I will be performing three 15-minute live sets at Trans Academy as part of the annual Trans Pride VR festivities! Please join TRANS.7885 to attend! (And come to Trans Pride VR too! It’ll be fun.)

I will also try to stream my sets at the usual place but there are no guarantees.

I will be performing three 15-minute live sets at Trans Academy as part of the annual Trans Pride VR festivities! Please join TRANS.7885 to attend! (And come to Trans Pride VR too! It’ll be fun.)

I will also try to stream my sets at the usual place but there are no guarantees.

I will be performing three 15-minute live sets at Trans Academy as part of the annual Trans Pride VR festivities! Please join TRANS.7885 to attend! (And come to Trans Pride VR too! It’ll be fun.)

I will also try to stream my sets at the usual place but there are no guarantees.

I performed at VRelium for Horizons: Music Beyond the Universe, on what happened to be my birthday!

You can still access its old microsite. (Be sure to click the “play” button in the corner.)

Happy birthday!

I will be performing a live set with Refraction VR to help kick off Pride month! I hope to see y'all there! For those who can’t make it in VR, I will also be streaming it on my Owncast instance UPDATE: on twitch.

This show is 18+ and will require VRChat age verification.

I will be performing a half-hour live set at Trans Academy, kicking off the new TA Underground concert series. Join VRChat group TRANS.7885 for your access to the show, or watch it live on Twitch.

Last night Furality opened up a dealer’s den preview so that we could check that our booths are set up correctly, and as a treat we got to see a decent chunk of the world and the overall style of the show, and I gotta say, it’s incredible. The Furality team have knocked it out of the park this year, and have really outdone themselves. From what I’ve seen this isn’t just going to be an incredible con, it’s going to be an amazing VRChat experience, and I am absolutely thrilled to be a part of it.

If you’re at all in VRChat (even if you aren’t at all interested in furry stuff), or heck, even if you’ve been thinking of trying VRChat out, I highly recommend coming to Furality Somna so that you can experience the joy. Also, you don’t need a VR setup to use VRChat! it just helps with the immersion (although just a warning, if you play it on desktop or cellphone you’ll probably end up really wanting to get a headset anyway).

Also, I plan on doing various impromptu shows at various places throughout the con, and if you see me wandering around, feel free to come up and say “hi!”

I will be debuting a brand-new composition, “Slow Dance,” at the Trans Academy Prom. Join group TRANS.7885 to attend in person, or watch the show on Twitch.

My lead time at the time was around 6 weeks, and I was told the records would ship on May 14. They ended up shipping a couple days later than expected, but I still ended up receiving them today, which isn’t too much further after the original estimate.

Anyway, here’s my review of how the product turned out.

UPDATE: elasticStage have responded to my review by sending me updated copies. Definitely check out what’s new!

The albums come in a very nice, professional-quality slipcover, with a custom-printed dust sleeve. The print quality is fantastic, and it easily meets or exceeds what I’d expect from traditional vinyl manufacturing.

The records themselves are lathe-cut, and according to elasticStage the blanks are manufactured with a process which are much more environmentally-friendly than traditional vinyl although they do not specify what exactly it is (although some sources say it’s PET, the plastic used for drink bottles).

The labels on the records feel a little chintzy, though. The label for Transitions was slightly off-center (unfortunate, given the circle motif) and both of them very much have a feeling of being printed on an inkjet printer, with a finish akin to early-2000s CD label makers. The print quality isn’t quite as crisp as I’d like. It’s still quite good, though, it just doesn’t feel quite so professional there.

Sound quality is, of course, the really important thing here.

First off, I should mention that while Transitions was properly mastered to modern standards (-14dB LUFS integrated with a -1dB true peak and with EQ matched to a reference curve), Refactor just got a “make things sound properly loud and consistent” approach where I did it all by ear, and spec-wise Refactor’s LUFS are all over the place and with some tracks having a true peak approaching +2dB. So I was super curious how well they’d turn out.

Both of them came out pretty great! They’re not perfect by any means, but the equalization on Transitions matched my expectations. Refactor was a bit treble-heavy, and there were a couple of bits where the high peaks sounded like they might have been hard-limited a little. This was especially prominent on Little Bouncing Ball, and the mp3 version streamed via Plex to the same hifi setup didn’t have the same characteristics.

I would be super interested to know how much better Refactor could sound if I gave it a remastering pass, but as it is, the current vinyl version sounds quite good! It also does sound characteristically like vinyl, so I don’t hate it by any means.

The big downside is that both albums do exhibit a lot of surface noise, and that surface noise actually sounds a lot like some sort of digital noise floor issue, which makes me wonder about the signal chain in their lathe setup. I had cleaned both records and my stylus and it made no difference to the surface noise, so I can only guess that it’s probably due to how the lathe cutting works.

But anyway, Transitions still made my tears well up at the places it normally does, and something about the string arrangements just felt richer and more emotional to me. And the surface noise gave both records something of a vintage feeling to them, even though the noise itself didn’t sound like typical vinyl noise.

So, with all that said, I produced the vinyl to be a collectible artifact, and not to have better audio quality. Given that both albums were produced entirely digitally and are available in lossless formats from Mirlo and Bandcamp, if you’re looking for the ultimate audio quality, buy them in FLAC. Personally I just use the high-bitrate MP3 versions.

But as an artifact, an indication that I was here and that I left my little mark on the world, I absolutely love that this service exists, and if anyone else feels the same, I have no qualms about offering these albums for sale through elasticStage.

(But if you just want to listen to them digitally, that’s fine too!)

I recently polled on Mastodon about next records to produce. The overwhelming response I got is that people would prefer that I make CDs instead. Fortunately, elasticStage makes those too! So, expect that to be a thing in the not-too-distant future.

I’ll still probably put more albums out on vinyl as well.

One I really want to do is Lo-Fi Beats to Grind Coffee To, but unfortunately that will have to wait until elasticStage supports multi-disc sets, as 63 minutes is a bit too long for an LP. They do have multi-disc on their roadmap, although they’re not expecting it to be available until next year at the earliest.

It’s that time again! Join TRANS.7885 for access, or watch on the Twitch stream Whoops, there was no Twitch stream this time, sorry to anyone who was expecting to watch me that way.

I will be performing an acoustic version of Play That Game at the Trans Academy’s “Moonlit” concert series. Join TRANS.7885 for access, or watch on the Twitch stream.

As someone who wasn’t a performing musician at the time, I still benefitted from it, as it gave me an occasional tiny boost to my (already tiny) music income.

But at this point it’s an entrenched tradition and it’s actually causing more harm than good. It might be time for it to end, or at least be reconsidered.

Because of Bandcamp Friday, there are two unfortunate tendencies which end up amplifying one another:

1. Many musicians are now withholding their releases until Bandcamp Friday so that they can get the biggest cut of their sales, meaning that all listeners are now overwhelmed with an absolute torrent of release and marketing notices on that one day, causing their music to be lost in the fray
2. Many listeners are now withholding their purchases until Bandcamp Friday with the well-meaning intention of supporting the musicians as best they can

Both of these tendencies compound, badly. For example, a significant amount of Bandcamp attention ostensibly comes through the release-window charting. It should be a good thing for musicians to stagger their releases out so that they aren’t competing for visibility and purchases within their release window. At the same time, it’s better for charting purposes for listeners to buy an album when it first releases, rather than waiting up to two months for it to happen later.

This has also likely had a much more profound impact on Bandcamp’s bottom line than expected. Bandcamp hasn’t been public about how much the impact has been, but there’s been a couple of hints about this; for example, a couple of times they’ve ended up in sponsorship arrangements with other companies (such as one with Roland), presumably to help defray their own losses on those days. It did not do anyone any favors.

But they’ve also gotten stuck; on months where they don’t do a Bandcamp Friday, people complain!

Bandcamp has their own share of expenses in running the company, so obviously they can’t just remove their cut permanently. But they’ve effectively ended up in a situation where they’re constantly having to compete with themselves; there’s roughly one day out of sixty when they make no money, but those days also have an outsized influence. If they’re able to afford that, perhaps they could reevaluate what their normal sales cut is and just do a permanent reduction all around.

Mirlo allows musicians to select how much of a cut Mirlo gets, and they suggest 7% as the amount that covers Mirlo’s expenses at a break-even level. Bandcamp’s cut is currently 15% for “long-tail” artists and 10% for artists who generate at least $5000 per year. There are a lot of factors that would go either way in terms of Bandcamp’s actual costs compared to Mirlo’s, but perhaps Bandcamp could change their cut permanently to be 10% for long-tail and 7% after the $5000 threshold.

My own sales over the past year have broken down as follows:

• Total gross revenue, whole year: $942.57
• Total gross revenue on Bandcamp Friday: $754.64
• Bandcamp’s total collected share: $63.32 (6.7%)
• Payment processor fees: $41.15
• Sales tax: $58.07
• My net revenue: $777.03

If they’d change their fee structure instead of having these periodic loss-leading sales events, then assuming the same number of sales for me throughout the year it would have been more like:

• Total gross revenue, whole year: $942.57
• Bandcamp’s total collected share: $94.26 (10%)
• Payment processor fees: $41.15
• Sales tax: $58.07
• My net revenue: $749.09

I’d have only made a little bit less, but Bandcamp would have made a bit more, but also, that’s only assuming the same number of sales happened. If it weren’t for the dynamics of Bandcamp Friday, it’s quite possible that I’d have made more sales overall, and in particular since more sales would have come during the release window of my albums, it could have led to charting and the increased promotion that came as a result of it. I have absolutely no idea how to reasonably estimate that, but assuming I made even 15% more in sales as a result of the changed dynamic ($1084), then at a 10% cut it would look something like:

• Gross revenue: $1084
• Bandcamp split: $108.40 (10%)
• Payment processor fees: $47.32
• Sales tax: $66.78
• Net revenue: $861.50

This would have benefitted both me and Bandcamp. And heck, even if Bandcamp were to keep their 15% cut I’d still be better off:

• Gross revenue: $1084
• Bandcamp split: $162.60 (15%)
• Payment processor fees: $47.32
• Sales tax: $66.78
• Net revenue: $807.30

As things currently stand, though, we have more and more musicians fighting for an even smaller slice of the pie, and listeners are getting annoyed.

At this point Bandcamp Friday isn’t really helping anyone and it is probably long past time that it came to an end.

Bandcamp have already committed to a few more Bandcamp Fridays this year but I honestly hope that they do not continue it into 2026. It’s doing more harm than good.

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.

I will be performing at the Trans Academy’s “Moonlit” concert series, this time for the European time slot. Join TRANS.7885 for access, or watch on the Twitch stream.

I did two songs and a bonus third song for Trans Academy’s “Moonlit” concert series.

(Apologies for the audio quality; I forgot to record my direct audio this time, so this is the in-game audio captured by Rory Pelham of the Trans Academy’s broadcast team. Thanks, Rory!)

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.