Hey y'all! It is Bandcamp Friday once again. Today is the best day to support musicians on Bandcamp (including myself) as Bandcamp waives their cut of the sale price of all music for this day only.
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:
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)
Bandcamp recently rolled out bulk editing for albums, but unfortunately it only lets you bulk-edit album prices, rather than the prices of individual tracks within an album. Fortunately, it isn’t too difficult to do this with a little Javascript.
For each album that you want to change the prices on:
Open up your album’s editor
Open up your browser’s Javascript console (usually using ctrl-alt-I on a PC, or cmd-alt-I on a Mac)
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:
I recently learned about elasticStage, an on-demand vinyl LP manufacturing company. I’ve always wanted to get some of my albums on vinyl, especially Transitions and Refactor, two albums which are very near and dear to my heart.
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.
Today is Transgender Day of Visibility, and as a transgender musician who has been releasing music online since the 1990s (and writing music since the 1980s), it’s super important to me that members of my community get seen today. The complex feelings around being transgender have always been a big part of my music, even before I had the words to express it.
Today, March 7, 2025, is Bandcamp Friday! That means that for the next 23.5 hours as of the time of this posting, Bandcamp waives their cut of the purchase price. So if you have any music you want to buy on Bandcamp, today is the best day to do it.
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:
For folks who follow this site directly on bluesky you might have noticed that the view there has… problems. I’m mostly posting this to see if some of those problems have been resolved.
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.
Convolution reverbs are pretty neat. Basically you take a recording of a space’s acoustics and then the reverb characteristics of that space can then be applied to any audio signal. I usually use convolution reverbs for most of my music, since it’s a lot easier for me to use someone’s recorded impulse response of, say, the Ulm chapel than to fly to Germany to record there in person.
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?
Gosh, I almost forgot to post this, but that’s because I haven’t actually listened to much music this week. Dunno why. But here’s some things I heard:
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
I didn’t listen to much music this week, but here’s some stuff I enjoyed:
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.
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.
Hey, it’s a new year! I’m going to try to keep these posts going for a while, I think. As always, these are just highlights; if you want to see my full listening history you can check out my last.fm profile.
I feel like doing these approximately once a week is a pretty nice cadence. So I think I’ll start scheduling these to go up every, say, Saturday. Yes, that sounds good.
Here’s some musical-listening highlights since the last one:
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.
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
Hey y'all, I’m trying to figure out when I should schedule my next VRChat concert for. If you’d be so kind, please head over to this poll and click on the times which work well for you. (Remember to set your timezone as well!)
As an independent musician who is also a (former-ish) software engineer who is keenly all-too-aware of technology and the development of the web, I would personally love to see a much better ecosystem of independent music distribution and discovery that isn’t reliant on any one company or platform, or even a handful of them.
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.