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premiere: Garden Gate - Houses of Learning

Want some fresh Halloween music? Only a few days away, so feast on Tim Meskers’ (Brown Recluse) new track that aught to do the trick. Look for a full length of material on Good Behavior Records.

premiere: Gabriel Brown - Disguise

This young shamelessly pop-loving Florida native, despite believing in staying plain on the outside, puts a powerful punch from the core of his dance-track inside. As he suggests, “get out of your disguise!” I expect more of these beauties in the near future.

“I live in Orlando, Florida. So as far as pop music goes, there’s not much of it here. I was blessed to find my producers David Whitemore and Adam Sliger who record me out of the Sunray Recording Studio,” he tells me.

“I write 100% of all of my lyrics, melodies, and tracks. I’ll make a pretty solid demo in Logic and then I’ll take it to my producers, which then we’ll piece it together, tweak some synths and record/mix/master everything. I also do all of my own graphics, website work, social media, the whole nine yards.”

Most importantly: “I turn 21 years old this Saturday.“

After you listen to his new song, do you want to help me wish my new friend a happy birthday?

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.

premiere: Polly Hi - Give It Up

Of course Princeton’s Sam McDougle has been creating music while working toward a PhD in Neuroscience. Such complimentary disciplines, right?! But if you think about it, and I do a lot, music and the brain’s function are deeply and indelibly intertwine in a glory of mystery. Luckily, Sam shares his Yo La Tengo influence on his sleeves, so you don’t have to give him an MRI to understand that.

premiere: Beyond Rare - Blue

Where are you today? Are you in the clouds? Or is the sun waking you up from a fog. “I have no answer,” sings Tori Michelle over Colton Toy’s breathless melody. This video directed by Jazmin Garcia hits the perfect note in its creative design, and blossom’s its own storyline.

premiere: Marineros - Secretos

Loving this dirty, sexy, raw music video by director Alvaro Puentes.

premiere: Gregory Uhlmann - It’s Not Your Fault

Greg tells me “the lyrical content [of this song] is mostly me being nostalgic about Chicago (my hometown) and more specifically, walking along Lake Michigan in the winter with a significant other as a teenager. Also, it’s more generally about how often we blame ourselves and others for things we/they can’t help.”

It makes sense as he continues, that “musically the song was very much inspired by Jeff Tweedy’s songwriting and it seemed to make sense topically with all the imagery of Chicago (in my head at least).“ Certainly sounds like it.

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