Keni

pixel skylines
$LAYYYTER
Alisa U Zemlji Chuda
Monterey Bay Aquarium
Not today Justin
trying on a metaphor
Sade Olutola
KIROKAZE
styofa doing anything

Love Begins
noise dept.
NASA
Misplaced Lens Cap
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Mike Driver
art blog(derogatory)

Janaina Medeiros
will byers stan first human second
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@lizpelly
Jenn and I launched a newsletter where we review five songs every few weeks. Subscribe here: https://cryptophasia.glitch.me/
https://buymusic.club/user/liz_pelly
When I teach, I tell my students: Don’t measure your worth through your pages […] You measure your worth by your questions. What kind of questions are you asking yourself? What are you trying to discover in the work, and are those questions inexhaustible? The fact that you cannot answer them right away is the very fact why you should stay with them. Take them for a walk. Collaborate.
Ocean Vuong (via jennpelly)
https://reallifemag.com/socialized-streaming/
This is what solidarity sounds like.
“We’re just trying to organize the unorganized, which is the vast majority of musicians right now. There [are] so many similarities if you look at [efforts to] organize Uber, freelance writers, adjuncts. …It’s the same problem, where it’s so hard to organize because you have so many employers.”
Spotify’s annual Wrapped campaigns make unpaid influencers of us all.
“What if we decided to reject this ‘masterful coup of free advertising’ and instead chose to collectively admire all of the different ways, besides the shallow value of play counts, that music has contributed to our lives and to society this year?”
Show Tech Won't Save Us, Ep How Spotify is Built On Artist Exploitation w/ Liz Pelly - Nov 26, 2020
For the Fall issue of No Depression, I wrote about the unprecedented environmental impacts of digital music and streaming. There’s a myth that because listening to music digitally involves no vinyl records made of plastic or cardboard sleeves, that it somehow must emit less carbon. The opposite is true: the current era of music streaming has led to the highest levels of carbon emissions ever produced by recorded music.
The piece largely centers on an interview with University of Oslo professor and researcher Kyle Devine, the author of Decomposed: The Political Ecology of Music. We talked about the harsh material realities that power current listening habits (“Because to store and transmit data over the internet requires electricity, it’s often the case that when you’re streaming music online, you’re probably burning coal, uranium, or natural gas”) as well as the broader impact of the on-demand instant-gratification culture that streaming is part of.
The carbon footprint of data centers, fiber optic cable networks, and consumer electronics combined with the massively higher rate at which on-demand consumption is happening are all factors, Devine explained. Here’s something else he said that stuck with me: “We now have so many more people doing so much more listening so much more of the time. Once you add up the aggregate energy effect of billions of people streaming billions of songs and albums all of the time, and the fact that all of that takes electricity…that is what contributes to this overall picture that the streaming culture of music that exists today is a greater contributor of carbon emissions than any other previous format…. Streaming a file off the internet is much more efficient than producing an LP. That efficiency gain is actually outstripped by the increase in amount of listening that is going on today.”
I also spoke with author and University of Glasgow professor Matt Brennan, who co-authored a study with Devine last year titled “The Cost of Music,” covering the economic and environmental realities of streaming. He succinctly explained why the environmental impacts of music streaming can be hard to grasp: “We know that flying is environmentally bad. The message has got out there on that. But part of the reason that people understand that is that in order to travel on your holiday, you have to go to an airport. You have to physically put yourself in this massive building and see the infrastructure that makes that possible. You don’t do that when you listen to music on your phone. You don’t have to go to the server farm and see all of the energy that’s being consumed to make [that] possible. So people don’t tend to think of music as having an environmental impact.”
The piece contextualizes digital listening within the broader material impacts of internet infrastructure, and argues that since streaming relies so heavily on data centers owned by Google (where Spotify data is stored), Amazon and Apple, music communities might consider seeing themselves in solidarity with actions taken groups like Google Workers for Action on Climate or Amazon Employees for Climate Justice.
Devine had illuminating things to say about the desire for “solutions” in the music industry: “People want to know, ‘What do we do?’ They want a utopian pep talk or a Hollywood ending... I’m not especially hopeful. It’s a bit grim.” As a political ecologist, his primary interest is not providing a consumer guide to the most environmentally friendly options for music consumption. “Each of these formats, in the history of recording, comes with upsides and downsides…The purpose of this research I’m doing is more to call attention to these bigger systems of problems and inequalities, so that people may demand more of those systems in terms of genuine responsibility and transparency.”
The full piece can currently only be read in print in No Depression, an ad-free, non-profit, reader-supported magazine operating since 1995. I’d also highly encourage those interested in the topic to seek out writings by the authors and researchers interviewed for this piece.
Singing is such a special, personal, 'bodily' instrument, the direct experience of which has largely disappeared from our Western societies, and the title of this post is a little jab at the notion that the voice is something that has to be slick and/or impressive, something you are born with (hence 'talent shows') or that needs to be trained a-la-fitness style, to show a vocal equivalent of perfect abs. I am not interested in impressing anyone when I sing, and wouldn’t dream of calling myself a singer; rather, singing is part of my musical toolbox, I use it (and words) to convey something which I cannot convey with instruments alone...
Colleen’s blog “Ten Years of Singing Not Like a Pro”
a song on our tape that i like
Many thanks to Joyful Noise Records for inviting me to curate the August edition of its White Label Series, a subscription series that releases limited vinyl runs of overlooked albums not pressed to vinyl before. I chose Thelma’s 2019 record The Only Thing and wrote this curator statement:
Thanks to Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst for having me on their amazing new podcast Interdependence.
The Anarchist’s Playbook: Occupy Boston takes a page from the radical underground (October 12, 2011)
Since all of the Boston Phoenix archives are either deleted from the internet or difficult to access, I have been wanting to republish some articles in full here for years, and thought this might be a good place to start. I wrote this short piece during Occupy Boston, at a time when it seemed like the contributions of anarchists were not being fully understood. It feels particularly relevant right now. This was written in 2011, and although I would report it out differently now, I still consider it to be an interesting document.
I re-watched the 1977 film “Between the Lines” last night, which is loosely based on the early days of alt-weeklies that eventually became the Boston Phoenix. It’s funny to rewatch because even then, in the late 70s, the whole plot of the film is basically about the fading promise of alt-weeklies: the paper is about to get bought out by some guy who owns tons of other newspapers and wants to change the paper and add more advertising, no one is doing the exciting hard-hitting reporting they did in the 60s, everyone is bored and uninspired and thinking about leaving Boston for NYC where at least there might be better jobs. There is also a lot of newsroom sexism, a music critic who sells his promo records to buy weed, etc.
Even though he’s not the star of the screen and is generally a pretty annoying character, I’m kind of obsessed with this kid who works at the paper and is trying to break a local music industry investigation that no one asked for instead of doing his actual job, while all these burnt out 30-somethings complain about how nothing is as good as it used to be. No one around the office really takes him seriously, but he’s basically the only person on screen doing any actual journalism at all. (It eventually leads to a couple of music industry bros beating the shit out of him to get him to stop writing the article!)
While watching, I unsurprisingly thought a lot about working at the paper during its last gasping breath from 2011-2013, and all of the thinking we witnessed then and had been witnessing for years prior surrounding the death of alt-weeklies. Meanwhile here is a time capsule from over 40 years ago suggesting the dream had always been dying... or maybe that being part of such an outlet or tradition will always require having to try to figure out how to make the thing exist in a system that doesn’t want it to? Or at least that not every current media industry challenge is as unique to the conditions of 2020 as we might imagine.
2019
This is a list of music I enjoyed in 2019. I made it in December but for whatever reason I never posted it. It never feels possible for these sorts of lists to be complete, so I often find them hard to let go of. But on the occasion of Bandcamp waiving their fees tomorrow for 24 hours, I thought I would share it. Hope you find something you like.