// Letters to YVYNYL // 

CLAVVS - Serpentine

 / These new digital friends of mine are clearly living in the same wavelength as I am these days. I can confirm their truth.

Hey Mark,

I’ve been thinking for a few days about what to say to you. It’s weird because you don’t know me and I don’t know you, but I imagine you are a kind human, sitting on the other end of this infinite tunnel of 0s and 1s. The new iOS10 has just come out and part of the new functionality is something they’ve called “Digital Touch.” My first thought is (of course) what a great song title or album concept it would make, because there is so much depth to the phrase. Much more than I’m sure the creators intended.

The digital touching of lives, like skin pressed to glass, pushing to break through but still distinctly separated. The cloudy prints left behind in its wake. The connectedness of everything is at once beautiful and isolating.

Because, in the real world, we will likely never meet.

Still, this digital touch is real in our everyday lives. I am affected by it constantly. The images I see inform my inner landscape, mold me into the person that I am. The sounds move me from place to place. I am not the person I was before them. I am fascinated by this.

“Describe who you are,” Facebook tells me in the “About Me” section of my profile. How strange! The thought that I could accurately sum up the wholeness of my consciousness into a three sentence blurb for others to read, evaluate and catalogue into the back corners of their mind for all time. The digital age is a strange one, made all the more strange when you are an artist and part of what you are expected to do is sum yourself up in a perfect little package for others to consume. I don’t think I’m very good at this, but I will try.

My name is Amber, and I am the lyricist and vocalist for CLAVVS alongside my partner Graham, a multi-instrumentalist who also produces the project. We live in Atlanta, GA, and we make pop songs about consciousness, existence, ego and time. I suppose most songs are about the human condition on some level, but our work deals in the embodiment aspect of being a human. The strangeness of occupying a body and the feelings that come as a result.

This song, “Serpentine,” is quite literally about the internal struggle we all face. The daily battle of our inner lives, the distinct voices that echo inside of us and fill us up with so much noise. The impulses we have to do better and the impulses we have to serve only ourselves. I’ve been told (and happen to believe) that everyone houses two voices inside of them. That of the ego and that of the soul. Both are meant to protect you, but only one of them will lead you home. “Serpentine” is about the never-ending battle between them, the temptation of giving in, and the momentary triumph of overcoming.

Graham and I believe that all consciousness is connected. That, scientifically speaking, everything is energy. And we all know from grade school that energy can never be created or destroyed. So, if this digital touch leaves you with anything, I hope it’s with a sense of calm. There is an infinite well of good in the world, and it’s inside of you.

With love + the best vibes,

Amber & Graham

Submit your story to Letters to YVYNYL.

Q Curius - Donnybrook

/ You know it is honest when your friends take the time to go out of their way to put heart-felt effort into writing about your music, and send it out to the world (or in this case cultish publications like YVYNYL)! That’s love. Especially when your friend’s music is blossomly under appreciated.  

Hey there, Mark,

We’re writing to you on the road from Atlanta to Nashville (a section of the highway called Monteagle Mountain that Johnny Cash has a song about) and thought we would take an unconventional and hopefully acceptable method of sharing a few songs with you. Your blog has meant a lot to us over the years–far more than we can put in a sentence, so we’ll leave it at that (And this– the music you post makes and is making road trips much better).

We are two halves of a married couple– Megan, a musician herself, and Aaron, talent free (but he is dictating this and I am typing it so I can say he is the only one who thinks so). The song we want to share is called “Donnybrook” by Q Curius. By day, Q Curius goes by Forester McClatchey, and he is one of our dearest and tallest friends. All of Q Curius’s production is done by another friend, Joel Calvert. Q Curius knows we are sending this letter, but has not read it.

Forester has been rapping awhile under  monikers of varying levels of social acceptability such as Young Lincoln, Velocirapper, and Claptrap and the Girls. Thankfully, he settled on Q Curius: the coolest and actual name of a senator in Ancient Rome. As a graduate student in poetry, Forester compulsively expands his vocabulary, making him dependent on words  as big as him almost as much as he is dependent on insulin to live (he just wrote a jolly essay on being a Type 1 diabetic that you can read here).

The source for the track’s title is two-fold. Donnybrook is an Irish word meaning, effectively, an all-out brawl. The word came to mean more to us after a troop of aspiring poets named their off campus house the Donnybrook in the tiny rural Michigan town where we all went to college. The Donnybrook was famous for its piles of cigarettes and cans of cheap beer, its full length readings of G. K. Chesterton’s Ballad of the White Horse, and most of all, its giant bonfires around which dozens of eager students would belt out Irish drinking songs and other spirituals in drunken unison.

Donnybrook the song deals with the kind of relationships that form and come apart during the time in your life when that is what you do on a Friday night. There is a simultaneous togetherness and loneliness to this sort of thing. Then, when it’s over, you have to negotiate how often you are willing to wallow in nostalgia over missing it.

After you spend any amount of time with Forester, you come away thinking, “How is he the way he is? And how can I get some of what he’s on? (Is it the insulin?)”. He is one of the most electric people anyone that has met him has ever met. With Q Curius, he and Joel seem to have captured this in song form. If you like Donnybrook, try out “Needles” or “Leaves” as well. It’s been one of those songs that colors a season of life. It is the spring of 2016 for us.

Thanks for all the music you’ve shared. Many of the songs we found first on your blog have become just like Needles or Leaves, defining season after season. And that’s been going on for, gosh, the last five years?

All best,

-Aaron and Megan Schepps

P.s. By the way, I don’t know if you hold this kind of sway with the band, but you should tell Grubby Little Hands to come a little bit southerly sometime. We can vouch for at least ten tickets in Atlanta.

Read more Letters to YVYNYL.

premiere: Shampoo - Hanging Up on U

Fantastic, glittering single from down south in Georgia. They actually sent me the whole record and I can’t wait to share it with you all. It is drop-dead gorgeous with every single bite. Start with this taste. 

hey mark,

a story about one of our songs: rush used to say that “freedom” by wham! was his favorite song ever. not the solo GM house song where his jukebox explodes in the video, but the powerpop wham! song. we were going to cover it when we were in an older band together, but never got around to it. so i knew some of the lyrics and got the idea that it was an anti-possessiveness, maybe even anti-monogamy song because the first verse is all about how this person is cheating on george michael, but how he’ll forgive her, and then the title line is ‘i don’t want your freedom’. so wanted to write a song like that, and i came up with 'hanging up on u’ which is supposed to be like a kiss-off to boys that think they can tell rush what to do, who he can hang out with, etc.

when i showed it to rush, he was into it, but then i told him it was inspired by freedom. and he says, basically: 'that’s the opposite of what freedom is about. george michael is saying he doesn’t care about their freedom. part-time love only brings him down and shit.’ and i looked at all of the lyrics and now i have no idea. is it pro-monogamy or anti-monogamy? anyway, 'hanging up on u’ is supposed to be like the song i thought 'freedom’ was. writing music is weird.

kisses
chandler from shampoo

Read more Letters to YVYNYL.

premiere: Orchid Mantis - Hyōgo Prefecture

Atlanta-based artist Thomas Howard sent me an interesting video for a new song he’s been working on. “I’ve just finished an album of songs inspired by folklore, early Japanese psychedelia/film scores, drone music, and artists such as Dirty Beaches.” Take a look.

Previously: a Letter to YVYNYL with “Last Summer Sun”

premiere: Nomen Novum - Down with the Sickness (Disturbed remake)

Are you a metal fan? You’re going to hate this. Hate it with your whole being. Or not? Who’s to judge. You don’t often get quality genre-bending covers like this. This cover is either takin’ a piss on the heavy dark song or makes the song’s story fit work more in your heart and mind. Like I said, you’re either going to hate this Atlantan’s ears or appreciate the cover’s conceptual art. Here’s what David Norbery told me: 

Hey Mark,

This July found me at Haneda Airport, Tokyo. My friend Philip and I were in line to board our flight home, when we heard something that made our ears prick up. The sound emanated from a group of millennials behind us, and was, on one hand, quite alien — something you might expect a mating crocodile to make — but we knew it instantly and lit up with delight: it was the unmistakable staccato scream from Disturbed’s 2000 breakthrough hit “Down With The Sickness”.

In 2000 I was graduating from high school. I was a pudgy dork who wore Hawaiian shirts and listened to They Might Be Giants. “Down With The Sickness” was a platinum-certified hit, and I remember chuckling at the music video with my dad, generational differences aside. Everyone I knew thought it was hilarious — the absolute pinnacle of the whole mall-metal / butt-metal / butt-rock / butt-sludge zeitgeist.

In the coming years “butt” fell steeply out of fashion. Nickelback and Creed, in particular, were crucified by pop culture as the epitome of bad taste and douchebaggery. Disturbed’s ship went down with them; their port-a-potty-burning anthem sinking last, leaving only the crocodile scream protruding from the water like a shining mast; a beacon of ultimate irony. It is perennially forgotten and recalled; a touchstone passed down to new generations too young to have known it firsthand, in a sort of rite of passage which has endured for fourteen years and counting. Ooh-wah-ah-ah-ah indeed.

This June my friend Nathan “Springer Spaniel” Springer rekindled the joke when he posted an appropriately noxious dubstep remix of the song on my wall, inspiring me to do a remix of my own. As I started pairing more emotionally-charged chords with the acapella vocal I ripped from YouTube, the song completely transformed. The thing is, David Draiman’s vocal melody is actually pretty good — you’d just never know it because the original production is basically limited to one crunchy, down-tuned fifth chord. No longer merely an adolescent temper tantrum, the song began to legitimately resonate with me, and I decided to sing it myself and make it a cover rather than a remix. I ended up sticking with the edited radio/TV arrangement, as it was the only version I knew in 2000. 

When I perform it live I include the enraged, profanity-rich extended breakdown, which I suppose obliterates any shred of sincerity the cover may have had (it’s worth it), but I consider the “studio version” pretty sincere. Everyone has demons. We don’t always like what we see in the mirror. Although I’m fortunate never to have personally experienced it, parental abuse is very real and very much worth writing about. A grown man shrieking like an enraged crocodile, on the other hand, will always be funny.

As a sort of epilogue, I sent an early mix of my cover to my friend Colin, who was unfamiliar with the original. “What? Really?” I asked, in disbelief. I did the crocodile scream for him over the phone — nothing. “Was it a really great song or something?” he asked, completely sincere. Suddenly I could see a beatific vision of David Draiman smiling down on me from the heavens. “Yeah,” I replied, “I guess it kinda was.”

Best,

David

Read more Letters to YVYNYL (see most popular)