amazingly lush electronica that makes my ears very happy

Also, I’ve gone ahead and enabled webmention on this site in lieu of comments. The layout is just the defaults from webmention.js. Someday I’ll get around to building a proper comment system instead.

• Recreational Love by The Bird and the Bee: Not Bird and the Bee’s best album, but also not their worst. And even their worst album is still pretty darn good!
• The Caribbean: I seem to have gotten some of their music from the various SXSW Emerging Artists collections and it’s all pretty good. Guess I’m going to have to add some of their albums to my wishlist. Conveniently enough they have a discography purchase option, as all Bandcamp musicians should.
• Hotel Valentine by Cibo Matto: I used to be super into Cibo Matto in the late 90s. Viva! La Woman and Stereo Type A were both amazing, genre-defining experiences for me, and I saw them perform live in 1999 which was super amazing. So when Hotel Valentine came out, I bought it immediately, and then proceeded to not get around to listening to it until just now. It’s pretty okay, I guess.
• Warp20 (Chosen): As far as best-of collections of the state of electronic music in 2009 go, this one is super great.

Also, I want to ramble a little bit about the Last.fm yearly wrapup. It’s cool that it tells me my top listens in terms of artists and albums, but it’s a bit annoying that it doesn’t do anything to normalize albums based on their track count. Like, yes, I listened to all 100 tracks from Song Fight!’s A Grand Parade but that doesn’t mean I listened to it 100 times. There’s just 100 scrobbles from it due to my single listen of it.

I wish I could get counts of just albums, not individual tracks, so that I could better figure out which artists I listened to.

I definitely listened to a lot of Green Day, ambienteer, Benn Jordan (particularly the stuff he put in his massive Gumroad drop), and Jeremy Blake. But that’s also because those are artists I happen to own a lot of music of.

For much of the year I didn’t have AudioScrobbler running or forgot to sync play stats from my phone before they got lost forever (although now that I use PlexAmp as my primary mobile player that shouldn’t be a concern going forward), but I also know that I didn’t listen to music for much of it because I was so busy making it. For me, music has historically been what I listen to while working on other things, but since I’m basically full-time as a musician now, that doesn’t leave me a lot of time to listen to stuff, and after a day of working in the studio the last thing my ears need is to keep the fatigue going. So as of late I mostly just listen to music when I’m driving, and I don’t do a lot of that either.

It’s also a shame that the amazing music I heard on the now-departed Radio Free Fedi didn’t make it into AudioScrobbler either. There were some absolute bangers there. RFF was also a great place to get discovered in general. I hope more projects like it emerge and find a more sustainable path forward.

But in the meantime, sharing music discoveries is a big part of why I blog about what I listen to.

Here’s some musical-listening highlights since the last one:

• two months of moments by glaciaere: some really nice heartfelt FM synthy stuff that spans a bunch of different genres
• Six Foot Moon by Distractor: 80s nu-wave for the modern era
• Full Of It by Summer Cannibals: Some great female-led power punk rock, I’m totally here for it
• Black Box of Jazz: This is an amazing compilation of some of the best music that jazz has had to offer. I happened upon this collection when I was visiting Hong Kong back in 2000, and it’s an essential for anyone who has any interest in the genre.
• The Great Concert of Charles Mingus: Speaking of jazz, this one is also particularly amazing, although it probably helps to be familiar with a bunch of jazz already to fully appreciate some of the musical humor in it. Mingus is one of the jazz greats.
• Pivot by Amoeba (one of the many projects of Robert Rich): I’m not sure how to describe this as anything other than “experimental rock.” There’s some great grooves in this accompanying some great noises. I’m not sure how I ended up with this in my collection (way back in 2019 if my file timestamps are to be believed) but I’m glad I did.
• Duo de Bois: Six Sonatas for Flute and Violin: It’s a shame Magnatune has ceased operations because they had some really excellent classical music on offer. This is an excellent recording of a great classical work. I can only seem to find it for sale on Apple Music these days but it’s licensed CC by-nc-sa so it should be possible to obtain freely. If only there were a way.
• Drum Machine Dreams by Stevia Sphere: Nice lush ambient music to fill your ears to
• Expert in a Dying Field by The Beths: This album was the big hotness when it first came out a couple years ago, and it’s well-deserved.
• FREQUENCY gift by glitched puppet: Really awesome lo-fi abstract ambient chillwave groove things.

My scrobbles don’t reflect all of this, unfortunately, as I have upgraded my office computer and the last.fm scrobbler wasn’t properly autostarting. I’ve (hopefully) fixed it going forward, at least.

• little fires by miscellaneous owl: Lots of great earnest indie music in various genres
• Heartbreak on Vinyl by Blake Lewis: The sophmore album of my favorite American Idol finalist, with some pretty nice lush electropop/dance vibes on this one
• Fly! by The Flashbulb
• Rock!!!!! by The Violent Femmes
• Verve//Unmixed vol. 3: Some really great jazz classics on this one (and on the whole Verve//Remixed and Verve//Unmixed series, for that matter)
• Song Fight!: Her: This is one of those fights from the era when a lot of folks were bringing their A-game, and there’s some great songs in this one

Thanks!

When discussing some of the alternate paths that people can take, it’s important to know what’s out there and what their strengths and weaknesses are.

Silos

In IndieWeb terminology, a “silo” is a website that operates basically in isolation from others, or where it’s a single site that is not under the control of its users, that attempts to be the single source of truth for everything. In social media parlance, this would be sites like Twitter X, Facebook, Tumblr, that sort of thing — a single dashboard that people sign into and can only see stuff from that site (or things posted directly to it), where the data is formatted based on that site’s requirements and are subject to that site’s moderation whims. Any interoperability with other sites is generally done through a special-cased partnership or API-based agreement.

Note that something being a “silo” isn’t a value judgement; it’s just a statement of the way in which the site or service operates.

In the music space, here are some of the better-known silos, which I present mostly as a point of reference when discussing the independent alternatives:

• Streaming providers, such as Spotify, Apple Music, Tidal, Pandora, Amazon Music and so on:

  These are places where where you pay a monthly subscription fee (sometimes in the form of ad revenue) to get access to their libraries, and presumably some amount of this subscription cost goes to pay for the music that they host in some way (although the people receiving that music are usually not the musicians, but that’s a whole other rant).

  The streaming silos tend to get their content through partnership agreements with distributors such as DistroKid, TooLost, TuneCore, CDBaby, amuse, and many others. While distributors handle the annoying parts of submitting musicians' content to the streaming providers and managing the payments in return, these partnerships are still formed directly and not available to the general public, and they, too, are silos.

• Storefronts, such as Bandcamp, Mirlo, Gumroad, Ko-Fi Shops, itch, etc.:

  These serve as places where people can make their music available for sale, and sell it, often with other value-add tools such as mailing lists, blogs, merch stores, and so on.

  These are often silos out of necessity, as handling payments is actually super tricky for a whole bunch of legal and business reasons. However, none of them work as just payment providers, and instead they’re all all-in-one does-everything things, often with the expectation that a musician will use that site as their one and only place to actually make their music available for discovery.

  Mirlo is an interesting case in that it’s run using a co-op governance model and strives to be as fair and equitable to the musicians as possible, but it is still a silo. There is only one instance of Mirlo, you cannot subscribe to a musician on another site from Mirlo (or vice-versa), and if you want to sell stuff on Mirlo, you have to adapt it to the specific capabilities that Mirlo puts in place.

• Discography and discovery services, such as Last.fm, MusicBrainz/ListenBrainz:

  These sites attempt to catalog all known music and help people to discover more of it. Often this is through a combination of user submissions and through so-called “scrobbling” software, where someone installs a bit of software to track the music they’re listening to and provide it as structured data back to the site, usually with varying levels of fidelity.

  One of the intended purposes of all this is to find relationships between music, such as “these bands have these members in common,” or “this recording had this guest performer on it,” or also recommendations such as, “If you like this song, you’ll probably also like this song.”

• Media hosting sites, such as YouTube and SoundCloud:

  These sorts of sites are basically fancy file hosting, where people can upload a piece of media and then others can watch/listen to them, usually for free (via ad revenue), and there’s often discovery and recommendations as well.

• Licensing clearinghouses, such as Songtradr, PlusMusic, or the late great Magnatune:

  Music gets used in way more ways than simply being listened to on its own. It’s often used as background music for commercials, video games, films and TV shows, Twitch streams, YouTube videos, and so on. Licensing agencies allegedly help with the difficult parts of getting one’s music heard and getting those fat stacks of royalties. Allegedly.

• Livestreaming platforms, such as Twitch, Picarto, Floatplane, YouTube Live, etc.:

  Sometimes musicians like to perform live for an audience. These platforms provide that ability, as well as a modicum of discoverability based on popularity and stream content. However, they tend to be problematic for live music, due to rights-related issues, bogus copyright claims, and overly-aggressive copyright enforcement in general. They also tend to be ad-supported and the ad breaks are often not in exactly the best place when it comes to music.

Federated services

A so-called “federated” service is one where it’s designed such that there’s multiple instances of the software running independently, but there is interoperable communication between them, so that, for example, a person on instance A can subscribe to updates posted to instance B. Think of it as being like email, where someone with a gmail.com address can still send a message to someone on beesbuzz.biz and vice-versa; there’s no central authority on who is able to send what to whom, there is just an agreement in the form of an open protocol that allows anyone to join in, and no need to form a particular partnership for two things to talk to each other.

In the music space we have a number of things like this:

• Mastodon: This isn’t technically a music thing, but a lot of musicians are on it. Its basically a federated version of Twitter, where people can post about stuff they like or are listening to, or can share clips of what they’re working on, and it’s just basically a free-form discussion microblogging thing. Mastodon is often what people think of when they hear about ActivityPub, which is the main underlying protocol it uses for instances to talk to each other. There are also other things that speak the Mastodon protocol suite and interoperate with it, including Akkoma, GoToSocial, and a bunch of others. The collection of systems that interoperate in this way are generally referred to as “the Fediverse.”

• Funkwhale: This is basically an ActivityPub-based implementation of SoundCloud, more or less.

• PeerTube: And this is an ActivityPub YouTube-like.

• Bandwagon: This is a (currently early development) ActivityPub-based thing that’s essentially a federated version of Bandcamp or Mirlo. The overall goal for it is to have federated discovery and perhaps the ability to purchase in a cross-instance manner as well.

Self-hosted things

Self-hosting a music website is a bit of a challenge; while you certainly can use pretty much any website publishing platform for that (this site, for example, uses Publ¹, and many musicians use things like WordPress and the like), there’s only a handful of things that are tailor-made specifically for making self-hosted music sites.

• Faircamp is a static site generator that is geared specifically towards allowing people to have a one-and-done thing for encoding all your files, generating nice HTML, and providing an interlinked discography, on any website that allows for static hosting. It also has a mechanism for “soft” payment gateways, where you can set up an external payment provider in order to sell a hidden link to a .zip download. It’s quite nice if your needs are specifically what Faircamp was designed for (which is basically a self-hosted Bandcamp analog).

• Bandcrash is a tool meant to encode albums and generate standalone HTML players that can then be embedded on another website. I wrote this specifically to make it easier to publish albums to my itch.io page, although I also use it in places on this site (such as the client work section), and at some point I will switch to using it for the embedded player on all of my album pages (I just need to get around to supporting a couple of things first).

• Blamscamp and Scritch are, similarly, player embed generators, although they require you to do your own audio encoding.

  Bandcrash originally used Blamscamp as its player, incidentally, and at one point I was considering switching to Scritch before I ended up just writing my own, Camptown. I do intend to eventually make Blamscamp and Scritch options for the player for those who prefer it, though.

• Owncast: This is an ActivityPub-enabled live streaming platform. It’s what I use for my own streaming setup.

  I list this as being “self-hosted” rather than “federated” because it isn’t really federated in the general sense. An instance can only host a single stream at a time and there’s no real login (aside from chat names), but you can subscribe to stream notifications via pretty much any Fediverse account, there’s a limited amount of chat identity management using IndieAuth, and there’s plenty of bots which will happily share stream discovery events to the greater Fediverse. It’s a publish-only sort of federation, similar to providing an RSS/Atom feed on a blog.

• Plex and PlexAmp: Self-hosted music streaming (á la Spotify/Pandora/Apple Music/etc.).

  This is a bit different than the other things here in terms of it being for simplifying your own consumption of music, rather than publishing it, but it’s an important part of the ecosystem in this modern, connected era. If you buy your music from people instead of just renting it, this is a perfectly good way to get access to it everywhere. It also has a discovery and recommendation mechanism, although that part is a paid add-on to Plex itself and my understanding is it only helps to recommend things you already own for having a semi-curated continuous music listening experience.

Protocols

The goal of interoperability is to make it so that musicians don’t have to redo work in a lot of places. Right now, when a musician wants to release some music, they have to upload it to a bunch of different places: music distributors, social media, every site they want to sell it on, and so on. This is a lot of work, and it gets increased every time someone needs to make a change to something (such as correcting a typo in the lyrics).

In my dream scenario, I’d be able to just post an album once to a site I control (be it this one or something like Bandcamp or Mirlo), and then have it picked up by all of the other places I want my music to appear.

One of the most important things about interoperability is having a protocol through which things can interoperate.

Most of the things listed above use ActivityPub with various ad-hoc data standards for the actual data exchange.

Another approach to interop is adopting composable protocols such as RSS/Atom and mf2 (preferred by the IndieWeb community) to provide the data in ways that can be parsed by external tooling. Any piece of software that publishes music to the web should also provide some common format that can be discovered from the page and then used to provide the data in a more computer-digestible way.

On this site I have attempted to provide some amount of mf2 and atom data; for example, the main page provides a feed of albums and blog posts in mf2 (which you can parse using pin13.net), and each of my album and track pages try to provide structured information about their content as well (for example, you can see the structured data for Transitions and for Behind a Mask). And of course for subscribing to updates you can point a feed reader at pretty much any page on this site.

There is no current widely-agreed-to standard for music interchange, however; I’ve been working with the developer of Bandwagon to try to establish some common ground (which I will attempt to support both on this site and in Camptown).

There do exist some protocols already, such as schema.org’s CreativeWork types, and OpenGraph’s “Music” namespace. These protocols are not widely-supported either, and leave a lot to be desired, as they are designed in the interest of search engines and social media companies, not so much individual creators.

What’s the point, anyway?

Imagine a world where you can post a release to your website and have it show up on social media, in discovery and recommendation feeds, or on genre-specific streaming radio stations that actively promote the artists (given appropriate permissions, of course), or any number of other things I haven’t imagined just yet.

And with a little more work in terms of payment- and license-related information, imagine being able to have things like automated sync licensing for placements in video games and short films and podcasts.

And imagine being in complete control of how your stuff is presented to the world to begin with! Even if you don’t want to build your own website from the ground up, imagine being able to choose your favorite existing software and use that to run your web presence, and if you don’t like something about it, being able to switch to something else without having to redo everything from scratch!

This website is the fourth time I’ve completely rebuilt my web presence from the ground up, and I hope that it can be the last.

1. Someday I will release my Publ templates for this site so that others may use Publ for their music sites as well. I’d like to think this site is pretty good! ↩

Anyway, while tagging music, I’ve been spending some quality time just listening to other peoples' music. Here’s a few things that I’ve enjoyed recently.

• Programmable Love Songs, Volume One by FlexE (Benn Jordan): I got this in Benn Jordan’s recent-ish complete discography drop, and I rather enjoyed it. I’ve been watching his YouTube channel for a while but only recently have started to actually listen to his music. Some of it’s pretty good! Maybe even most of it.
• Trippin' Out, by Chris McDermott & His Wild Combo: This is a CD I bought back in CDBaby’s old “online record store” salad days, before the entire music industry switched purely to digital distribution. It doesn’t seem to be on any of the indie purchase services these days and as far as I can tell the band is no longer active, but this album is some pretty fun, frenetic blues jamming. My favorite song on the album is “Polkadot.”
• Song Fight!: Tyson’s Corner: This is a fight from 2015 (gosh, has it been 9.5 years already?!) and I don’t think I ever got around to listening to it before. There’s some great songs in this one, and this was from a time period when Song Fight! generally had a decent level of overall quality in most fights.
• Let It Be, by The Beatles: I used to be a huge Beatles fan and their music still holds up for the most part. Some of the songs on this particular album are a bit self-indulgent but oh well, it’s called “classic” rock for a reason.
• Determinance: Original Soundtrack by nervous_testpilot: some pretty great 90s acid techno-style stuff that sounds like it’d be totally at home on any given Playstation 1 racing game. I have no idea how it fits with the actual game it’s from. Maybe I should play it someday.

The gist of the conversation is that pretty much everyone, especially those working in music, always have such a relative, subjective idea of what it means to be “successful,” and the overarching constant seems to be that even people who are making a sustainable living at music, and who have a respectful following, and so on, still don’t see themselves as successful.

I think at this point it’s pretty clear that I am not successful as a musician; my releases do not pay for themselves, much less generating any considerable amount of income, it’s been a struggle to get even 150 subscribers on my YouTube channel, and even getting anyone to listen to my music to begin with is a struggle.

So, here are some ideas of what I think it would mean to be successful as a musician. This isn’t all-inclusive, nor does every criterion have to be met.

• The amount of income I get from my music would be sufficient as a living wage
• Any time I release something new, I have a fanbase that acquires it without prompting
• Any release pays for its own production costs within its first month of release
• I have enough fans that YouTube actively tries to retain my content rather than treating my channel as a liability
• Any release I put out gets visibility in the various streaming platforms' algorithms
• People approach me to express interest in hiring me
• Concert organizers approach me to express interest in me performing with them¹
• I am approached with offers for representation, either via an agent or a record label
• I have people trying to interpret my songs on their own, whether correctly or incorrectly, and reading their own meaning into them regardless

That said, there are a few criteria by which I can judge myself successful as a musician:

• I have had people I don’t otherwise know reach out to me saying how much some of my music meant to them at some point in their life
• I have had people I don’t otherwise know cover songs of mine (shout-out especially to Matches for her lovely cover/reinterpretation of Rhymes with Lucia)
• I have had people I don’t otherwise know tell me they are fans of my work

And that isn’t nothing.

1. Ignoring pay-for-play scams and other such predatory nonsense, of course. ↩

I of course have my latest album, Transitions, and quite a few other albums available, including with a deep discount if you opt to buy my entire discography all at once.

There are also a lot of other artists that I think you should consider supporting!

Here are the things I’m planning on buying this month:

• The Recollection by 46bliss

  46bliss is one of those bands that I learned about in the early days of CDBaby, and I loved their original album, “Pistachio Home.” They’re a band I lost track of after that release, and I’m surprised to learn they’re still around! Several of the songs on The Recollection are remixes or remasters of songs from Pistachio Home but there’s also a lot of new-to-me songs on it as well.

  They have a bunch of other albums that have come out in the interim but they don’t appear to be available anywhere at the moment.

• err:Rawr’s latest releases

  He has released a bunch of stuff since the last time I updated my collection of his work. He’s a good bean and a fellow member of the Red Means Recording Patreon Discord.

• Astronomy Nights by Whispering Cosmos

  I don’t know a lot about this artist and I’m not sure how it ended up on my list, but that’s fine. I could always use more chill ambient music in my life.

• reflections by lowercase t

  This artist is a friend of mine who is always the first to support others, and they are, again, a good bean. Their music is also great, with these fun lush soundscapes that are also full of delicious dissonance and weird processed vocals that give it an uncanny feeling of being music from another universe.

• Novembeat 2024 by BackspinZX

  Another good bean, who I also know from the Red Means Recording community. I always especially love supporting people who produce music for Novembeat, especially when it’s as high-quality as this.

• Novembeat 2024 by Harder Wins

  This is aggressively minimal beat-based music, and it’s also Novembeat, one of only two submissions this year.

• moult’s discography

  Hey look, it’s another furry musician who refuses to stick to a single genre. I especially like Cupples.

I also have plenty of other recommendations from months past (I will eventually backfill them onto this site), and for even more independent music, you could just look at my Bandcamp collection. Which is, uh, quite large.

Context

Once a year, Song Fight! people get together to do a show, Song Fight! Live, where we basically get together and do Song Fight! as an in-person live event. The original format from the first three years was that we’d have basically an in-person reprise of prior title challenges (with different musicians taking turns to play their songs for the titles), followed by what was essentially an open mic for songs people wanted to perform. In keeping with the challenge of Song Fight!, the event’s host would also provide a title for people to make a new song for, to be debuted at the show.

Starting in the fourth year, the title-based format stopped being feasible (due to the growing number of titles and the rarity of any two participants having had any of them in common), and it switched to a concert-festival format, with each participant doing a short performance set, but the final “live fight” challenge (with the debut of a new song) remained.

In 2020, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the format had to change; rather than meeting in person, we prerecorded videos that we would submit for presentation, and there would be a separate video presentation of the “live” fight songs, with a vote conducted online. The title in 2020 was “Better Luck Next Year,” which was… optimistic about how soon the pandemic would subside enough for us to reconvene in person.

2021 was still online-only, and the title selected for the live fight was “Behind a Mask.”

When this challenge was ongoing, I had recently moved from Seattle to a nearby small town in order to have more space for gardening and working on music, although I had not yet set up my new recording studio.

Inspiration

With the context of the world and everyone’s isolation, I was struck by just how much everyone had withdrawn and started to rely on social media for all interpersonal contact, and with how much this reliance on social media was distorting peoples' attitudes to one another.

At the same time, in this isolation, many people were forced to spend a lot of time alone, which leads to introspection and self-discovery. At the same time, Snapchat’s “gender swap” filter was leading a lot of people to experience gender euphoria for the first time, making them realize just how much dysphoria they were normally under without realizing it.

Meanwhile, so-called “deepfake” technology was getting extremely powerful and scary, and this was leading to a huge uptick in the number of scams being perpetrated on unsuspecting/unaware people, who didn’t realize that the person they thought they were dealing with did not exist.

The various algorithms that were impacting everyone’s lives were changing the way we thought about ourselves and others.

Lyrical meaning

Feeling lost in an elephant’s dream

This is in reference to how elephants purportedly never forget, and how the Internet is essentially a non-forgetting collection of facts that can be recalled at will, perhaps inaccurately. The specific phrase comes from the name of an open-source short film.

Caught up in the digital stream

This is, of course, in reference to how awash everyone is in a never-ending stream of social media posts, especially when trapped inside with nothing better to do than to sit at the computer.

Cave of shadows, can’t say what I mean

This is a reference to Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, in combination with the acts of self-censorship people have to undergo in order to remain “polite” or to avoid hurting others' feelings, especially with regards to invalidating other peoples' truths.

A million miles far from home

Being stuck inside made one’s home feel like an unfamiliar, oppressive place. Many of us just wanted to get back to simpler times.

Best foot forward, take a step back

A reference to the Overton window and its related allegory: “Meet me halfway,” says the reasonable person; you step forward, they take a step back, and then once again say, “Meet me halfway.”

Play defense while on the attack

Bad actors have a tendency to play the victim while being the ones who are committing an offense. Figuring out who is really wronged, and what steps we must take to address that injustice, can be quite challenging.

Sowing discord, can’t cut them no slack

This line has a double meaning; the primary one is that people who spread misinformation and disinformation online have a tendency to then decry anyone who tries to correct their lies and mistruths, and how difficult it is to hold one’s ground in light of that.

The other meaning is that Discord and Slack very quickly took over as the communication platforms of choice, especially as alternatives to in-person communication and collaboration since offices had finally become recognized as unsafe breeding grounds for disease.

Everybody so alone

Because, you know. Isolation.

If everyone could see
themselves through some other eyes

Perhaps it was a wish for folks to try to understand where other people were coming from, perhaps it was a cry for a fresh perspective in general.

Innocent, caught up in the machinery
An algorithmic disguise

The entire premise of the song.

Making everything great again

A reference to a certain Presidential candidate and his tendency to always frame his positions as being a “common sense” return to greatness.

Forget about your family and friends

So many people I knew went down political rabbit holes never to emerge; factions formed, contact was broken off, so much hurt happened as a result of people getting caught up in particularly virulent cliques.

Looking for a means to an end

So many people got downright Machiavellian when it came to justifying their beliefs and opinions, especially through vilifying the “other.”

Just don’t want to be alone

Many destructive online communities became self-sustaining cliques where people are so caught up in their community that they dare not abandon the specific belief system that makes it a community to begin with.

Back in September, 2020, Dan Olson released an incredible video about the Flat Earth community which goes deep into this, and draws connections between it and some of the other communities I am indirectly addressing in this song.

Fragile gem, split in two

This line has another specific double meaning.

First of all, I saw a huge uptick in people who began to identify as plural, possibly because of how much time they were spending with themselves and where they started to notice (or perhaps build) lines around the different aspects of their personalities that make them whole. Sometimes it felt like people were purposefully breaking themselves apart, shattering into little shards that could never be reassembled.

Secondly, and more generally, this just referred to the much deeper political divide that had formed, separating society fully into diametrically-opposed camps.

Internal dialog of them versus you

This refers to both of the meanings of the previous line. Some of the plural systems were having a very difficult time agreeing with themselves. Radicalized people with strong political views would engage in straw man tactics to decide that people on the other side were inherently wrong because of what they believed each other to believe, even if those beliefs were not, you know, actually present.

Find acceptance with nothing to do
The voices there are all your own

And this continues the double meaning, with somewhat opposing meanings depending on which side you’re looking at.

If everyone could see
Themselves through some other eyes
Innocent, caught up in the machinery
An algorithmic disguise

No new meaning to this repeat of the chorus.

A deeper body ache

The stress of the Everything made a lot of chronic pain sufferers feel everything to the core.

And make a bad mistake
A million jumping on

Nobody ever wants to become the Internet’s main character. Make a fool of yourself in public by sharing an opinion, and you might just be branded a monster forever.

Sharing a bad take
Nobody can quite shake
The feeling that you’re gone

But sometimes people just dig in their heels, regardless of any impassioned pleas to the contrary, and sometimes everyone else just has to cut their losses and mourn the person they once knew.

[Caught up in/Woke up from] the elephant’s dream

This lyric was originally recorded as a repeat of the first line of the song, but when I perform it live it is now changed, to show a progression and an understanding that it’s possible to pull yourself out of these algorithmic traps.

Getting washed away by the digital stream

But being aware of the situation doesn’t itself solve the problem.

If it feels better to share another meme
Doesn’t make you less alone

A lot of people use memes and cultural touchpoints to bond with each other. There’s nothing wrong with that, but life needs to be more than just sharing the latest weird in-jokes with your circle, right?

Some notes

My explanation of the “fragile gem” section might be seen as saying something that I am not, and I want to go into further detail.

In no way am I calling for a centrist idea of civility between warring camps. Nor am I saying that there are correct ideas on “both sides.” Instead I’m expressing frustration on how there even are tribal “sides” to begin with, and how much the nature of the modern Internet and social media in particular have lead to this societal partitioning.

I am very much of the opinion that we need to do what’s best for each other, and that happens to put me firmly on one side of the divide that shouldn’t even exist to begin with. I’d love to see the gap get filled in, ideally with the corpses of the capitalist systems that created it to begin with. From where I’m standing I feel like things are too far-gone.

I hope I’m wrong, but things are likely going to get way worse before they can get better.

And regarding plurality, I am certainly not making a judgment call or claiming what’s right for people. I’m just observing that the state of the world has led to these internal fractures and that sometimes people are left duct-taping the pieces back together. Really, my belief is that everyone is made up of separate constituent parts, and what defines someone’s “self” as an integrated whole has no true objective basis. I just want to remind people that even if they are multiple individual shards, they still form a singular being, even if it doesn’t feel like it sometimes.

Making of the video

Most of the videos produced for the live fight were just people performing their song in front of a camera, sometimes with loved ones, sometimes overdubbing and editing things into a “live” assemblage. (If you like, you can see the entire event as it unfolded.)

I took a different approach, and in I went all-in on the “algorithmic disguise” aspect, using Snapchat filters to make myself appear to be a number of different things (including, at one point, an actual sockpuppet!), as well as a bunch of other video filters for various effects. All of the video footage was taken while I recorded those parts for the Song Fight! submission, although for the album I rerecorded the vocals. (Regrettably I hadn’t yet thought to make the “woke up” change at that point.)

As mentioned earlier, I had not yet set up my recording studio, so I recorded different parts of it in different rooms of my house. There was also a segment that I animated (the making of which was shown in a timelapse during the post-bridge instrumental). Some commenters thought that this was also a Snapchat filter (which I’d looked into doing and is the style I was going for), but I’d actually keyframed it manually and used EbSynth to interpolate the keyframes, with additional video effects to take stylistic advantage of where EbSynth fell short. I was specifically inspired by Joel Haver’s animation technique (and Joel was kind enough to watch my video and leave a nice comment on it).

The bit with Animal Crossing was in reference to how New Horizons came out at just the right time to become the game of the pandemic. By mid-2021 I was pretty bored with it, but I also happened to have an in-game wardrobe that reflected my real-life clothing and some accessories; I’m not sure how well it comes across in the video, but during the segment where I’m changing my clothes in-game, those changes are also reflected in real life.

I am not too ashamed to admit that playing with my appearance in Animal Crossing actually inspired some real-life stylistic changes at the time, too, including me adopting a new hairstyle for a while.

During the DDR segment I’m actually playing one of my own charts (specifically the one I made for Delicious Candy). I thought that imperfectly playing DDR to the lyrics “A deeper body ache / and make a bad mistake / a million jumping on” was too good to pass up. I was also purposeful at tearing the mask off (to breathe better) only for the camera to cut away just before my face becomes visible.

Aftermath

I did the entirety of the song — video and all — in just over two days.

A couple people complained about it being “over-produced” and losing sight of the purported Song Fight! Live ethos, even though I was working in the same time constraints as everyone else, while simultaneously dealing with not yet being fully set up in my new home. But people love to find things to complain about, I guess. (Which is what I’m doing right now, too.)

Neither the song nor the video won anything in Song Fight!, but it was the song that sparked me to finally complete the album Songs of Substance, which I’d been planning for a few years at that point. There’s some pretty good songs on that album, if I do say so myself! None of them are as deep or meaningful as “Behind a Mask,” but I’m particularly fond of A Long Plastic Hallway.

It’s still a bit of a work in progress. There’s a lot of meta-information I still need to add, and the music section will eventually get a nice tag browser to make it easier to filter through my, uh, 25 years of releases to find what you’re looking for, but adding in the data that’s necessary for that to happen will take some time.

I also hope to eventually make it so that you can get nice printable liner notes from all of my album pages, but that will also take a bit of doing!

There’s also obviously a bit of design work that needs to be done, especially around tags and the buy/listen box for things. I definitely have plans! But for now I’m just trying to get this site functional enough, and I think it’s at that point.

I also have a lot of plans for this blog in particular: I want to have articles on music making, stuff about the music industry (and trying to survive as an independent musician in general), and also an ongoing diary of the music I’m listening to or inspired by! I might also post occasional things like deeper meanings behind songs, and random work-in-progress things or other little experiments.

This blog will definitely be more focused on my music, though; for other stuff, I have a whole other website.

I’m still trying to decide whether I want a comment system, and what form it’ll take. Sometimes I feel like simple is better, and in the meantime there are plenty of other ways for people to get in touch with me.