so, how should you listen to my music.

attentively.

and, as always, please use headphones - high quality ones, preferably. do not listen to it on your speaker phone. please. i plead.

you also need to find a nice quiet spot by yourself, and actively focus on it as it is coming at you. so, you could listen to it on the bus, for example. or, in the library. or, on your couch or in your bed.

but, you won't get much out of this if i try and blare it at you when you're drunk, or lost in thinking about how to hit on the person at the other side of the bar. there are components you can trance out into, but not many people dance like i do.

of course i want my music to have a wider exposure. who wouldn't? that's the point: i want more people to listen to it.

but, even if performing it was actually remotely plausible, it would still be the wrong way to market it. i need you to listen to it in a quiet space, through headphones, alone. you won't understand it through the atmosphere of a bar or a concert hall - and it's not designed for that kind of ambience, either. and, it's not even a question of not compromising on it, i'm just adamant that it's just the wrong way to do it.

so, i need to get the recorded music to djs, record stations, record labels, stuff like that - and then try to convince them to listen to it in the right way. i mean, there's a reason the beatles stopped touring when they hit their experimental phase; it just no longer made any sense to try and create it live. i'm not getting anywhere trying to jam over a three hundred part backing track - it's boring, and pretentious, and misses the point. those three hundred parts took a long time to make - i actually want you to hear what they sound like.

i actually got somewhere at some point by trying to market the recordings via youtube trolling, but i wasn't actually moving any units and made the choice to retreat.

is this a harder problem than trying to market a band? i'm not sure it is, anymore, even if it isn't the expected set of problems that a diy musician tends to come up with. i mean, i'm still pressing records by hand, here, i'm just trying to get you to click a link rather than trying to sit you down and listen to a song. harder is questionable, but different is certain - this is a very different challenge, and i'm going to need to use very different approaches.

as it is, i have two choices.

i could put something together, and have it sound nothing like the recording. or, i could show up to the gig and pres play, like a dj set.

my music is not reproducible by live musicians, and is not intended to be.

i'm 38 years old and i've played in a band setting maybe four or five times in my entire life. i have no concept of what chemistry with other musicians is, or what compromising on a sound is. i've always imagined that the process of starting a band would essentially be equivalent to hiring musicians and giving them sheet music to play, but i've never actually done that in real life. it follows that i wouldn't actually know *how* to play in a live setting, and i'd no doubt get stage fright and have to run off and hyperventilate somewhere in a corner.

i would rather watch other people play something i've written than actually perform it myself.

but, i'm ok with this, because i've never identified as a rock star, but always as a composer of abstract music. excluding a small period of time when i was like 15 years old, i've really never had any serious aspirations to start any kind of actual band, but have rather always been seeking experimental musicians for the explicit purposes of studio work to create albums full of recorded compositions. i don't want to set up an amp in front of you and slay you with my technicality and skills, i want you to listen to things i've carefully constructed over many hours with a pair of headphones, and connect to that music by yourself.

and, i've never stated anything differently to anybody. all i've ever told anybody for the last 20+ years is that i'm an experimental studio composer with minimal interests or, frankly, ability in actual performance. i've cited people like frank zappa, billy corgan, michael gira, trent reznor, jimi hendrix and john balance that built careers around their reputations as studio musicians, with minimal abilities to reproduce their experiments in a live setting. i've never cited performing artists.

and, i haven't cut an original vocal track since 1999.

i'm not at fault. don't blame me. you imagined something that wasn't real. i've been honest with myself and everybody else the whole time, you just didn't actually listen to what i was actually saying.

i have presented myself as an artsy rock chick from day one; you misinterpreted me as a metal head guy. i don't even like metal. now, you're finally coming face-to-face with your own delusions, and you don't have anybody to blame but yourself.

i've been quiet.

i'm just stuck waiting for facebook to load. over and over. so, i haven't been wandering around the internet, reading things. but i want to get over this hump this week once and for all so i can get to actually planning these cases.

this week in detroit may be more ridiculous than movement - and that much better because it's that much less packed. i've been talking about the dead techno scene in detroit, but i should bite my tongue: if this weekend becomes the norm, the techno scene in detroit will be doing just fine, even if it's relying on touring djs (which i see no shame in). there's really only two residents in detroit right now, and only one of them seems to have a regular late night. normally, you get one long party on the weekend, if you're lucky, and you have to pick. outside of movement, i haven't seen a weekend like this since i moved here. really.

and, there's a few rock shows to pick from, too. meaning, this is going to be long and ridiculous - and i'm going to actually make it all the way this time, because i'll have those rock shows to push me.

that just means it's that much more important to stay disciplined as i push far ahead into the end of june and start looking at toronto and london dates seriously starting for july.

i'm not a progressive, i'm a leftist. there is a very different history, and we have very different policy aims. i have no patience for capitalism, and see no future for it, and i'm not interested in working with religious groups or even in respecting concepts of religious freedom.

my analysis is consequently from the liberal left, and not from this authoritarian conservative space that progressives exist within.

what focusing on impeachment means is that the democrats will spend the next 15 months focusing on ways to elect the next democratic candidate president, rather than on writing legislation.

and, so, your view on this really depends on why you supported a democratic majority in the house. did you vote democrat because you want the democrats to pass laws? or was it a protest vote against donald trump?

and, if it's the latter, and there are a lot of you, you might want to get the point out: because out here on the actual left, we don't vote democrat out of protest, but rather out of pragmatism. if we're doing protest votes, i'd rather cast mine for the greens or the socialists, thanks.

worse, there's also a lot of voters in the middle of the spectrum that may actually consider voting republican in 15 months if the democrats don't actually accomplish anything, which i'll remind you is what happened the last time they let pelosi run the house: she sat on her hands for how many years and let the republicans run the government, with minimal interference.

we have the same problem with the liberal party in canada, now, although this is more recent. if you're actually serious about building democratic support for this election and the next, you need to address the fact that voters are fed up with them because they don't actually do anything: they get elected on strong mandates to do things and then just sit on power for years. it kills morale; it's deflating.

in order to build a broad base of support, the democrats need to do things like pass anti-war legislation, reform the tax code and focus on serious health care reform. it doesn't matter that it's going to get vetoed - make him veto it. make him do it. the american people elected a democratic majority to the house, and they have every right to expect it to govern as one.

focusing on impeachment is an escape hatch, a distraction, a way out from actually governing. and, it's not going to build support for the next democratic president, but rather fuel cynicism amongst voters, who are going to conclude that the democrats squandered yet another majority, and are not a worthwhile pragmatic option - from either the center or the left.

democrats that are supporting impeachment are doing so because they don't actually give a fuck about any of this - they just want an opportunity to run in 2024, and consequently want to avoid electing a democrat in 2020.