niamewsic

this is my blog for being insufferable about music

[thrashdxll]

I'll block a bitch on Rate Your Music if I really need to

[russianturkishbath]

caligula booklet

[russianturkishbath]

the quietus interview

[edmconspiracies]

[n4b3]

Magdalena Bay - That's my floor (2024)

Director: Amanda Kramer

[tankhall]

In 2018, I wrote down a passing thought in my cheap little leather-bound journal I was writing a collection of songs in that would go on to become Preacher’s Daughter. “If I finish this album the way it needs to be finished, it will change my life, and it will leave a hole in my heart for years that I won’t know how to fill.” I’ve always had a knack for eerily accurate self-premonition. Preacher’s Daughter certainly left a hole, and it certainly changed my life, but only on the outside. All the songs I wrote for it were about characters, a girl in a “faraway” place living her “faraway” life, albeit still parallel to mine, but wholly detached from me. Willoughby was doomed to be closer to home. I wrote Nettles and Waco the same week, the first week I spent in the Alabama house where I would finish Preacher’s Daughter after so many years of trying. The difference was I wrote them about me. There were no characters at first; it was just me. In fact, I wrote them in an attempt to hide from Ethel Cain for a moment. She eventually devoured those little ditties too, of course, as she always does. In hindsight, I’m glad I had to share them with her. I couldn’t have carried the full weight of them myself, I know that now. My premonitions were out in full force; over the course of the next few years, I’d script out my own life in the same morbid fashion I always have. Maybe it was a lesson in not training my eye downward as I’ve spent the majority of my life doing.

I had 3 weeks for the holidays between mixing and submitting Perverts and jumping back into the maw of taming an unfinished Willoughby Tucker. I spent the first three months of 2025 on probation, unable to go much of anywhere, awake only when the sun was down. I’d never mixed a record of that magnitude, which was daunting with deadlines immovable. I remember 9am on my 27th birthday rolling around after being awake for hours whittling away at mixes, announcing the album and entire tour before going back to mix an album that still wasn’t done. I’ve never cried so much finishing a record, and that was before it was even out. Combining your Saturn return, your first shot at true love, and the longest tour of your life is something I would never recommend to anyone. It was the death of both ego and everything around it. I couldn’t be more grateful. Never in my life have I been so turned inside out, so uprooted and unraveled. Looking back, I needed it more than anything.

Thank you to everyone who listened. Ethel Cain and Willoughby Tucker will always be my children, my burnt offerings, what I leave in the storm. Sometimes I wish it didn’t have to be this way, but I also fear it’s the only way. Ethel Cain, Willoughby Tucker, I really will always love you. I feel as though in this moment here, saying goodbye, you and I are closer than ever. I hope you can forgive me.

[gouged-doll]

[tankhall]

i know what you did

[alienorchids]

MALICE MIZER, 2001

[tgatbc]

[uboatheflesh]

Musicians, never look at your own RYM/AOTY reviews (double this if you are a trans woman). If you are lucky enough, avoid all reviews of yourself. Please yourself only, and hope others come along for the ride. Otherwise you are merely producing content - although when you have bills to pay, this is an understandable temptation.

Because if the woman who made goddamn Vespertine and Homogenic still has negative reviews get under her skin and ruin her creative process - you will get brainworms too. The human brain is not designed to read so much negative feedback as anything other than a potentially dangerous abandonment by the tribe. And fawning can mean giving what makes your art uniquely yours. In these fear responses, the unconscious walls up. The flow is interrupted.

Fans who don't make art, just consume it - realise this too. Do not 'demand' a sound from a musician, a specific canon ending from an animator, a colour scheme from an illustrator. Art is powerful precisely when it is out of your control, otherwise it lacks the element of surprise.

This applies to artists too - the real creator is your unconscious self, not your ego - who gloats, fights and does a lot of the non-creative work. And you can only access your unconscious when it is safe to do so and when it decides - not using egoic effortful intention. It only comes out in effortless doing.

It's selfless to be selfish - that's dialectics in action.

[uboatheflesh]

Keep in mind Bjork is Icelandic, and they still have decent arts funding and a functioning welfare state. A financial safety net - or indirect funding - allows an artist to be selfish enough to make good, radical and important art. And increasingly only nepo babies can do this.

The more I rely on music to pay for my healthcare, the less selfish I feel I am allowed to be. This is why the 90's "slacker" who innovates a genre has all but disappeared. Many innovate artists now come from places which still have a semblance of a welfare state, and easy indirect funding (like Iceland).

Pay artists - buy from bandcamp and physical mediums/merch. Artists - join a union, for the sake of your creative potential (I am part of the MEAA). Starving artists are the ones least likely to innovate.

If you have something to lose, then creativity can seem dangerous, and that's the main issue with many of us. Any risk now is potentially deadly. If you have nothing to lose, you'll be creative, but you may not have a roof over your head, or food to eat.

[supermariomamafucker]

they need to come up with more words like necrosis and miasma and mausoleum and cadaver and morose and decrepit and stuff like that just so metal bands can expand their vocabulary

[mumphs]

every black dresses song

Devi McCallion, mumbling: dream.... dreames come truth if.... dream come true if you really do......... if you really do...... if you really want...... if you really love....... iwht all ure fuckinG HEART ....!!!!! WITH ALL URE FUCKING HEARTH!

*the loudest noise you've ever heard*

Ada Rook: ENTROPY DEVOUR ME! HYPERSTITION ELAPSING! METAPHYSICS ELOPING! PISS STAINED FISHNETS!

[blackdresses-archive]

Forever In Your Heart Art By Bani-Chan

[tankhall]

i’m not precious abt my unreleased music anymore btw, yall can listen to literally whatever u want and enjoy it. sorry for being 25 and annoying

[boccher]

the central conceit of white boy "comedy rap" genres is that they're too racist to recognise that most classic rap is already pretty humorous in many ways, on account of wordplay being fundamental to the form,

[disarmluna]

[agirlnamedbone]

reminder to artists that we are the most unreliable narrators possible when it comes to our own work. if you make an art thing one day and are like "this is pretty good" and then suddenly out of the blue think it's literally a blight on the universe it sucks so much, consider the anecdote that kristin hayter (lingua ignota)'s producer had to repeatedly assure her "may failure be your noose" didn't sound like "imagine dragons or something"