KNOCKED LOOSE SUFFOCATE
Category: Music
CDS ARE REAL
CJ Chilvers knows his music, so when he streamed Extreme’s Cupid’s Dead he got a surprise:
“I noticed something new in the song “Cupid’s Dead.” Trumpets! I had 30 years of experience with that song. There had never been horns in it. But here they were, being annoying as hell and obscuring Nuno’s incredible riffs.”
I had the same experience with Soundgarden’s ‘Outshined.’
When you’ve listened to a song for THIRTY YEARS you notice the difference, and it’s jarring.
CJ’s “Why I went back to buying CDs (and you should too)” is well worth the time, and makes me want to get back to building my CD collection.
BRANDT BRAUER FRICK – MASSE
Hard to believe I started listening to Brandt Brauer Frick some 13 years ago, and now they’re making these amazing videos in what appears to be a decommissioned power plant?
Get all their music on Bandcamp.
Here at CREEM, we’re not building the biggest audience of digital tourists. Creem.com doesn’t have ads; we don’t publish free content. If you want SEO-friendly music news like dozens of other sites do, don’t waste your time, CREEM isn’t for you.
John Martin
TELL ME HOW TO LISTEN TO YOUR MUSIC
If I click on your band’s LinkTree / Link In Bio and I can’t tell in 1.2 seconds how to LISTEN to your music, you’re fucked.
Tour dates. Great.
Press kit. No thanks.
Website.
Hmmmm… think about that last one.
While I’m stoked a band even has a website in 2024, what has our experience been with band websites for the last 20 years?
They’re usually not updated, maybe it’s just a bunch of tour dates from a BandsInTown embed, maybe some old photos…
DON’T. MAKE. ME. THINK.
Make one of the buttons “LISTEN” or “HEAR OUR LATEST SINGLE” and link it DIRECTLY to a place where I can listen to your actual music, or click play on a YouTube embed.
This might sound like I’m being old and curmudgeonly, but patience for this stuff wears thin after two decades of doing this 10 times a day.
CULTIVATE COMMUNITY
How do you make it as a musician in 2024? Have fans that you can reach.
On Spotify, I can’t reach the people who follow me—I have no idea who those people are, and I can’t communicate with them. I’m just on a playlist or an algorithm. But here on Substack, I’m cultivating a community.
Fog Chaser
Without fans, you don’t have a career.
OAVETTE LP
Glad I emailed an old bud the other day, because they sent me a link to this amazing album and I’ve been listening to it every day since.
I’ve been listening to a lot of electronic music the last few years, and I’ve always been a sucker for bands that do the repetitive loop stuff, and wow, Oavette hits a nerve for me.
It’s like I could watch this band play at an art gallery, you know?
DON’T GO BACK TO THE CRAP
I love this so much from “How Tiny Desk Concerts Became a pop culture phenomenon.”
Folk artist Laura Gibson felt deflated after her 2008 South by Southwest show in Austin, Texas. The Thirsty Nickel bar allowed noisy 6th Street revelers who didn’t purchase tickets to enter, and they had no interest in listening to the soft-spoken artist.
“Mid-set, I was like, ’Why did I drive all the way down to Texas … What am I doing with my life?” Gibson remembered. “I felt like ‘I really just want to go hide somewhere and cry.’”
Two folks from NPR were in attendance and offered Larua to come to their office and perform, and it became the first Tiny Desk Concert.
Laura had to go out and do something and it sucked. Yet she did, plowed through it, and it led to something else.
I think a lot of us had some great fun and success with social media back in the day, but then it sucked.
Laura (I hope) didn’t have to go back to play another shitty venue to keep her career going. She just moved forward, like I see a lot of other artists doing, leaving behind social media.
Yes, we made our connections, had some wins, but “going back to a shitty venue” isn’t how we’ll get to the next level.
(via Kottke)
SPACEPORT
Travel through space and futuristic dimensions while working from your computer terminal with this excellent release from Martin Stürtzer.
BLOGS AND MP3S
Here I am in 2024, reading a post linked from Kottke.org, and listening to my music files using an app called Swinsian.
Back in my music blog days I got a lot of samplers, pre-release CDs to check out before anyone else.
One of them was rough cuts and demos of ‘De-Loused In The Comatorium’ from The Mars Volta. I remember this on a CDR, shipped in a padded mailer. That was in 2003, before I moved to NYC. My goodness, this is a gem.
Bands used to post demo MP3s on their websites, too. I have a handful of those, too.
I’ve also got some files that don’t play, which I think maybe are tied to the iTunes store? Thankfully I don’t have too many of those.