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TICKETS!
Come see The Meeks at …
The Rubulad in Bushwick (1/20): https://www.eventbrite.com/e/lady-lychee-yourning-ep-release-show-w-kira-metcalf-shalom-the-meeks-tickets-477441358957
Shubas in Chicago (2/11): https://lh-st.com/shows/02-11-2023-felix-rabito
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The Churn: Yard Sale
Alright, Good’s debut LP, Yard Sale, is out now on The Butter. It’s really fucking good. Listen HERE.
- All songs by Brendan Raimann.
- Recorded and Mixed by Brendan Raimann.
- Mastered by ReleaseMaster.
- Brendan Raimann — Vocals, Guitar, Keys, Bass, Drums, Pots, Pans
- Shane Consalvo — Piano (4,11)
- Brett Pezza — Guitar (4,8,11)
- Artwork by Ryan Israel.
LINER NOTES
“I think I hate the floor.”
I leave it so cluttered I can barely see it.
It’s always flooded with clothes, books, records, strings, ropes, shoes, carabiners, bottles, cans, wrappers, bags, letters, bills, bowls, bugs (probably), a guitar or two.
I hate it.
“It knows that I’m unsure.”
Not that I’d ever say so.
Not in so few words.
It took Brendan’s keen (if unassuming) voice — delivered over Zoom as a voice memo (almost exactly a year ago) — to lay it out.
Twenty-three years young and doing pretty ok, he crystallized a notion felt but never shook.
“I love everything that you’ve done, doesn’t really change, no it doesn’t change anything.”
Our apartment spun its wheels dutifully: writing, mixing, tweaking, scrapping. Iteration on iteration.
For me, it bred frustration.
“Doesn’t change anything at all.”
For him, it refined early demos, sharpened fragments to a point.
Soundscapes bloomed, grew new layers at a rapid clip. They recontextualized a resignation to “hate the floor,” blurred its bitter core in melody, multicolored subtext well-woven through guitar, synth, bass — plainspoken lyric against dry sonic wit.
Before long, new sentiments took hold.
“I’ve been in a better mood.”
Demos found footing, a voice, merged with each other into a unified project.
“Now I know what it means to shake it off.”
It locked into focus. Eyes to “where it goes.”
“Ebb and flow, breath it out and take it in.”
It grew.
I watched closely.
Yard Sale reached its climax at the crux of “Change.”
Pitched vocals, pulsing beats on par with pop’s most idiosyncratic, “Change” bristled with a pioneering confidence.
It needed an outro to match.
Brendan set to work, beginning in the kitchen.
First pots, then pans, then wooden spoons: an entire afternoon in search of clang.
It looked like mania — more than slightly insane.
I’m remiss to say I was a bit smug.
Until he showed me where it all went.
“Change me now me now me now me now …” faded, the horns came in stride. Bass locked in just behind the beat: a polyrhythmic subtext. Pots and pans followed, plugging the gaps, filling the space.
There was still mania — in the core of the thing — but it stood at the edge of breakup, a suspended sliver of chaos in lockstep with the groove.
It was a space to “see things through.”
From here, Brendan rolled and glitched, blending benchmark influences — Alex G, Caamp, RKS — into a sound all his own.
He traversed genre with ease, lilting “Big Green Field’s” slowcore into “Burn’s” caffeinated punk into “Breakaway’s” anthemic churn into the lucid simplicity of “Fall.”
“Maybe it’s too much.”
I paused, took it in.
“I’ve been thinking you’ve been far too kind.”
Perhaps.
“Never harping on the old shit. Too numb to get a good grip.”
Ok, chill. But the fact remains.
“I can’t hold back.”
And maybe it’s okay if I’m off track.
“You know what I am. You felt it, you felt it.”
And maybe it’s okay to fall.
“I’ve been thinking that’s it’s not so bad.”
Not at all.
“Might’ve been the best I ever had.”
—
“Too much for me to take.”
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The Churn: Diminished, It Returns
HI. IT’S ME. I’M BACK &
I see you[1]…
… standing there like a ghoul, cornered in the crevices of your own misgivings.
What gives?[2]
Embarrassed to feel blue in your Halloween muscle suit?[3]
Do you feel insane?[4]
I’m sad to say, I feel the same. And for no good reason at all, I’m afraid.
I’m afraid, and that’s alright.[5]
I’m alright[6] (or maybe all right[7]).
Are you alright?[8]
Don’t answer that just yet, at least not until we’ve gone[9] through all the
GOINGS ON
- Alright, Good’s debut LP, Yard Sale, will drop into your life on November, 19, 2022. Sit tight, stay frosty, and stream “Big Green Field” while you wait.
- New gigs! Keep an eye out for an Alright, Good date, come November.[11]
- Old gigs! Every member of The Butter is still gainfully[12] employed.
- Middle-aged gigs![13]
- Tom Garvey will soon be the proud father of his very own banjo. Don’t be alarmed if …
To modern eyes this instrument may not look like a banjo. It has no circular wooden body, no metal parts. Instead, a flat piece of wood bisects a round gourd, forming the neck and sound chamber. A piece of animal skin sits taut across a circular hole cut into the side of the gourd, a skin that creates the top of the instrument and the soundboard. Around this white circle, the maker has cut intersecting lines into the gourd. Strings extend from the bottom of the gourd, across the soundboard, over a bridge that holds them up, and along the board-like neck to where it comes to a triangular point.[10]
- It is indeed a banjo.
- Babies are dumb. Crows are not. Click here to learn why crows are as smart as seven-year-old humans.
- If you’d like to befriend a crow, give it a shiny object to play with. Or maybe write the crow a little tune on your brand-new banjo.[14]
- Donny’s plants are dying.[15] Venmo him, please.
- Donny will not use the money to purchase a banjo.[16]
- Mind your gourds. They don’t take kindly to change.[17]
- All are invited join various members of The Butter as they go Elsewhere[18] for a night of great tunes[19] and even better cheekbones.[20]
- No, the banjolele does not count.[21]
AND NOW, A PLAYLIST FOR YOUR TROUBLES
- “Everything That Feels Good Is Bad” — Whitmer Thomas
- “November” — Wednesday
- “Androgynous” — Nation of Language
- “Buddy” — Time Heidecker
- “Problem with It — Plains
- “Early Morning Waiting” — Alex G
- “Easy Listening” — 2nd Grade
- “You Taught Me How To Write A Song” — Mo Troper
- “Sailor Mouth” — Why Bonnie
- “Waiting for Music” — Diners
- “I See You” — Bonny Doon
- “Beautiful Out” — Worst Party Ever
- “Erica’s World” — Game Theory
- “I Don’t Want Control of You” — Teenage Fanclub
- “Waking Dreams — Nico Headley
- “You Know I’m Down” — Frog
- “A Modern Lay” — Slaughter Beach, Dog
- “2 Days” — Antarctigo Vespucci
- “Dark Morning ( Magnetic)” — String Machine
- “Just Friends’ — Ok Cowgirl
- “Pretty Pictures ” — Indigo De Souza
- “Life’s a Lie” — Katie Von Schleicher
- “Gold and Red and Laughing” — This Is Lorelei
- “Good Times Are Gone Again” — Fred Thomas
- “Cooler When I’m Sick” — Whitmer Thomas
THIS MIGHT BE A GOOD TIME TO GET A SNACK LEST YOU GET STUCK INSIDE THE SHORT & PRETENTIOUS ESSAY OF THE WEEK:
AGAINST SLEEP
For those keen on living happy, healthy lives, there’s no substitute for a proper portion of high-quality sleep night after night after night after night after night.
The science makes clear that 6, 12, 18, or (for some up to) 24 hours of sleep nightly creates a clean barrier between your conscious (waking) life and all that unconscious bullshit burbling underneath. Given enough sleep, we can function like the motherfucking gourds we were always meant to be — decorating the dim hallways of our lives with grace and dignity.
Pretty cool, right?
Sure. It’s great to be a gourd.[22] It’s great to have that kind of clear and conscious purpose.
But what if we threw our vegetal whims to the wolves and said fuck it! What if we didn’t sleep at all?
Well, I don’t know what the science says (it’s boring & I’m sleepy), but I’ve skimmed a few books. So, I think I’ve got this.
If the rested mind keeps consciousness clean, then the sleepless brain does just the opposite. It shatters the barrier between waking life and its unheimlich underbelly.
Without sleep, sensations that seem familiar — “friendly, familiar, homelike” — are shrewd tricks: familiarity performed through the lens of the unconscious.[23] Though the dream state might not reign as it would in the pure fantasy of the REM state, it has more purchase than we care to admit.
At its best, sleeplessness elevates our everyday into cycles of abjection: little implosions that queer the line between the subject (I) and its object (externalities & the unconscious).[24] This abjection creates an atmosphere in which our silly little subjectivities can run free.
And frolic, they do, inhabiting any object they think might deceive our eyes half shut.
They conduct a chorus wherein corner stores[25] and cold cuts conspire against to our composure, break into the bleakest burrows of our brain, bringing our batshit inclination to alliteration into the limelight.
In other words, shit gets weird.
Though our silly little subjectivities run freely into the objects of our reality, they can’t (or maybe refuse to) consume them. You know what those cheeky little bastards do instead?
They loom — just fucking loom — “within abjection,” manifesting all of those “dark revolts of being,” emanating (or maybe battling some entity) “from an exorbitant outside or inside,” wavering “beyond the scope of the possible, the tolerable, the unthinkable.”[26]
Before we know it, our insides are out and or our outsides are in or most definitely somewhere in between and we’re left without language to reduce or action to conceptualize or abstraction to analogize ourselves out of this this whacked out parallel of a world, so what we to do?
*Yawns
We buy a banjo.
And we sing a little song.
Go to bed[27].
THIS IS THE PART WITH THE POEM & YES, IT IS OBLIGATORY
“Phaser”
When I first saw you,
the triple point on the phrase diagram, necessitating the use of an electric arc furnace,
I executed a headspace extraction.
Words cannot express how I felt about
Utopia, a hopeless dream or hopeful fantasy,
observed as rays in gas discharges, extracted to develop a conception of the enigmatic world
of the hidden inwardness, drinking the absence of stronger interspecial attraction.
Consider the woman with hemorrhages,
siphoned to volatize carbon [a process “understood” by far too many “scholars”].
I would die! she said, knowingly, her soft laser tongue acid testing the solubility
of the acetylene and acetone swirling around the endamoniacal subterfuge.
Why must you give your spectromatic dilations to the Other?
My deepest apologies. That’s just my ego moaning, longing for the day when it can get
more depressed reading YouTube comments, more depressed than expected because I wanted him to die —
nested, like an if among thens, screaming
WELL, THAT WAS NICE, I GUESS. LET’S PIVOT AND REVIEW A NEW RECORD CALLED
The Older I Get The Funnier I Was by Whitmer Thomas
“Oh tonight, under these lights, I will try […] Yes I will try”[28] to say why I feel so much more attached to this record than any I’ve listened to in a good long while.
But I can’t because it’s super late & I really do need to get to bed. Sorry.
[3] From “Basketball #2” by MJ Lenderman
[4] Oh, it’s a call back
[5] Alternate Take by Fleetwood Mac
[6] Twin Peaks covering Black Sabbath
[10] Excerpt from Well of Souls: The Banjo’s Unwritten History. “It’s decorative gourd season motherfuckers.”
[11] By Wednesday (the band, not the day)
[12] Mind you, these gains are strictly financial.
[13] I really don’t have anything for this one.
[14] “The idea of finding a lost banjo image always feels both ludicrous and hopeful.” — from Well of Souls: The Banjo’s Unwritten History.
[15] If we’re being honest, Cleo’s long dead.
[16] He’ll give it to Tom. The rest is buried in a Well of Souls: The Banjo’s Unwritten History.
[18] The venue in Bushwick
[19] Thus Love is playing.
[20] Thus Love is playing!
[21] Sorry, Brendan.
[22] Banjo in the making.
[23] Freud’s “The Uncanny”
[24] Julia Kristeva
[25] Or Bodegas as we call them in polite society
[26] Kristeva, again
[28] Cooler When I’m Sick
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The Churn: So It Begins
INTRODUCTION
Hello and welcome to the crest of my little hill (see chart below).
Doing things over time & into the darkness My plan is to summit this little hill once a week — Tuesday to Tuesday to Tuesday — collecting content, delivering from on high.
Do not mistake this plan for a promise.
Because when it comes to promises, “it wouldn’t be fair of me to impose my interpretation of such lapidarily subjective imagery on you, and because in many cases I don’t really know what [I’m] talking about.”[1]
But with a plan, or scheme, I can lapidate to my liking, release if I want to, make like an axolotl[2] if I don’t.
Lucky for you, I’ve no designs to make like an axolotl just yet, which is why we can both enjoy this inaugural issue of The Churn.
QUESTIONS, COMMENTS, CONCERNS
Churning. What is The Churn?
Words and images, compiled weekly, documenting the rumblings, ramblings, and mumblings behind The Butter.
And what exactly is The Butter?
Excellent question. It’s a lot of things. You could even say it is more than it isn’t. At any rate, I think it’s something of a collective that my friends and I started to share the stuff we make — mostly music, but also writing, film, art, etc.
Ok: Who exactly is The Butter.
We are as follows, and I’ll even throw in the where for good measure.
New York [Brooklyn: The Meeks[3] & Alright, Good[4] // Manhattan: Muzzy Hooks[5] & Cheekbones[6]]
California [Truckee: The Wims[7] // LA: Payant[8]]
DC [The Atelier[9]]
Pending [Wheels[10] & the Qualia[11] production team]
Everywhere Always [Ava Mullen[12] on drums].
Thank you for answering my questions. Carry on.
Sure thing, pal.
Shmangin’ GOINGS ON
- The Butter just had a show on a roof overlooking the BQE. It was tight.
- Alright, Good just put out “Big Green Field,” the lead single off their forthcoming LP. Listen here.
- Houseplants, an LP by the Meeks, has been out since early August. Listen here.
- The Atelier is about to release their debut LP. We’re very excited about it.
- John King is a lovely human.
- Tom Garvey is too, sometimes.
- This just in: Ava Mullen remains “good at drumming.”
- Grayson Maker (funny, allegedly) has signed on to help produce Qualia. He may or may not get paid.
- The Butter is committed to never recording a podcast.[13]
A PLAYLIST FOR YOUR TROUBLES (PSST … THIS IS A LINK)
- “Big Green Field” by Alright, Good.
- “Hands Down” by 2nd Grade.
- “TLC Cagematch” by MJ Lenderman
- “Hollow Moon” by Why Bonnie
- “Shoes” by The Wims
- “They Replace Your Heart” by Fred Thomas
- “hand crushed by a mallet” by 100 gecs
- “Let’s Go Crazy” by Prince & the Revolution
- “I Just Wanna Have Fun” by This is Lorelei
- “Hours” by Muzzy Hooks
- “Quotations (Alternate)” by Water From Your Eyes
- ‘thanksforcoming.bandcamp.com” by thanks for coming.
- “Noodles” by Cheekface.
- “Intersection” by Slaughter Beach, Dog
- “Something Something Electric” by The Meeks
The Big Sad (Art by Marta Antonetti) SHORT & PRETENTIOUS ESSAY OF THE WEEK:
ON HABITUAL RELEASE
Habitual Release: Making quite a lot of things and putting them out into the world, even if nobody seems to care.
“You wrote too many songs,” Fred Thomas[14] wails. “But not enough to keep half an audience halfway singing along.”
Popularity notwithstanding, there’s something to be said about the Fred-like folks who’ve made an (dare I say) atomic[15] habit out of mostly inconsequential pursuits.
Despite little to no prospects of financial, reputational, or even emotional returns, these prolific few lock themselves in the cycle of continuous release, churning out song after song, record after record, film after film, phrase after phrase, opening the floodgates of their tiny little hearts to pour an endless stream of nonsense into the void.
This level of commitment falls somewhere between the amazing, the unreasonable. and pure fucking lunacy.[16]
It also begs the question: Why?
But I refuse to answer. It’s wrong question to ask. It implies a reason and an end where neither exist. It denies the power, the joy, of pure fucking lunacy.[17]
Pontificate all you like,[18] any effort to isolate an impetus for habitual release yields the same response: “Let’s go crazy!”
“Let’s go crazy” because life “means forever and that’s a mighty long time.”
“Let’s go crazy” because things “are much harder” in the object orientation of “this life” than in the ephemeral, maybe even imaginary, obsessions of “the afterlife.”
“Let’s go crazy” because there’s nothing here for us, no impetus for our sleepless, reckless, occasionally destructive acts of creation. It’s just that “We’re all excited and we don’t know why.”
If an atomic habit #leverages systemic mechanics — the language of capital — to generate some sort of return, then habitual release masquerades in the system’s clothes, a trojan horse smuggling lunacy beneath the factory walls. This lovely lunacy infects all returns, exploding from the dictated form to spawn objects that span a spectrum from the hyperreal[19] to the hilariously inane.[20]
It’s tempting to characterize such lunacy as a byproduct of originality: easier to conceptualize if we can place its source inside some mystical, mythical inspiration. We don’t want to admit the obvious.
“If it wasn’t me, I’d copy me to. You just copy everything we do.”[21]
Yep, habitual release is little more than a sham,peddling the simulacrum’s unfailing ability to fuck things up just enough to be cool.
Keep copying a copy’s copy and eventually it’ll be unrecognizable. It iterates on itself endlessly, rejecting forward motion for the weird pleasure of circularity. To participate in habitual release is to quite literally “do the same thing over and over again, expecting different results.”[22]
So, if you still want to ask me why, I’ll leave you with this here copy: “Do you feel insane?”[23]
Well, do you? THE PART WITH THE POEM
“caps locked” by R. I. Franklin.
the filing cabinets are full of dirt
wet dirt. good earth.
the night janitor unlocks the soil,
buries thumb tacks and staples.
when the entry level checks in next morning
there’ll be a forest
trees as tall as their debt
to be chopped down
by the branch manager
and turned into desks
strong wood. good desks.
before the sun rises
the crickets will come out of the computers
and eat the keys
s me f the v wels
n ne f the c ns n nts
the c ps l ck
What is it like to be a tree? AND LASTLY WHATEVER THIS IS
I’m sorry Ms. Celery, but you offer neither flavor nor nutritional function. You’re a farce among flora.
In both fact and fiction, you’ve nothing to show for yourself but a cheeky crunch and a crispy whisper wasted on the cloying strings to follow.
You’re irreducibly archaic — raw, unmediated — even as you put forth an emptiness on the edge of modernity; it registers Piketty’s hypercapitalism in vegetal form.
You’ve been known to consort with raisins. For this, we cannot forgive you.
Sell her an e and then another. Stiffen with the consonant image. And all for what? Nothing. Fucking nothing.
What do you want with me, Ms. Celery? Why do you feign? Why do you taunt? Why do you flaunt your pointless existence in clean, calculated lines?
Why not entertain me like the pepper or simply sustain me like the humble spud?
Fuck you, Celery!
I’m sorry. That was a bit much.
Coffee, whiskey, meat, saturated anger.
You might not be a lunch, but you don’t deserve this.
It’s unfair of me to think it’s your place — your calling — to serve us, the nibbling.
What seems to me impractical might be for you a pragmatism.
Your patina of meaning slings a zinger wry and dry into our veggie munching [edgy something] mouths.
Our teeth sink, expecting, only to greet exasperation.
Tricky little fibers. Sticky little fibers.
Hiding motionless, emotionless.
The big zoinks.
& salad days no more.
In voice and action, we claimed the mantel of control.
Made Ms. Celery a resource, a commodity substance.
But none control the Chloropunk.
BYE FOR NOW.
Shloopin’
[1] Lester Bangs.
[2] “There was a time when I thought a great deal about the axolotls. I went to see them in the aquarium at the Garden des Plants and stayed for hours watching them, observing their immobility, their faint movements. Now I am an axolotl.” — Julio Cortazar
[3] My project (formerly The Shifties). Stream Houseplants anywhere or come see us play sometime.
[4] Brendan Raimann’s project. Stream “Big Green Field” anywhere or come see him play sometime.
[5] Tom Garvey’s project. Stream Muzzy Hooks anywhere or come see him play sometime.
[6] John King’s project. Come see him play sometime.
[7] Daniel Griffin’s project. Stream The Wims anywhere or go see him play sometime.
[8] Ashley Finster’s project. Stream The Summer I Feel Nostalgia For anywhere or go see her play sometime.
[9] Luke Molinelli’s project. Debut LP coming soon. Go see him play sometime.
[10] John and I (interluders) hatched a shoegaze scheme.
[11] Experimental comedy from Adam Hellinghausen, Grayson Maker and Michael Donovan (me), bringing fresh corporate perspectives to an internet near you: It’s not what is but rather the what it is like.
[12] Cling clang: pots & pans.
[13] Bullshit, probably.
[14] Michigan-based indie scenester known for his work at the helm of Saturday Looks Good to Me, Failed Flowers, Flashpapr, and a sizable body of solo material. Lyrics lifted from “They Replace Your Heart.”
[15] Plucked from James Clear’s spicy little self-help volume about how anybody (but mainly sad middle-aged men) can make #smallChanges to #eliminate bad habits and #develop good ones to see #powerful increases in their annual contributions to the #publishing industry.
[16] “Writing is lunacy” — Susan Sontag.
[17] Italics are too damn fun.
[18] Re: The opening monologue of Prince — “Let’s Go Crazy”
[19] Gecs, Midi, and the like.
[20] “Noodles” — Cheekface.
[21] “hand crushed by a mallet” — 100 gecs
[22] One of Einstein’s thingies.
[23] “Are You there?” — Slaughter Beach, Dog.
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