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Posts tagged letters to yvynyl

premiere: Union - Gates

This ultra colorful video was sent my way recently with a Letter to YVYNYL explaining why and how the song was meant to share in its experience.

Hello Mark,

My name is Nick - my girlfriend Jen and I wrote, produced and mixed an album over the last two years alongside shooting a music video for the first track in our living room. We’re ready to share “Gates” with the world and would be honored to have it live on your blog.

“Gates” is a thank you letter for the gift of managed anxiety after years of searching.

After several years of playing guitar based music in bands like A Million Years and Whale Belly, I started recording joke songs with Jen using Ableton Live. If the song made us laugh we went with it. And it wasn’t uncommon to throw in samples from movies with narrators sharing visions of the future and babbling about time travel.

In the winter of 2013 a lot of things happened all at once. A Million Years, my focus for the previous three years called it quits, I lost my job, and I began having a mysterious health issue where my breathing would suddenly feel incredibly constricted. I was experiencing intense anxiety for the first time in my life.

Out of money I moved back into my childhood bedroom in suburban Long Island and decided to put a little more energy into the electronic production I had been playing with up until that point. At first I had planned to be home for no more than 3 months while I looked for a job, but the more music I wrote the more obsessed I became in finishing an LP. Even when I found a job I kept using every night to create demos. Still suffering from anxiety during this two year writing period, a friend introduced me to Focalizing, a meditation practice that among its many applications can help people with anxiety. This became my second obsession.

“Gates” was written after a specific moment in a grocery store where I was standing alone in an aisle and suddenly could barely breathe. At that moment I remembered the practice I had been working on, closed my eyes, and brought my attention into my body. Immediately I was thrust into a calm, pleasant place. I was feeling better than I had in months only moments after being at an all time low. The pressure that was pushing my chest in lifted and I was breathing normally again.

This song describes my experience that my all time lows, my worst moments, can actually be used as gateways for healing. These moments are forks in the road and at each fork I can let my mind race with thoughts of, “is this it, am I going to die now?” or bring my focus into the moment and let something better prevail. This experience (along with many more since) has made me thankful for the anxiety, it led me to a gift that improves my life.

The video is a concept inspired by the visuals that can appear when doing this type of meditation. Swirling colors on the back of your eyelids often occur alongside deep calming sensations. To create this, we filmed food coloring and nail polish falling into pools of water. Sometimes before the food coloring hit we stirred the water which caused more unexpected results. We then had a friend shoot us on a second day in front of a green sheet and joined all the results.

With Gratitude,

Nick & Jen

Read more Letters to YVYNYL.

premiere: Good Night Gold Dust - Waves

Minnesota’s Colin Scharf wrote me a heavy letter to describe the low level death vibes behind this new dark but not hopeless song:

Hello Mark!

Colin here, from Minnesota indie quartet Good Night Gold Dust. I’d like to share with you our newest single, “Waves”. I struggled with the lyrics and music for about two years before I thought they were good enough to bring to the band. Sometimes I still don’t trust the syntax on the chorus:

“I’ve forgotten how to forget the bad parts / It’s getting harder to remember the good”

That checks out, right?

A few years ago, a friend drowned in a lake. A year before that, another friend died in her sleep. Two of my uncles recently passed away—one in a fucking county jail; the other of a massive heart attack. I missed my uncles’ funerals because of distance: I live in Minnesota; they were in New York. I missed Jen’s and Charlotte’s funerals because of work. I know that’s bullshit. You never miss the funeral. But things progress so quickly. These are among my biggest regrets.

The deeper regret is that I was only permitted a brief window with them. I wish I’d had more time.

Jen, who drowned, was tight with some of our friends. I didn’t know her very well. Really, I wrote “Waves” for her, and for our friends. The last time I saw Jen, she was skateboarding on a summer afternoon. We smiled. And then she was gone.

Charlotte was a songwriter. She loved the Clash, and sang like Lucinda Williams. We still don’t know how she died. I like to think she passed away like Joe Strummer, peacefully, in her sleep. For a long time we couldn’t listen to her songs without crying. It’s gotten easier, and I’m glad for that. They’re such good songs.

My uncle Bill was an alcoholic. He was the baby of my father’s family, child number four of four. He loved hunting, fishing, trapping. He and my father had a strained relationship, and those tensions unfortunately colored my own perception of uncle Bill. I never let myself get close with him.

My uncle Bruce would speak like Bill Murray in Caddy Shack. In the summers, when I was a kid, he and my aunt would throw up their camper in our big countryside front yard. We’d roast corn over campfires and in the mornings uncle Bruce would cook pancakes for my brother, sister, and me.

You won’t learn about these people through our song. But maybe you’ll learn about people like them; people from your own life. And maybe others will do the same. If anything positive can come from their absence, let it at least be a great song.

- Colin

Read more Letters to YVYNYL.

JOLYMPIX - At the Shore

Gothenburg’s singer Johanna Nordström tells me this intriguing single with an even more interesting story:

Hey Mark,

In Jolympix early days we went to play in Bamakó, capital of Mali, West Africa. We hooked up with some great musicians who were going to guest our show at Exodus, a venue at the Hippodrome horse racing tracks. The vibe couldn’t be better. The sound engineer turned out to be a rapper and we saw the horses from stage, racing in a slow pace in the heat.

All of a sudden, they called from the hotel, there was a state coupe happening and the military had taken over the president palace and the tv station, airport was closed. We left all the instruments and took a cab to the hotel through a nervous city. The feeling was surreal. How could this peaceful friendly place and musical epicenter turn into first page news in a couple of hours?

We couldn’t take it in, instead we got disappointed like kids that we couldn’t play that night. We didn’t know how long the curfew was going to last, how serious the situation was, how we would get food etc. We were stranded in a small hotel with the staff and guests. There was a Spanish pilot who took the family father role, a journalist who reported news to the world and us, a french grandma who had lived in Timbuktu, a very colonial racist sales man and his prostitute for the night.

The lights were turned off and a unarmed guy guarded the non existing gate. Information and rumors reached our ears, a hotel down the street is looted, the president is shot.. Somebody asked if we wanted to buy a living goat. Grandma cooked it. As privileged people, we spent the time talking, drinking, worrying, hanging by the pool, exercising, making music, sometimes we heard gunshots from the street, it’s only in the air they said.

After a week, the curfew was off and we played at a small open air club. The atmosphere electrified with emotions, you could feel how all of us needed the music in that moment, that it actually spread some hope and love. The airport opened the next day and were lucky to be on the first plane to Europe. Very mixed feelings of relief and frustration to just leave it all behind.

- Johanna

Read more Letters to YVYNYL.

William Austin Clay - Skip Ad

Just got a note from Texas:

Hey Mark,

My name is William Austin Clay and I just wanted to submit some music to be posted on your blog. I used to play in a Denton band named Blessin’, as well as a few others, and before that recorded music as ShaShaheed. You posted my track “Why” back in 2012 but my music has changed a lot since then.

I recently graduated from the University of North Texas with a Bachelor of Arts in Music. At UNT, I mostly focused on composition and guitar performance, writing cerebral academic music while at the same time being involved in the growing music scene in Denton. While living here I was able to meet and work with many talented musicians, including Jesse Miller (a.k.a. LUWUM). I also spent a lot of time recording my own music in my bedroom on a little digital multitrack and posting on my SoundCloud; a few of these recordings were compiled for a mix I recently released on cassette through local label Dallas Distortion Music.

Last summer, after everyone from Blessin’ had graduated from college, we went on a tour up to Chicago, over to New York and down the east coast back into the gulf coast. I feel like I learned a lot about the “indie” music scene and what I wanted as an independent musician myself while on the road and these new insights certainly informed my latest work since coming back from tour.
Hearing so many cool, unique bands, coupled with the inability to write or record for a whole two weeks really spurned my creative drive when I got back from the road and I was quick to start working again. Over 2 - 3 weeks, after coming back from tour, I was able to write and record a group of songs that I hope to release soon. One track that came about during this period, “Skip Ad”, especially stuck out to me, prompting me to prep it as a single and submit it to you to be posted on your blog.

Sonically, I feel it’s fairly representative of the broad palette of moods and colors I developed with this group of songs- driving, lyrical instrumentation, a more defined production quality (compared to my lo-fi, bedroom recordings), stark juxtapositions of major and minor modalities that evoke a kind of emotional ambiguity or even conflict, at times tense yet fluid or optimistically morose. Lyrically, it is a kind of loose critique of capitalism and its effects but I must admit, lyrics are not of major importance to me as a musician. I often wait to write the lyrics last, as was the case with these songs, because my main concern is the music. Lyrics, for me, are simply a vehicle for the melody, using the resonant frequencies of the vowel sounds as a means of adding color to the timbre of the melody and consonants to outline temporal qualities like phrasing. I chose to use politically charged language in an attempt to promote social change, however small or insignificant it might be. I used to think it was corny when bands politicized their work but I feel like the world doesn’t need anymore love songs and there are many issues that concern me that I wish to speak about and raise awareness of. I guess what I’m trying to say is this song, as with all my work, is about the music and if I could, I would sing in gibberish (unfortunately, I’m no Elizabeth Fraser).

Best,

William

Read more Letters to YVYNYL

Read the latest Letter to YVYNYL:

Central California’s Stephanie Croff thought she had everything in order, that her life was in perfect alignment. And then it wasn’t. Her relationship broke apart suddenly and left her thinking about where she landed, or if she had landed at all. Healing came slowly, but when sharp shattering pieces found their way back together it’s not surprising to learn that power came from crafting the music she loved.

Dear Mark,

…So I did the work. I dug into myself and read books and cried on the floor and picked myself up and went to meetings and cried in my car and then created work and delivered it and shook business-owners hands and signed contracts and did more work and earned as much money as I could to fund a project like I had never funded before…

(read to the whole piece while listening to her music here on my Medium)

Read the latest Letter to YVYNYL:

Miya Folick knows that you have dirty underwear because, shit, we all have it. No one is perfect. It feels connected us to more of the universe when we start to remember what lovely flawed human beings we all are. We puke from time to time. We lie from time to time. We make lots and lots of mistakes. These are her ruminations she feels when she’s writing music. Let’s be honest, no one is perfect. Listen to her songs with that reminder.

Dear Mark,

…I had some people over and one of them drank too much and was sleep-puking from the couch onto the floor. I watched as another friend, without hesitation, brought her a cold towel and a bowl. I watched her pick up the sick friend’s head and gently, but forcefully, pull it off the couch and over the bowl. She said all the things I would have liked her to be saying to me if I were in that situation…

(read to the whole piece while listening to her music here on my Medium)

Read the latest Letter to YVYNYL

Manett wrote to me about her life growing up in Guam. Seems as though people who are raised in such remote places have an ongoing love/hate relationship with their roots. People feeling comfortable remaining put in a gorgeous natural place may feel suffocated by it’s smallness. Guam is a distant land, many time zones away from the rest of earth, and that separation feels palpable every day being a kid growing up there. She has music to help her understand it, and here’s what she wrote me about how these thoughts effect her songs.

Dear Mark,

…It was a big deal when a sibling would leave the island for college in the mainland U.S. We’d see them go through the airport gate and vanish for months. Phone calls were long-distance back then, and the enormous time zone difference, not to mention the impending culture shock, made it easier to simply let go of any expectation of contact…

(read to the whole piece while listening to her music here on my Medium)

Read the latest latest Letter to YVYNYL

West Philly’s Hallowed Bells Allison Stout never intended to be a technology-based artist. She wrote to me recently about her creative path, the growth of a project, and how her a relationship with collaborator Darian Scatton dives into their obsessions of dots and loops. The sound they began producing together reached into old, forgotten electric relics. From here, they started to press all the buttons to where their hearts were inspired.

Hi Mark,

…“What should we do today?” and he answered, “Record some music.” That might have been it. We started out with me playing Rhodes piano and Darian playing a little 1980’s Casiotone keyboard and his K-Station synth that he’d had for years. But before long, we became restless for new sounds and soon found ourselves slipping deeper and deeper into the world of electronic instruments..

(read the entire piece while listening to their music on Medium)

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