// Letters to YVYNYL //

premiere: Harrison Caldeira - Higher

 / Music is, as many of us know, a true medicine, healing some of the most difficult problems life sends our way. I know a lot about this from personal experience myself, but it makes me happy to receive letters from folks who know the immediate value of music. Create it, listen to it, share it. Those vibrations are the ones that make the most challenging moments palpable, if not downright medicinal.

Dear Mark,

I have always known music. It has been my comfort. My peace. Sitting in the bathtub as a toddler, I would laugh with happiness, as my dad would sing The Beatles’ “Hello Goodbye” on repeat. And I would request it every time. He would later inspire me to pick up a guitar myself at the age of twelve. It quickly became apart of my life. But I never realized how much it meant to me until it was taken away.

I’ve found that as you get older, it’s easier to let the world get inside your head. Having graduated high school, I figured I ought to put myself on a more “serious” path. I put music at the back of my mind for a while and decided to pursue an academic life at university, thinking that sooner or later I would find a suitable career.

But on February 14, 2011, everything changed. Late that night, I had a seizure and was hospitalized until morning. Six months later I was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis. I decided to move back home and transferred to a local university in order to receive treatment closer to home. 

In December of that same year, shortly after having been diagnosed, I suffered a paralyzing relapse that debilitated my motor skills. Much of the strength and coordination in my hands, legs and feet was lost. I experienced problems with my speech, and I soon felt completely defeated. One day, my dad had asked me to pick up the guitar and play something for him. I’ll never forget the feeling I had as I strummed hopelessly and realized with agony, that I couldn’t play anymore. It was at that point that I discovered how important my relationship with music is.

I think that having experiences like these can either make or break you. Or both. After my diagnosis, I found myself in a really dark place, and I felt every minute of it. But my MS has given me much more than it can ever take away. It brought me exactly to where I need to be, where I’ve always needed to be—where my heart’s always been. I picked up the guitar, and I taught myself how to play, all over again. It was frustrating beyond words. And more than once I wanted to give up. But once in remission, I had a new perspective on what mattered in my life.

And a new determination. So I began to write. After I wrote my first album HIS·STORY, I left Canada to travel around Europe for a year. While I lived in France, it was difficult to communicate with people due to the language barrier. In these moments, I turned to songwriting to express myself. I took the Mumford and Sons approach to writing music. I wrote as many songs as I could, then from sixty or so songs, I chose my best six. When I came home, I recorded these songs at Splintered Wood Records. We were just two people for one big project, and I can’t thank him enough for the work he did.

Through endless re-recordings and re-writes, the final product came to be. I feel as if I’m always trying to get what I feel inside, out through music … it’s an impossible task, but I try to get as close as possible. I’m driven by that need to be truly venerable with myself and with my music.

Best,

H

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// Letters to YVYNYL //

The News - Fail Better

 / Poetry has always played an important part of coming to terms with the idea of failure in music songwriting. Philadelphia-based duo Rachel Haines and Benjamin James do some meditation on this, and wanted to send me their thoughts on their first ever single release. Balancing the poser of words, the places they fall in between the cracks, the way they crawl into your skin without  you understanding their impact until years later; this is what good songwriting is all about. 

hello mark

we are going to attempt to write about “fail better” our debut song from our musical collaboration - we call The News.  The collaboration started early 2016, and most of our songs were recorded during the summer, and we are finally starting to put them out into the world.  We will be releasing them all as singles, and we fear that in the playlist culture we live in currently, the idea of taking an entire body of songs and throw them into the world, may simply be too much and fall on deaf ears.  Like the Beckett quote we based our song from, distilling down the end piece to a manageable chunk, may be easier on the audience, but may in the long term, misconstrue the intent of the author.

When dealing within the pop milieu, there are so many cliches and pitfalls to songwriting, or at least that is how we feel it is, and frankly, any thoughts or feeling you are going to try and convey, undoubtedly have been illustrated by a poet far better than you could have ever hoped.  

That said, we strive to apply context to our songs by anchoring them firmly within an ideology that we mutually could agree upon, as we feel it rings true to both our ears. It is with this in mind that we both agreed to firmly base our song “fail better” within the framework of Samuel Beckett’s 1983 work “worstward ho!.” Perhaps it reads as pretentious or silly to base your framework on a piece of prose that frankly was written as a parody of another work by Charles Kingsley a hundred years prior, but there is something about the quote “All of old. Nothing else ever. Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better..” that has resonated with readers and interpreters since its writing nearly 35 years ago, and that seemed like a good enough reason to explore it.

The fact remains though, this quote is often grabbed out of context and is often seen as some sort of self help mantra, which honestly, we do not feel was the intent of the author, but it is easy to see how that meaning can be applied when you don’t read the rest of the prose and all the darkness that surrounds it.  

For “fail better,” it is that cutting edge, just below the surface that we longed to embody. Upon first glance, perhaps this is just another “what have you done for me lately,” woman empowerment pop song, but honestly, that is not where we are coming from.  It is that struggle between substance and headlines, and that drifting back and forth between people in our lives that we know are toxic, but we find ourselves returning to those places again and again, that drives this song.  

This is our first song, and honestly, you never know if anyone is going to hear what you make, so that said, it most probably will be our most honest perspective we will have, as it is a song, simply not informed by an audience in any shape or form.  

“All of old. Nothing else ever. Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better..” is a case study in the idea of success and whether or not it is a concept that really exists in life, and although we can’t encapsulate that big philosophical idea in a pop song, it can certainly help inform the character within the song. This is not self help material for sure, but writing the song was.

rachel + ben

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// Letters to YVYNYL //

premiere: Sheers - Depth

 / The warm movements hold cold reverberations from the low hum permeating this track, a place that feels difficult to turn away from Lily Sheers’ work. And oh, that organ! Ultimately, I am transfixed to these works that use mixed media within outside elements of craft: dance, film, color. Join this incantation for the deeper we go into this autumn song. 

Hey Mark,          

Firstly, I admire what you do and the music you choose to feature on YVYNYL, and the letters from artists are brilliant. I’ve spent perhaps too many hours of life wondering why I write songs, why anyone should listen, and what good it does. As a classically trained choral singer and harpist, I’ve never been certain “pop” music is the place for me. Regardless, I’m putting my best efforts into this project, hoping that if I go about it genuinely, someone will connect with my work. Anyway, I love the Letters to YVYNYL because they make listening a more personal experience.      

“Depth” was an intuitively-written song. I started with only a simple bass line and a vocal melody so that the space between the two could be an instrument in itself. Working with the musical representation of distance, the autobiographical lyrics are about the isolating effects of emotional independence. At the time I thought it easier to miss people than to maintain vulnerable relationships, despite a resultant battle between the emotional and logical self.

After fleshing out the song more, I recorded the track with Scott Schaus, and our mutual friend Hasan Mahmood came up with the video’s premise, which I think is a great reflection of the song’s sentiment. The one-shot video (truly one shot, no cheats!) features the improvised dancing of Juliette Nolan. While she represents the emotional aspect of “Depth,” I act as the inhuman, a-emotional counterpart ignoring her presence. We laid out the setting to echo feelings of isolation and duality, accented by Kayla Newell’s defiant paintings.          

I remember the first time Hasan asked me about the meaning of the “Depth,” I blushed and gave the briefest answer possible. For someone who writes songs about fear of vulnerability, speaking about the meaning of lyrics is also utterly terrifying. The process of completing and putting out this music video has proven befitting, I suppose. Each step has challenged me to reveal more of my emotional self. Here I am now, writing you with more detail than I could not have comfortably imagined upon creating “Depth.” It still makes me a little nervous, but if it’s for the sake of giving a genuine account, so be it.

Thank you for reading! I hope you enjoy the video and this bit of backstory. Let me know if you have questions I left unanswered.

Cheers,

Lily Sheers

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// Letters to YVYNYL //

premiere: Midnight Garden - Something Blue

 / Everyone who puts their focus and energy into creating something bigger finds that the roads they chose change corse in ways they never imagined, and sometimes those roads lead right back to where they started. Chicago’s Nick Donlin wrote me about this experience with his collaborator San Diego’s Zach Vouga.

Good evening, Mark, 

We hope this letter finds you and your readers well. It’s cold and rainy here. The seasons are changing. Something about this change effects me subconsciously for sure. It puts me in transition mode, gets me ready for the next thing, and gives me an opportunity to reflect on the past.

Zach and I met in high school. Sort of weird kids, and where we grew up the weird kids did drugs and made music. Not that abnormal really. We were each working on separate projects at the time and I think each of those projects and hit some sort of lull. I don’t know, it was just the right moment to try and work together on something. We called ourselves Glitter Bones. We experimented around for the next couple years, releasing a couple of EP’s and playing super hot and crowded house parties in Chicago and opening for some sweet people around the city. For whatever reason, as life tends to just happen, we parted ways. Zach moved across the country to San Diego and I moved back home. I think of these as sort of the soul searching years, doing a lot of growing up or whatever.

Around a year ago I was working on the rough draft of what would eventually become the song Time. It just sounded to me like Zach should play on it, so I emailed him the basic tracks I had recorded for it. I felt it was kind of an experiment. Like, could we write music together without being in the same room? We got pretty excited about the song, so we wrote another. It turned out to be a great formula. Rather than like writing a whole record and then going into the studio, the recording and writing processes went hand in hand. I’ve always loved records where you could tell the band sort of used the studio as an instrument. So we kept writing, and piece by piece it came together. It’s kind of cool to have the freedom to let the record evolve naturally in such a way.

We decided to call ourselves Midnight Garden. While it definitely felt like we were picking up where we left off with Glitter Bones in some ways, the time apart also made it feel like something new and fresh to us. Midnight Garden is sort of a feeling. Like the way night life makes you feel, or a chilling on a porch late on a summer night kind of thing. I don’t know, I hope other people hear it and think about their own thing.

I said before that the time Zach and I spent apart before sort of reconnecting was a time of growing up and soul searching. Our songs are definitely about that. Lots of self reflection, songs about love, and relationships. Big life stuff. There’s some storytelling mixed in there too. I think all that stuff is better left up to the listener to figure out for themselves though. I just know that for me, writing music helps me get things off my chest, so I think a lot of the songs are about working through something.

This past summer, Zach and I finished up our debut record Ruined and decided to put it up on our various social media outlets, Spotify, Apple Music, etc. It took nearly a year of this back and forth writing and recording to finish the record. It may not have gotten the exposure or attention we wanted, but in the grand scheme of things that doesn’t matter that much. Some people heard it and loved it and shared it with their friends and that’s really what we’re after. Connection through something pleasurable.

Since we don’t really have an opportunity to tour right now, we are always in writing mode. This can be a good and bad thing. Sometimes we write things without any sort of clear direction of where this material might end up. As I mentioned earlier, we’ve been writing music together in some form or another for the past six years. YVYNYL even premiered a music video for us during the Glitter Bones days, so I can’t really tell you how many of these songs we’ve written that have gotten lost in the cracks of time. Songs that didn’t make it past the transition to something new.

As soon as we released Ruined, we were already writing new things. It’s sort of a trial and error process to find the sound that feels right. We decided this time it’d be interesting to share a couple of these songs rather than lose them forever. Something Blue is one of those songs. It’s one that we’re really excited about, but just don’t know if it’s the direction we’re looking for when feeling out the next record. So I hope people can listen to it and get excited about what’s coming next and hopefully we can share some information about that soon.

I think we just really love making music together and want to share our experience with as many people as possible.

Peace,

Nick & Zach

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// Letters to YVYNYL //

Gymnast - Young Blood

 / After reading this piece from Cathy Wilcock and Chris Lyon from Manchester it made me wonder if they are working on a PhD in philosophy or psychology, and music lands in the region of ‘side project’. I don’t know if they are students or professors - it’s just my own wild guess - but their methodology clearly correlates to their song writing craft. Perhaps, like many of us, their professional life is merely a side project of their true passion in music. 

Dear Mark

We came across your blog and have been having a blast reading through the Letters to YVYNYL – great idea for a blog feature. We wanted to write you a little something about our recent single ‘Young Blood’ and the EP that it is from.

The EP has a central thread running through it: the concept of liminality. The ‘limen’ is a boundary or threshold and liminal moments refer to transitions through those boundaries. While the concept has been borrowed into all kinds of contexts, we are taking it in its original anthropological sense. Societies everywhere have been very consistent in developing rituals of transition. These mark (or even bring about) the transition from one category of identity to another. They can happen to selves within societies (for example, the Sinhalese-Buddhist exorcism-of-illness ritual), or to societies themselves (for example, during revolutionary epochs), or can reflect a society’s sense of the world they inhabit itself undergoing substantive change (as in the spring rituals of pagan Russia explored in Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring). 

These rituals are chaotic moments because they require disassociation from the ordering principles of the past followed by the establishment of different, new, ordering principles. In between the disassociation from and re-establishment of ordering principles, there is a space where experience is unstructured and unmediated by these principles of order – this is the liminal moment.

One of these rituals of transition is the coming of age ritual which formalises a subject’s transition from childhood to adulthood. This is the particular moment of liminality which informs our single ‘Young Blood’. Coming of age rituals let the subject loose from the authority of their parents, their tribe, their roots, and allow them to / invite them to establish their own principles of ordering. This sense of release can be liberating and enriching but also sorrowful and angst-ridden, as seen, for example, in Goethe’s Young Werther or Richard Kelly’s Donnie Darko. This fretfulness and self-doubt often arises because the subject is being asked to prove that they are ready to go it alone. It is the anxiety accompanying liberation during coming of age liminality that our song ‘Young Blood’ explores. 

There are multiple voices in the song which all take place in the subject’s head. This is because of the multiple selves (pre- and post-transition) which co-exist during liminal moments. There is fear about being set free from the authority of the parents and the homeland and perhaps losing contact with those ordering principles altogether. There is self-doubt about whether or not the subject will let down both themselves and those former authoritative voices. This apprehension accompanies the euphoria of liberation from those authorities. Throughout the song, the lyrics reference these pressures / freedoms. At the same time, the music embodies simultaneous apprehension and excitement in its fluid metric shifts between an angular pattern in the verse and bridge and a euphoric four-on-the-floor in the chorus.

Ok, thanks for reading if you got this far!…

Cathy and Chris

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// Letters to YVYNYL //

premiere: Alone Architect - Faded (feat. Dani Poppitt)

 / Montreal-gone-LA electro artists Jeff Feldman picks some poignant collaborators. Darkness and blood get a moment to break down and reflect with his friend singer Dani Poppitt. Personally, I’m absolutely fascinated by the dreams of death and life and how the two will never be disassociated by the two elements of our experience. Songs, as meditations, on the afterlife have always had resonance with me and maybe you’ll share that emotion with us as you listen to their newest track here.

Hey Mark,

I don’t really know where to begin so I think I’ll begin by saying I think you have something special going on over here at yvynyl.

I just stumbled across it recently and once I landed on yvynyl and started digging, I quickly realized that it was more than just another generic blog.  It breathes, has a pulse and feels alive. Thanks for creating a human, comfortable place to connect to new art!

My name’s Jeff.  I go under the moniker Alone Architect. I make what I’d like to consider to be cinematic, electronic music. I often compare my music to a novel. Weird, right? Or a film. I like to think that in listening to my songs, they take you on somewhat of a journey. That they tell a story. That they’re visual.

I’ve always had a thing for love songs. Not in the sense that I like listening to love songs, but more in the sense that I fell that there are so many of them out there that the world doesn’t need another one.  For example, listen to any pop tune out there and there is some form of love, lust, sex, heartbreak etc associated with them. Now, there’s obviously nothing wrong with love - the actual emotion.  It’s amazing!  It’s probably the best feeling out there.  Loving and being in love and being loved. I love it! Ha! That being said; there are other things to write about as well. So I’ve never written a love song.

Faded is, in a way, that love song that I had yet to write. Myself and Dani Poppitt, my friend and the vocalist on the tune, penned the story from the perspective of  someone who recently died & finds themselves unable / unwilling to leave our physical world behind for fear of losing their true love and never finding them again.

They’re trying to beckon their love to follow them to another plane of existence that they think is better. Closer to the source. So they can transcend together. They basically want their true love to kill themselves, so that they can be together.

Now from our human perspective that may seem pretty messed up. I often find myself wondering if what we think we know, is actually what we know. As a species, I mean.

So much of our beliefs are based upon “laws” that are only viewed as sensical because of our willingness to accept their validity. Even when it comes to science, all these values (numbers, equations etc.) that we use to obtain proof, through scientific equations and formulae, are only true based on our willingness to accept these values for what they’re inherently meant to be taken as. 1 being 1.  2 being 2.  1 + 1 = 2, for example.

Now, I’m not saying I’m anti-science. Far from it. I love science. I guess what I’m trying to say, is that we all have our own ideas of what happens to our consciousness energetically, once we die.  If we retain it and move on to a more evolved and aware state. Or if it just goes back into the flow of it all and who we were, the thoughts we had, the energy we bottled for our briefest of moments in this particular life, explodes into a wave of everything and our individual “souls” or “spirits” cease to be. Or there is a huge possibility that there’s nothing. That’s it.

The truth is, is that no one really knows. We all want to believe that we go on. That there is another dimension where we are going to transcend to, once we depart this physical plane.  We want to think that we’ll still hold strong bonds to those that we loved dearly and the fiercest in this life. That we’ll move on in another life, together as more enlightened beings. Beings working our way to the source of it all. To the light of enlightenment, where we’ll be able to rejoice forever and marvel at how ignorant and naive we were when trapped in our physical selves.

We want to live on, ‘cause, goddamned it, we’re important. We matter.

I wish I could believe that when I die, I’ll still be me, but version 2.0.

That I’ll be with those that I love most in their 2.0 forms.

This is kinda what this song is about.

I wish I could believe that I was important enough to live on after my
body dies.

But I can’t. Because I know enough to know, that I know absolutely
nothing at all. Like Jon Snow. Only not nearly as badass.

Enjoy the tune and please feel free to let me know if you need any more info!

Cheers,
Jeff /  Alone Architect

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// Letters to YVYNYL //

slackers ☂ - ты приснишься мне (“I’ll See you in My Dreams”)

 / One huge benefit I get from my project here is that people write me from far away places and share stories of their wild adventures. This Moscow-based punk band told me about some incredible travels they took across Siberia on their way to perform at the Playtime Music Festival in Mongolia. That’s right. Mongolia. Now I want to go there, too!

Hey, Mark! 

During a tour show in Moscow, we played with our friends Nikola Tesla & Thee Coils in a small venue Ypsilon. It was summer and there was really hot in all ways, about 200 people were jumping and dancing, many of them came to us near the club after the show, wished to have a good trip, took pictures with us and hugging haha. We were hanging out for the whole night after the gig, no one went to sleep and in the morning we found ourselves in a van going to Nizhniy Novgorod. 

We were there before, it’s a very beautiful hilly city stood on two rivers, but the road there was the most terrifying in this tour. It was very hot outside and there were no windows in the van except the driver’s one, so you can try to imagine what it’s like to be there for 8-9 hours haha. We arrived there only in the evening and went to the scene almost immediately. But the show was ok, we ate some pizza, drank couple of beers, found the last drops of energy in ourselves and played rather long and strong. 

The next city was Ekaterinburg, it’s in the Urals that separates Europe from Asia so we took a flight there. The show was totally mad, there was no stage and people just went crazy and danced like hell, fell on our drums and equipment and also on us, took a mic and sang our songs instead of us while we played for them like karaoke, looked at each other and laughed haha. 

Then we went to Omsk on a train. Omsk is in Siberia and it’s a hometown of my bandmate Andrei, he has a lot of old friends there and he wanted to perform there for a very long time, to show me the city where he lived for more than 20 years - and so his dream came true! His friend met us at the railway station, we walked in the city, Andrei showed me different places from his childhood and teen age. In a bar where we played we met millions of his friends, the show was fun except one moment when I broke my cymbal. I was disappointed, but I quickly forgot about it, because we were having a very good time after the show with all of the audience and Andrei’s friends for the whole night.

The last city was Novosibirsk, we were invited there by Slava, he’s a barman in The Rooks bar where we played. We were there at 1 pm and testing all kinds of craft beer and cider till the evening when the show started. The Rooks bar is a very small place so the stage was outside, we played about 20 minutes and suddenly the police came. Two cops told us that if we continue playing they would call for reinforcements and all of us would be busted haha. We asked to play a couple of songs and after them they shut our gig down unfortunately. But we just continued testing beer and cider with our friends who came from another Siberian city Tomsk to see us, and the next day together we spent at the botanical garden. 

By the way, not long ago Slava invited us again to finish our set without cops haha. At this moment our final trip started. We had to get to Ulaanbaatar from Novosibirsk and it took more than twenty four hours. There were two flights (one 3 hours flight to Irkutsk and another 20 minutes flight to Ulan Ude over the Baikal lake with 5 hours waiting between them) and 12-hours bus to Ulaanbaatar. While riding on a bus and looking through window we could only see miles and miles of nothing, there were only plains and prairies outside, with horses, goats and yak from time to time and almost no men, only nature. 

The thing is that all of the bands at this festival had 4-5 members at least and had a very massive epic sound - that’s like almost all Mongolian bands sounded. But there is only two of us in a band, we have only guitar, drums and two voices, the audience didn’t dig it and we just vanished on that huge main stage, but it was fun aniway, we played about 50 minutes there. But two or three days later we had a solo gig there in a venue called “Temple” and it was really cool, the audience was at arm’s length from us, we always like it that way.

The whole Mongolian experience was really impressive, we didn’t know what to expect, but we met many interesting young people, saw and visited many beautiful places, including the Chinghis Khan monument and dinosaur park with stone dinos there haha. We became a real good friends with our promoter Oyunka, we were hanging out all Mongolian days with her, made funny interview on her radio show “Indie Thursday” there. And she visited us in Moscow in September for a week, we had a cool time. It’s a pity that we live so far from each other, I want to hope it wasn’t our last meeting. 

We arrived two hours later than we should and we were afraid that we couldn’t find each other with Oyunka but she recognized us, took in a car and we went to Playtime. That was the day before our show and we just had a rest after a trip, eating, smoking and drinking something strong haha. It was very strange and like a dream, we couldn’t believe that we’ve got there after all these hours of time and miles of space. We met a lot of people of all nationalities that night, Oyunka introduced us to The Radio Dept. who played there that evening, we met Ann, a Russian girl who lived in Australia for a very long time, then studied in Japan and turned up in Mongolia after all. We became friends and she also visited us with our promoter Oyunka in September in Moscow. 

Thanks god, our road to Moscow was just a one plane flight, I sat on my seat, fasten my seat belt and turned off for a six hours till the end of a flight. The tour was over.

Cheers,

Roma

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// Letters to YVYNYL //

Pastel Hell - Love & Dementia

 / Bending a song’s tempo within itself will also bend its mood. The work of Alex Fox Tschan dissociates itself within each phrase it makes. In this song, the character is looking at a woman who “runs a lifestyle blog, which means she does nothing at all.” The ultra modern references in that oh-god-I-hate-myself sort of self loathing makes his work is more complicated than it at once appears. Let it soak, let it marinate a bit before you trust the story. And let his letter tell you more.

Hey Mark,

Hope you’ve been having a great summer man. Just wanted to drop a line about retiring Lunifred Benjamin. It does’t mean what it used to & it had gotten quite tiring to preface/spell-out each damn time I was asked. Plus, Pastel Hell sounds like the new tunes I’m making & it fits with my general sardonic blonde vibe I guess…

I just finished an EP on Friday. It’s 5 songs & is available on the links below. A video & full LP are coming… I always tend to keep relatively silent about sharing my personal life. I prefer to let the music speak for itself because the lyrics are very honest & autobiographical.

That said, I appreciate how you’ve always been on the lookout for the substance & context surrounding the music. I want to share some of the bullet points (dark impending pun not intended) with you. I owe that much to ya after you were so kind to pump me up from obscurity almost 2 years ago.

I’m from very rural Virginia & was raised by my father (who is from Philly & went to Lower Merion btw). My mom is a beautiful soul whom I’m very much like, but she is also bipolar.

I’ve made original music since I was 14 but it sucked until college. Possibly because at Virginia Tech I lost a couple friends, & nearly lost a best friend, to what was still the largest mass shooting in America until Orlando… but that event was also the thing that woke me up and made me more vibrant & grateful. But it also significantly scarred me in a way I did not realize until years later. I stayed in Blacksburg another year, then moved to NYC in 2009 with my band, The House Floor (all Virginia Tech folks like my good buds in Wild Nothing).

Somehow The House Floor got on All Songs Considered within 3 months of living here. Then in 2010 we got courted by Secretly Canadian for a while. We even made it out to Bloomington to meet them, but I was having a tough time emotionally & was abusing pills then. I ended up getting into a drunken argument out there with the main guy Chris. Still so ashamed to this day of that era in my life, but he is a gracious dude & we’ve remained pen pals over the years. I think he could tell I was not myself during that visit. I ended up breaking up that band in early 2012 because I wanted to try some different things. But we had a good run! One rad LP & shows with Mr. Twin Sister here and War on Drugs down in Virginia.

For nearly a year in 2012-2013 I lived in the back of my car after a bad break up. I was a casual cocaine user from 2010-2012, but became a heavy daily user eventually. That lasted WAY too long… until I got pulled over for a DUI in May of 2013. Thankfully & very luckily no one was hurt. But that shameful event may have saved my life. Whatever aggregating depression that I wasn’t acknowledging from all the aforementioned shit finally caught up to me. I got sober & sorted my life out after that. I think/hope I’ve finally dealt with the things I needed to, because nowadays I can drink & confront tragedy without getting pulled back into old habits.

I hope that my music sounds like it’s coming honestly from the person above. It’s the only thing in the world (other than bartending apparently) that i’m pretty good at. I thank you SO MUCH for taking the time to read this. I hope you enjoy the new music. Thank you wholeheartedly, Mark. Be well, bubba. 

-Alex

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// Letters to YVYNYL //

Samana - I’ll Keep You With Me

 / If you’re like me, you need to get your heart broken on a daily basis. I seek music like this, to keep my own spirit in check. Am I okay? Am I alive? Large portions of my mental space hovers in that place. Wales-based duo Rebecca Rose Harris and Franklin Mockett write music with that truth in a daily practice, based purely on the way they craft melody, and tap into the capacity of her low, mystical voice. They wrote to me about how they’ve built their sound, their story, and how they view this life.

Dear Mark,

It is a pleasure to write to you and I hope this letter finds you well.

I am writing to you from across the Atlantic Ocean. The valley, from beyond our window, is shrouded in autumn’s palate of geological golds, fading greens and burnt reds. As the days proceed, the nature that surrounds our solitary farmhouse becomes increasingly different. I regard the season of autumn to be a reflection of change and of movement both in the land and within oneself. It is for this very reason I feel it is an appropriate time for me to write you this letter and share with you our story.

My partner and I are Samana.

A year ago we packed the bare necessities of our lives into our thirty-year old van Govinda and left England with 300 Euro’s to write a body of music born from freedom, instincts and belief. We removed ourselves from all restraints and commitments and journeyed by map and compass across the far reaches of Europe to write in the isolated forests of Slovenia, the mountain peaks of Austria, the holy valleys of Montenegro, the golden farmlands of Serbia and the secret communities of Hungary. We made ancient pilgrimages, slept beneath the stars and washed all year round in lakes and rivers. 

We devoted every element of our existence and progression to the development of our music. We performed it ritualistically on the streets to people of passing towns and villages to share the essence of our work intimately and personally in its rawest form, defying language barriers and division. From Indian summers through to winter snowstorms we gathered interest and support from people of all walks of life whose kindness allowed us to travel like this for a year, taking us to the furthest reaches of Albania and back again. 

Having composed an album on the road, we returned to the UK and took residence in an old farmhouse in the Brecon Beacons. We have since built an analogue recording studio and darkroom, where we compose and record our music and develop and print our photographs. Requiem is an insight into our lives and what is to come.

With Heart,

Rebecca & Franklin

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// Letters to YVYNYL //

premiere: Rooms - Bittersweet Company

 / I know there’s a deeper story that he’s not telling me here because Robert Nicholas was cagey about the details when I asked. But okay, the duo’s first single speaks for itself so I’ll bite.

Dear Mark,

Being honest, today a close friend turned me on to your blog. I am a first time reader. With that said, I’ve spent the past several hours reading and discovering fantastic new (to me) music. Your unorthodox approach is refreshing, and inspiring to read/watch/listen. You definitely have a new fan.

Currently, I reside in Los Angeles. I live two doors down from M, my musical other half. We are located in a quaint apartment complex in the Thai town neighborhood. In our two apartments she and I produce, write, and record all of our music. If you listen closely you can hear our neighbor yelling at his son Noah. Kid’s a brat :)

Earlier this year we made the decision to leave a major label project behind to focus all of our attention on Rooms. The constant compromise, and restrictions left little artist freedom. Although we’re back to surviving on pennies and collecting Bed, Bath and Beyond coupons the ability to share something that is derived from passion is fulfilling.

The video for “Bittersweet Company,” was shot entirely on my iPhone. We moved the futon in my apartment to access the bare wall, a red bike light as our lighting source, and taped my phone to a mic stand to keep it steady.  

I sincerely thank you for taking the time to read my note and watch our video.

It’s 67 degrees in Los Angeles right now which means it’s finally moving towards fall. 90 degrees in October is far from appealing to us. I’m jealous of your east coast seasons and all the moods that winter weather creates. Stay warm.

Be well my friend,

Robert

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