Lost Channel Echoes

An illustrated tribute to songs found on music blogs from 2010 to 2013. Posts about twice a month. You can support this project on Patreon.

[lostchannelechoes]

Light Powered // Deastro

A short and sweet instrumental track, joyous and bouncing. No vocals, but it doesn’t need it: the brightness and light within its tightly packed two and a half minutes propels you along without any voices. It’s one of the few songs I wish was longer, stretched out for as long as the sun hangs in the sky, but perhaps it’s best that it’s brief. Even the best things can overstay their welcome.

[lostchannelechoes]

Yellow Wings // Keepaway

This one has always sparked the fires of wanderlust in me, usually kept banked and cooled out of necessity. Part of it is the dreamy, almost echoing guitar and sampled backing vocals, their sound reverberating as if from a narrow canyon or valley, or out of some thin, gossamer portal. Another part of it is the lyrics themselves, speaking of a longing to be in two places at once, a desire to experience everything, everywhere, as much as possible.

And yet, there’s a sense of paralysis here, as well: the lyrics whisper part of the problem is nothing is true/and nothing has happened at all - the wanderlust thwarted, or held in suspension, anxiety and fear of the unknown ending the adventure before it’s even begun. And there’s a breathless moment where it seems the song might fade out before it’s really started, but it comes back in full force, bright and shining like the noon sun caught in glimmering golden feathers.

[lostchannelechoes]

DUSTY FRUIT // THE RUBY SUNS

For a brief time in the early 2010s, there was a trend of summery, vaguely tropical-flavored indie pop and rock. “Dusty Fruit” is probably one of the better examples of this mini-wave within indie music of the time: layered vocals over dreamlike instrumentals, bright and hazy and sounding the way sea air tastes.

I’ve yet to find a solid lead on what the lyrics are, exactly. There’s words, sure, and they’re probably English, but at the end of the day I’m not sure the content of the vocals matters so much here. They’re here for atmosphere, just like the instrumentals, language bubbling to a meaningless June-warm froth. The end result is like trying to recall a long-gone day at the beach: you may not remember what you said, exactly, but you remember who you were with, how you felt, how the salt of the ocean tasted on your lips, how the tide tugged at your body and how the ghost of it remained for hours afterwards.

[lostchannelechoes]

BUILDINGS AND MOUNTAINS // THE REPUBLIC TIGERS

So often the natural world and urban spaces are pitted against each other, both in terms of their visual formations, and the effect they have upon the mind and heart. Nature heals, the city wounds.

Here, cityscapes and mountain peaks are treated the same: neither as artificial, built constructs, but as inevitable natural formations. (Or is it the other way around?) Either way, they rise from the bend of the earth the same, unspooling on either side of some or any highway: blue with distance at first, then clearer and with more color as you drive nearer to them, and among them. Made different, one vastly older than the other, but they produce a similar effect, once you’re at their feet:

They make you feel inescapably small.

[lostchannelechoes]

SO FAR AROUND THE BEND // THE NATIONAL

The lyrics in this one are, perhaps, more tongue-in-cheek than the gently blue tone of the instrumentation and Matt Berninger’s soothing baritone would suggest. There’s allusions to food budgets so meager they could fit in a teacup, getting high and laughing while praying for Pavement to get back together, tied at the end with the refrain that there’s no leaving New York. It should be sad, but there’s a detachment that makes it all seem somewhat ironic, rather than tragic or merely boring.

Even so, there’s something distant and wistful about this song, almost melancholy: the sense that someone you care about deeply is slipping, quietly and inexorably, through your fingers. A question not of if the relationship will fade, like fog in the face of the sun, but when.

[lostchannelechoes]

BRIGHT ORANGE AIR // THE INLETS

An odd little mood piece of a song. I’ve never been precisely sure what the lyrics to this one are -a Google search only turned up a fragment, the entirety apparently lost or only found in the liner notes of the physical album. The most enlightening clue was in an old Stereogum post, which noted that it’s “an ode to the psychotropic effects of municipal lighting.”

Not what my first guess would’ve been, but I can see it. The relatively sparse, precise instrumentation and Sebastian Krueger’s distinct voice, together, bring to mind a cool autumn night, lit sodium yellow and amber orange by streetlights and bars and cafes. The sort of time and place where there’s more light bulbs than stars, glittering and blinking in a rigid net of darkened streets, rather than a formless, velvet sky.

[lostchannelechoes]

FOR REVEREND GREEN // ANIMAL COLLECTIVE

My relationship with Animal Collective’s work actually predates my stint with music blogs by a year or so; I first encountered them on MySpace, of all places. (Their page is still there, and seems to be updated regularly.) But I include them here because they were all over the music blogosphere, with every new album and EP, and their signature sort of strangeness primed me for some of the weirder finds I’d stumble across later.

And I suppose it’s not a wonder that this song in particular seemed to resonate so much with me when I was a teenager. Underneath the shivering instrumentals and Panda Bear’s high, straining vocals is a song about anxiety, simmering social unrest, and the disillusionment of adulthood. In Animal Collective’s hands, these seem… not necessarily less bad so much as more distant, made alien by music that, at the time, was like nothing I was familiar with -and still stands out from a landscape with no shortage of experimental pop.

[lostchannelechoes]

I GOT THE // LABI SIFFRE

This was one of the first tracks I heard on Said the Gramophone, back in early 2010. It ended up being a fantastic introduction to both music blogs and funk (a genre I previously had not had much exposure to): that slow, slinking bass line at the start, the impeccable guitar and Siffre’s honey-smooth vocals, bolstered by a perfectly used horns section. It’s a perfect blend of sex appeal and class, and all in the service of one of the sweetest and most genuine love songs I’ve heard.

Here, Siffre sings of finding a lover who lifts him up from interminable, constant blues - in the lyrics he describes himself as a downer and a lonely soul, who finds light and meaning with his sweetheart. And, really, isn’t that the dream? To find someone who helps you become a better version of yourself? It’s just not often we hear that dream set to a sunny brass chorus, or brought to life by Labi Siffre’s fantastic voice.

[lostchannelechoes]

I first got into music blogs in early 2010.

Before then the way I found new music was through radio, or randomly browsing through CDs at discount shops, Christian bookstores, or Best Buy. (Or, on very rare occasions, through MTV or VH1 or the tragically short-lived International Music Feed). I poured through my mother’s CD collection, picked through the music collections my friends had built, hunted down songs I heard on TV or in movies and ripped them through Limewire or looped them for hours at a time on YouTube.

Then, sometime in the latter half of high school, an artist I was following mentioned a blog called Said the Gramophone, where she’d first run into some of her favorite musicians. Curiosity piqued, I took a look.

To say that Said the Gramophone -and every other music blog I discovered as a result- had a big impact on my tastes in music would be an understatement. I found several of my all-time favorite artists and bands -including Sleigh Bells, HEALTH, Elbow, and Animal Collective- via sample mp3s tucked away on various music blogs, large and small, often accompanied by pithy, glowing bits of review or prose. I’d spend entire afternoons link-hopping, trying to find some bit of aural treasure that’d capture my attention until repeated listens made the luster wear thin. By the time I’d stopped coming back to the music side of the blogosphere, I’d collected about ten thousand music files, both the dubiously legal “samples” I’d gotten off of blogs, and legit copies I’d ripped from CDs or bought from iTunes.

The landscape for music has changed a lot in the intervening years. Before I’d stopped regularly coming back to Said the Gramophone and its brethren, streaming wasn’t as much of a thing as it is now. Soundcloud, Spotify and Bandcamp existed, yes, but were not quite so ubiquitous as they are today. It’s both easier and infinitely more difficult for a nascent artist or band to get an audience -easier due to low cost and the ease of use of the tools, and harder because the market is big, and saturated. Music blogs helped with that, back in the day, and maybe they still do. Even so, I can’t help the feeling that their influence has waned, and perhaps won’t be coming back.

But.

But Said the Gramophone is still around. Still posting. Has been for thirteen years, now, at the time of this writing. While their 2017 best-of list hinted at their closure sometime in the nearer future, they’re still here, and many (though very much not all) of their contemporaries are holding on, too. Still posting, still sharing gems of songs that they find, like stars plucked from the night sky.

So I wanted to do something to pay tribute to that legacy. Something to say thanks to those bloggers, hunting for treasure like I was, sharing what they found for the world to hear. Something for those singers and bands and artists I wouldn’t have found without them.

May my words and pictures bring you something like what they brought me.