diskmess

[diskmess]

I'm having a very swell time. LOVE to All who have read any amount of the words posted here. Consider pulling a joyful little compact disk off your shelf and giving it a spin.

The local Used Books + Stuff shop had a buy two get two special on CDs and tapes and DVDs. I got 4 cool disks. Over the past couple of weeks I've gotten a whole bunch of other ones from a whole bunch of different places.

I drove about 40 minutes north to a record store in an absolute nowhere town. I passed a car engulfed in flames on the highway. Traffic was slow. It got hot as I got closer to the car. I thought for sure it was going to blow up and I was about to die. I LIVED and got 3 cool CDs.

I played a smallish, semi-secret festival held once a year by a band that has a cultish following, known and loved by people who know and love strange bands. HELL: Kurt Cobain, known for being famous and loving strange bands, loved this band. People say he died wearing one of their T-shirts. I'm not making that up. I hope I'm not making that up.

For the sake of having Band Goods at the festival, I made a bunch of homemade CDs. They have all found homes.

THE SET ITSELF went great. I had fun. I met a whole bunch of very beautiful people and a whole bunch of very great bands played after us. The last band played a moonlit poolside set and my soul traveled someplace more elsewhere and different than Here.

After the festival I had to go two days without any solid food so that doctors could put a camera inside me. The festival sang "Happy Colonoscopy" to the tune of Happy Birthday. I wish I had a video of it. That moment will likely bubble to the surface of my memory every time I am in a hospital for the rest of my life.

RIGHT NOW I am ripping a whole bunch of CDs to my hard drive. I've been painstakingly adding tags and album art to the albums I bought from the bands I played with at the festival. My stomach is doing horrible things. There might be Love everywhere. Finding joyful objects might be easier than it's ever been. Of all the times to be alive, I'm sure that this is One of Them.

No — I know that this is one of them.

[diskmess]

Brainbloodvolume

(CONTENT WARNING for animal death)

THE (RE)DISCOVERY

I’m only twenty-eight years old, and I’m going gray. I think it’s because I spend roughly fourteen hours every day being worried. It’s certainly not for a lack of trying to manage the worry. I’m constantly scolding myself, trying to center my attention on something life-giving instead. This, of course, gives birth to new worries: I worry that I will become the worry. It usually becomes me. 

If stuck is what you say Well, that is what you've made

In eighth grade, when I was about thirteen years old, I listened to Brainbloodvolume in its entirety at least once a week. It was the last album I needed to collect from Ned’s Atomic Dustbin, my favorite band at the time. They were a watershed influence for me as a young bass player.

I initially discovered them in my late uncle’s CD collection. He was about as old as I am now when he died. My dad ended up with his CDs in a tray. I’d occasionally pull out some dusty piece and give it a spin. I once happened to spin The Neds' debut album, God Fodder, and the opening track floored me. I played it back several times. I brought it in to my guitar teacher because I needed to know what made the guitar sound so springy. He told me that a guitar wasn’t making that sound, it was a bass. I checked the liner notes: there were, in fact, two bassists. The trajectory of my life as an occasional bass player was changed forever. 

I eventually collected all of their albums on CD. I have no doubt that I was their biggest fan in the entire United States. I also doubt that anyone else within a two-hundred mile radius of me was listening to them in 2008. The people who know them are usually some flavor of British and deep in their fifties by now. They might be about as gray as I’m going to be in my thirties.

As I brushed my teeth one morning, staring at my gray hairs in the mirror, songs from Brainbloodvolume kept popping into my head. I decided to listen to it on my way to work.

I wondered if anyone had uploaded the album to YouTube. When I searched for it, I was shocked: I did. I uploaded it fourteen years ago, in dog-ass quality. I couldn’t believe it was still there. I forgot I ever uploaded it.

I played my old dog-ass CD rip, filtered through Windows Movie Maker, through YouTube circa 2009, and again through NewPipe in 2024, atrociously artifacting its way through my car speakers and into my ears. I drove.

I saw a bird fall over on the other side of the road. It flapped its wings pathetically against the pavement, spinning in circles. I knew it was going to die. A car was going to hit it. I pulled into a nearby parking lot so I could turn around. I had hoped I could scoop the bird off the road before it got run over.

A man sitting on a bench in the lot started throwing up without even a hint of shame. He simply opened his mouth and let it flow out. When he finished, he crossed his arms, closed his eyes and returned to listening to music on his Beats by Dr. Dre. By the time I turned around, three cars had passed in the direction of the bird.

I pulled out of the parking lot and saw roadkill in my rear-view. I went to work.

THE EXPLORATION

See what you find digging in the dirt —

Any exploration is really just an exploration of the past. I will not attempt to prove this. I will barely elaborate. Hell, I’m just going to be honest: I don’t think I believe this, even a little bit. I am fresh off listening to this album for (God only knows) the 357th time in my entire life, maybe the 20th time in my adult life. That, back there, is the sentence that fell out of me the second my hands touched the keyboard.

I am going to pretend it’s true, just for the next little while. I’d like to invite you to do the same. You can say no.

Any exploration is really just an exploration of the past:

I drag my feet through the mystery muck that the Me of yesterday left behind. It’s a rotten legacy. Only the Present Me knows what I really need. Past Me has to burden himself with procuring those things. He has to go out through all the muck and break his legs looking for something good, and he probably won’t find it, and he’ll probably have to turn around and walk all the way back, and by then he'll have his hands full of new muck. It’s a rotten legacy, but I can’t be upset.

Let’s explore.

I am about thirteen years old. I am approximately four hours into a nine-hour bus ride to Boston for a school outbound trip. I grab my portable CD player. I flip through an enormous stack of jewel cases in my backpack and pop in Brainbloodvolume. This is my first time hearing the album in its entirety. I saved it just for this trip — my favorite band’s final album. The opening track contains a soft, quiet opening that was not present in the music video for the song. I’m floored. Of course I’m floored.

There is a sudden jump in volume as soon as the real song begins. I don’t see it coming. I jolt upright and scramble for the volume, my face burning red in embarrassment. I see a chaperone motion for me to turn it down. It was audible outside of my headphones.

I spend the next forty minutes or so in deep concentration. I stare at the ceiling because I do not want to look at my neighbor. I do not close my eyes because I do not want to look like I am asleep. I do not close my eyes because I want to look like I am listening to music, and that is what’s special about me. I do not close my eyes because I know that everyone is looking at me and deciding whether or not I am worth anything at all, and I know that I will accept their decision no matter what, so I look awake, and I look awake because I am enjoying my different, secret little music more differently and secretly than everyone else, and I play the bass and I write songs and one day I will be a little famous but not too famous because I don’t want to be “mainstream” or “sell out,” and when I look awake while listening to my different and secret music, You, You who is looking at me right now, will be able to tell that I love music very much and that it’s my destiny to make music, and God will know it, and it’ll be okay when I go off losing my homework and daydreaming during class and screwing up at home and doing a terrible job at the family business, because You saw me then and understood that I’m Just Not Built For This Stuff, but I have music, and one day I’ll be past This Stuff and beaming my great terrible beacon right in the eyes of everyone else who’s Just Not Built For This Stuff, and they’ll know that they can get through it because I got through it.

A bump in the road causes my CD to skip at the climax of the last track. After the album ends, I turn to a teacher who I think is maybe one of the “cool ones.” I remark mildly on the frustration of my CD skipping. I want someone to ask what I was listening to. I want to be seen. I anticipate the teacher’s response.

“Ah. Bummer.”

He turns away. Years later he gets fired for being a pedophile.

Years later I know some things differently. I am going gray. I do not care if I am seen or not. I grow no fruit from any wisdom, and I do not imagine handing it down to some younger and gone version of me.

It’ll be okay.

One day I will see Me in the corner of my rear-view mirror, shrinking away as I get to work, and I'll understand that I’m Just Not Built For This Stuff, but it’ll be okay because I have

[diskmess]

The Breeders - Pod

I’m going to have to be honest about some pieces of myself that are not endearing. This is going to take some time. A long time. I know you can’t wait forever. None of us can. For now, let’s start with two recent occurrences:

I forgot a close friend’s birthday. I have crunched some numbers and determined that there are approximately three hundred and twenty-one adequate excuses I could give you, but they do not interest you now, and they will not interest you tomorrow or in two weeks, and one hundred moons after my last bone becomes indistinguishable from the planet’s crust you will no longer have the faculties to care. I forgot. That’s it.

When I heard of Steve Albini’s sudden passing, I immediately looked up his discography. I pointed at all the albums I knew and failed to take note of the ones I didn’t. Pictured below is one of the albums I pointed at. 

THE DISCOVERY:

I’d been seeing the same vinyl of The Breeders’ debut album at one of my local record stores for three consecutive weeks. I’d appreciate its largeness and jaw-flooring low price for about as many seconds as it cost dollars. Then, I would say something terrible:

“Next time, if it’s still here.”

When I forgot my friend’s birthday, I realized I needed to buy that record. I knew she didn’t have it. I even had a dream about giving it to her: bowing myself in half, head down in deep apology, I presented the record like cartoon butlers present fine cuisine. Surely, it was a prophetic dream. I rushed out there one bleak Monday before work. I got there an hour before they opened. I needed to kill time. I puttered my dying car over to the nearby Wal-Mart, which ended up taking half an hour due to a malfunctioning traffic light. I listened to The Breeders’ Pod while inching forward every thirty seconds or so. 

I escaped Car Jail and looked at bad DVD covers for about twenty minutes. I had my legs carry me back to the parking lot, shuffling my mass underneath the uneven rays of an indecisive sun. It rained. The sun beamed. It rained. The man parked in front of me stared me down as I killed time by filling it with my phone. I tried not to see him.

When I arrived at the record store, the record was gone. 

THE EXPLORATION:

(and that’s hot — )

Most of my days are spent roasting in boxes. I drive dangerously close to half-asleep in a large red oven. My ass plasters itself to the seat. Fans blast barely conditioned air into my twitching eyelids. When I roll down the windows, I can almost stop myself from becoming a sweat factory. When I roll down the windows I make myself vulnerable to 100,000 small imaginary knives, pointing in at me from all the Out There’s commotion. I turn up the radio so I can hear it over the air whooshing. The radio announcer speaks: 

Yesterday, at age sixty-one, we lost Steve Albini. A new Shellac record is set to release in just over a week — he was not planning to die.

I get something down on my chest. 

They play three songs he produced and I’m staring out at the parking lot. Time, which never stops moving, is something we are tasked with filling. Once it is filled, it passes. I have never witnessed something so harrowing as a totally empty hour, thank God, but I know I’ve gotten close. Some days I am dragged along an energetic river full of places and memories. Without even a single thought I am washed over many would-be destinations whose towering landmarks turn to fractions of particles of dust. Other days, I direct its flow:  

“still rolling in the stones run to the log that's rotten and — “

Someday, on a day like any other day, that’ll be it. I will be filling time by making plans to fill some other time with some kind of Goodness. I won’t be thinking about it. And that’ll be it — where I lay, everything I ever gave the gift of motion will be hung upon the world. When it hangs, anyone can choose to bear it. I always choose to bear it on those days where I direct the river’s flow, and I always wake up screaming when the bumps of some beautiful place disturb my lifelong car nap. I catch it blurry in the rearview and start pounding the windows. Oh! Oh God turn around, what was that, what happened, why didn’t you tell me, how could I have been sleeping, where are we going,

And that’s it. Next time, pour water on me ‘til I live again: I promise I won’t forget. Slash my tires if I forget. Make me stay right Here. Make me sponge up every piece of every place I’ve ever passed and make me give it back to the world while the river still drags me along. Let me use its flow to carry these pieces to elsewhere and some other time. Don’t let me be dragged along until That’s It. Don’t let me drop everything there.

[diskmess]

Pere Ubu — Apocalypse Now

THE DISCOVERY:

Rain never stops, except for when it does. 

In a desperate attempt to simply Get Out Of The House, I had decided to hit up two thrift stores, a vintage store and a record store with my younger sibling. The most interesting disks at the thrift stores were children’s edutainment and oil-stained Newsboys albums.

No: I didn’t get any of them. However, fortune found me kinder at the swankishly trendy vintage shop. We had taken several wrong turns and unfamiliar roads to make it there. 

Parking was a grim nightmare. Cars were slotted sloppyways into every single spot. We circled the building at a salted snail’s pace and slowed to a stop in deep horror as we noticed someone Else pulling into the lot. My car sat in a troublesome spot as I waited for someone to leave. The sky continued to mist my windshield. I thought about turning around and going home. I thought of giving up. I winced.

After a protracted period of wondering, waiting and wandering, the Holy Glow of someone’s bumper lights caught the corner of my third eye, shaking my soul awake. My only chance. The car pulled no more than two yards out. I swooped in. 

Many trinkets, pins and baubles greeted me as a warm bath to my swamp-marched soul. I spotted an unorganized stack of Compact Disks laying off in the corner, almost as if they were mere decoration. It was here that I made Today’s Discovery. 

My knowledge of this band runs rather shallow, but I can tell you these things: I love odd singers, and “Caligari’s Mirror” is on my Halloween playlist every year. I snatched it up alongside another joyous discovery, which I will talk about later and some other day. 

THE EXPLORATION:

I will have to apologize. I had initially envisioned these “explorations” as me laying in total solitude, doing nothing but listening to the music. I am already breaking that rule. It has been damp and gray outside for weeks, even though it’s only been a few days. Time itself has grown taller than talehood; it becomes a concept so far beyond belief that some hands trapped within me reach for a phone that can only speed-dial Jonathan Frakes. My soul grows hungry for movement. 

I surmise from the album’s 1991 release date and familiarish tracklist that this is probably a live album. I figure I might as well pop it in while partaking in the lively-enough act of Driving Around Town and running mild errands. The sun shines for the first time in a long time; although every other mile is marked by the looming of asphalt clouds. They force my mind to produce words like “impermanence” and “transience.” The disk spins.

From “My Theory of Spontaneous Simultude”

“I feel so confident about this theory that I’ll turn it over to the audience.  ‘I am like —’ and you gotta say the first thing that comes to your mind  and It’s gotta be clean, and it’s gotta be spontaneous  and I guarantee you that it’ll make sense, are you ready? I AM LIKE —”

I am like a damp city road. 

The disk is lively. It delights me. I take an hour-long pause at the library, tap digital flashcards and read a lovely short story. Clouds continue their sour looming upon my exit. The weather promises to remain as sticky pavement. There are weights in my chest at all times and a house made of problems waiting for me when the day is done. I can’t be bothered. Rather, I make a firm decision to remain unbothered. I return to my car and start it up. The disk spins.

[diskmess]

ABOUT THESE EXPLORATIONS

(This is already posted on the 'about' page, but no one's gonna see that so I'm making it a normal post as well)

I listened to music differently in middle school. My relationship with music was different.

For an amount of reasons, LimeWiring songs had become a sort of non-possibility. This left me at the mercy of whatever I could find on YouTube (circa 2008) and whatever CDs I could get my grubby, nasty little hands on. Single pieces of music meant a lot more to me. Just one entire album of songs would suffice for at least a month’s entertainment. 

In the eighth grade I remember getting a teenage-sized lecture on monthly budgeting. As a basic exercise, we were individually given a monthly budget and several necessities we had to spend that money on. Each necessity had tiers from least to most expensive. For entertainment expenses, the cheapest option was one $10 CD every month. After that, the options got significantly more expensive. Of course, I chose the humble Compact Disk.

The teacher chuckled. “Really? Just one CD a month? No movies or anything?” 

Really. 

Some guy my mom was seeing at the time gave us a portable CD player. I used it almost every night alongside some cheap sound-canceling cans that were originally a gift for my dad, but he never used them. I’d blast the air conditioning, flip on the noise cancellation, push the “2x Bass” button on the CD player and just lay in bed with my eyes closed, listening as the disk spun.  

Which brings me to Now:

I recently threw my Spotify subscription in the Kill Pile. I have been discovering (and rediscovering) other ways to Love music. The first of these discoveries (and rediscoveries) was The Joy of Catching the Radio. Maybe someday I will write about The Joy of Catching the Radio. I will not write about it now.

The second of these discoveries (and rediscoveries) was The Joy of the Compact Disk. 

I like writing it with a K. It feels tougher and chunkier. Maybe calling a smooth, glossy little disk “tough” and “chunky” sounds incorrect. Maybe writing it this way comes across as teaboo posturing. That’s fine. I understand that CDs were once the sleeker and sexier Music Circle, killing vinyl dead. 

Why buy a big, fat, clumsy, skippy-crackly record when you could buy this ultra-convenient little disk that you can even play in your car? 

Some years pass, and it changes: 

Why buy an easily scratch n’ scritchable rotting disc when you could just stream it? 

And the tables turn: 

Why even buy a CD when you could buy a huge record that loudly displays your Deep Love for the music in all of its crackly, analog charm?

The Compact Disk is no longer sleek and sexy. These things hog up valuable real-estate in record stores. One of my local record stores even has a ‘buy three, get one free’ deal for CDs. They line the walls of that store, becoming one with the border that separates the Out There from the In Here. They sit in cardboard trays underneath the neat rows of vinyl and assimilate into the furniture’s sturdy legs.

HENCE:

I insist on using the equally correct, chunkier spelling of the word ‘disc.’ These things, in their pointy-cornered little plastic cases, are proper disks. 

Last month, newly free from the SHACKLES of Spotify, I popped into a record store on a whim. Underneath the shelves of vinyl records, there were boxes full of CDs. I got down on my hands and knees and carefully dug around each and every box, my fingers getting dust-crusted in the process. These things were dirt cheap. I bought about five of ‘em for a piddling fifteen American dollars. I bought some albums I know and Love, some albums I kinda know, and some stuff I’d never heard of in my life. 

The Joy of the Compact Disk turned my blood into gasoline fire. My heart exploded into larger versions of itself.

Finding music this way elicits a sense of exploration and discovery that I never got from just browsing related artists on Spotify. It’s impossible to describe. Even so, I’d like to try, if I can, to share a small morsel of the fruits of these explorations with Whoever Feels Like Reading All This.

Here is the CD player I will be using. It’s actually very similar to the one I had in middle school, although it lacked the swanky Walkman branding. It even has a bass boosting button, cutely labeled “SOUND.” This thing delights me. Beyond the joyful color and wonderfully bubblous design, it also reminds me of a Walkman MP3 player I used to hog from my older brother. I think I hogged it so much that it eventually became mine. I also happen to be borrowing this particular device from my younger sibling. It feels like the most appropriate machine to use on my voyage of music discovery (and rediscovery).

With all that said, I’d like to have these Online Postings be brief, for the most part. I’d like to share the experience of my DISCOVERY, followed by a description of my own EXPLORATION of the disk’s contents. As always and forever: you can read it or don’t. I dare not hang such annoyances upon anyone who doesn’t Want to be annoyed. There is no expectation. I only want to extend an invitation.

I intend to listen to these disks while laying in bed, distraction-free. I intend to become a vessel. I will go wherever I am led. Whatever I find upon arrival, I will describe to the best of my ability.

Thank you.

(I posted the first of these Reports a short while ago. You can read it here if you'd like — and only if you'd like.)

[diskmess]

Temple of the Dog — Temple of the Dog

THE DISCOVERY

Back In The Day:

When I got home from school, I’d sit at the computer with the speakers as close to my ears as I could get them and listen to music on YouTube. I’d look up whatever music video I felt like staring at, and I’d sit with my face pressed to the screen. Then I’d click around all the related videos. 

I had exploded many post-school afternoons in this way. It was like daydreaming. In those days I dreamed loftily — Music sounded huge. It was something bigger than me, and as far as I was concerned I was no more than no one in particular. I was deeply into grunge and 90’s alternative. I thought that being deeply into grunge and 90’s alternative made me Different and Smart. Despite the fact that I hated myself, despite understanding that I was no more than no one in particular, I also held superiority complexes about the weirdest little things.

No: I had no Good friends.

Even so, music was more to me than just something to feel smart about. These evening explorations of 2008 YouTube led to many great revelations. I grew with the music. I learned.

Naturally I found Temple of the Dog just a few throws of stone away from Soundgarden. It felt like a mind-blowing discovery at the time. 

You’re tellin’ me Soundgarden Guy and Pearl Jam Guy made an album together?  (...) 😱BEFORE Pearl Jam??😱

I was obsessed with this album. I never listened to it in its entirety. I never found the CD at any store my parents took me to and I never asked my mom to buy it for me. The only song I’d heard from it was “Hunger Strike.”

The album changed me. I was moved by the mere fact of its existence. It was an insane discovery — finding that people who made music you Loved could go and make different music you Loved with different people who also happened to have made other music that you also Loved. 

I finally found and bought the CD about fifteen years later, on Record Store Day of 2024. I found it alongside Mad Season’s only album. Finding them together felt like a small miracle. Sometimes things just happen. Sometimes they happen in pleasing ways.

THE EXPLORATION

The day is wet gravel. I have been asked not to run my AC so much. I have complied. My back sticks to the bed, and the back of my hand sticks to my forehead. Everything is stuck. No amount of loud box fan air can delete the near-drinkable humidity. Maybe no amount of anything can fix anything else. I have been splayed out on this bed for seven eternities, thirteen lifetimes, twenty-eight years and five months. I begin to wonder what causes movement in the first place. I do this in no scientific fashion. 

From the album insert:

“Emotion. Very pleasing. Real music.  No analyzing. No pressure. No hype. Just music to make music.”

My eyes can’t decide on whether they want to be open or closed. When they decide to be open, my hand moves over to the CD case and flaps the insert around. My eyes fall on its words and make a habit of reading and re-reading them, sticking them briefly to my memory. Everything is stuck. 

But there is a feeling of movement. 

I recall hours of evenings spent blasting music from computer speakers, my legs stomping around to grunge hits like an idiot. Those legs may have moved on their own. 

My eyes decide to open again. They fall upwards to the ceiling — the same ceiling they have been falling up to for almost all of the twenty-eight slow years I have been crawling to life. My legs push my Self upwards and stand me in front of a box fan’s choppy breeze. My neck allows itself to grow limp. To roll back. To release. 

Nobody is gonna make it end, and if it don’t begin (...) 

The disk stops, but there is a feeling of movement. Sometimes things just happen.