For a very long time, I listened to pretty much nothing but Phish. It was an easy life for me, musically speaking, because the band had not yet temporarily broken up and I hadn’t quite gotten around to hitting up the Clash of the P Bands. In the time before I was crazy about vinyl records I wanted to get all my music in nothing but beautiful portable MP3 format.
Continue reading → Discovering New Music with Gorilla vs. Bear
Artists for the last few years have a new venue to not only communicate with their fans but to actually involve the fans in the production of their work. In the past, for example, a band would have to play concerts or work side jobs if they wanted to raise the money they needed to pay for studio time or for mastering and pressing of their music onto vinyl or compact disc. This has all been fundamentally changed with Kickstarter, and other sites like it, which allow people to directly fund artists so that they can make their artistic projects a reality.
Continue reading → Bridging the Gap Between Artist and Fan with Kickstarter
A thin man — maybe it was a woman (honestly was hard to tell in my tired state) was looking through one of the several bins of used records in front of Easy Street Records in West Seattle. I was walking to a friend’s apartment to take a short nap and my wife and I thought we saw our friend walk into the store.
Jason Clay Lewis sent me an email yesterday announcing the newest bouncing bundle to his family: Tat Baby!
Once a year, there is a special day that pays tribute not only to independent record stores but to the fans that have made it what it is. These are the very same people who come out in droves when a lime green seven inch from a band that they have never heard of is announced — limited to two hundred hand numbered copies, of course. Let us now look at all of the aspects that make Record Store Day as exciting as it is.
I have many memories of purchasing music as a child, and all of them involved the cassette tape format. This is not to say that other formats were not available for purchase — rather, this was the only format that was both affordable to me and easy to take with me. It might seem hard to believe now in a day where you can get a digital music player with no moving parts with a twenty dollar bill and get change, but portable music players were really expensive in the 1980’s — especially to me, a child with no actual income.
The mail woman opened the door to the office and dropped off the large square envelope. Everyone in the office thanked her, as was the custom. My supervisor brought the envelope over to me and let me know that it was for me. I gleefully opened the stiff folds and slowly pulled out the treasure held within as technology bends backwards into history to create a new aesthetic for today.
