The roots of the I Scream for Cleveland mixtape go back a couple years at least, back to when Twitter was still a somewhat valuable place for writers to be. My friend Maria Barrios, who received my fall 2023 tape, tweeted something about me screaming for Cleveland. I responded in the rhythm of the last few lines of one of my favorite poems, “I Explain A Few Things” by Pablo Neruda. It’s about the Spanish Civil War. He ends with three different phrasings of the same statement: “Come and see the blood in the streets.” I mimicked the same stressed and unstressed syllables he uses restating “I scream for Cleveland” just as many times.
Then, when I was working on Summer 2023//it’s a rainy day, sunshine girl, I got really confused and upset about whether or not the tape I worked on very intensively all spring was really “the one.” I thought I’d scrap it and make a new tape for Maria called I Scream for Cleveland. I worked on a couple drafts of it, but I kept feeling exhausted and uninspired. I ended up realizing I was trying to paper over the fundamental discomfort and uncertainty of the original tape, determining that it was indeed the one for that season. This year, our summer mixtape “cover” features an image of me holding in July of 2024 the picture I had made of me holding my Honey Hut ice cream sundae last summer before shelving the idea. It’s fitting, because this transmission is majorly about progress not being linear and learning how to leave things open.
View out of the privacy tent where I had to go to the bathroom while working in rich people’s gardens in the mid-to-late spring. I think you can see the trees breathing beyond the oppression. Factory ceiling blown right off.
Following a disappointing April spent thinking that being the leader of the Cleveland Renaissance hand-selected by the universe meant going to every show and pushing my introverted ass way beyond my limits (and largely finding that the shows happening here aren’t responsible, respectful, generous, necessary, or worth my time, energy, and financial resources), the universe just blew the whole ceiling off my life to reveal the real path.
On May 2nd, I got fired from the factory job that was making me miserable for the whole six months I worked there. It was an incredible feat that I lasted that long, which was actually a major victory for my ability to be a responsible adult. But by the end of my time there, I was at a constant boil. The whole week I had been at maximum frustration levels and was blasting the incredible tape Chuva by Secret Drum Band max vol on my headphones continuously at work, completely dissociating from my surroundings. Then on Thursday afternoon, I was let go. It was a total surprise, especially since I was running their whole shipping department and had just done all of the work of fulfilling their first absolutely massive push into the Publix chain of grocery stores almost entirely alone, while my bosses (who are a couple) were travelling shopping for destination wedding venues (again). (Their dumb friend who was my direct supervisor was left in charge while they were gone, during which time he let me know that I terrify him. I’ve never been more proud of myself, to be quite frank. He had his childhood best friend fire me when he got back from the most privileged kind of vacation you could possibly take.) It was totally surreal, because they had no idea what they were doing and I was probably their greatest asset. I told him I was really looking forward to watching them run the place into the ground and I absolutely have been enjoying that as it swiftly unravels while my life gets better and better every day, even though it’s all been enormously challenging and required extreme effort and dedication to get through.
I immediately got rehired at my old job and agreed to come in to work that night, no half day of work missed. I got home and told my neighbor I just got fired and had no idea what I was going to do, because I had already been wondering how I was going to pay my property taxes in July. I checked my email and I had a request to listen to the new album Jessica Ackerley had coming down the pike and see if I was interested in writing the bio for the release. I listened to All the Colours are Singing immediately, while meticulously cutting the grass along my backyard fence with a pair of pruners and wrote the label back to let them I would be honored to write about one of the best albums I have ever heard. I worked the shift I signed up for last minute at my old job and was there from six to midnight pulling heavy cases of alcohol and putting them on pallets the whole time with no break, which reminded me why I left: I am way too old to be doing work like this. Despite having a college degree, I’ve worked mostly manual labor jobs to survive the last decade living with complex PTSD, including three years as a stagehand, and I’m just really feeling the impact of all of that on my body in my late 30s. I told my supervisor there I wasn’t sure what would happen with my schedule since the whole thing just blew open, but I’d let him know my availability going forward. I got hired to work full time as an apprentice gardener the following day and never went back.
Around this time, my interest in Secret Drum Band had led me to some of their influences like the Creatures and Crash Worship. I decided we were only going to listen to really sick percussion bands this summer. This is really when the tape started to take shape: the “Mad-Eyed Screamer.” With a chance, I was in the trees now every day, driving out to the woods to garden in fancy east side suburbs I had never encountered before. Could be your preacher, could be your teacher, but I’ve chosen being an Empress and a “Mad-Eyed Screamer” for the Land. I realized two of my favorite drummers–Lisa Ann Schonberg and Mike Weis–both currently work at the interstices of percussion, field recordings of ecosystems, and electronics. So, I made them responsible for bringing me into the trees with their drums and birds and insects, called to the center of one’s heart and led into the opening of the future, the clearing, the “surface of the abyss” suggesting not only endless uncertainty, but a massive opening of possibilities. Dive in.
Assortment of alchemical objects sent to me by Christina Carter with the watercolor book combined tarot/astrology reading last fall/early winter. In Italian, “Fuoco” means both “fire” and “focus.” As a musical term, it commands one to do something with passion, intensity, and ardor. It also means hearth, a source of heat for cooking and a place where people gather around fire.
Enter Leo Goddess Kate Bush. I noticed that somehow my Kate Bush Youth Crew shirt featuring the cover of The Dreaming with “Kate Bush” in a classic youth crew font had sadly disappeared from my wardrobe and I decided to put it back in the rotation. Then, I noticed something much more disturbing: despite owning this shirt for many years, I had still never actually listened to The Dreaming. This shirt is important to me because I grew up in a straight edge hardcore scene, but I would listen to genius woman songwriters in total secrecy. I spent a lot of the month of May, in which this entire tape was composed, wrecking my body tilling the Earth and finally listening to The Dreaming.
SEE THE LIGHTS RAM THROUGH THE GAPS IN THE LAND
The track represents me starting to drive on the motorway every day to go to the woods and be fully present to nature all day, watching it come to life. Watching the sun rise over the land, watching possibilities open up. And now we’re in the dream time, which is really just a very deep engagement with reality…a time in which dreams are being realized. After my first day as an east side gardener, I drove all the way to Pittsburgh to see the Messthetics with James Brandon Lewis, and the “Fourth Wall” on my world felt totally blown open as the highway welcomed me to Pennsylvania that evening.
The fact that “The Dreaming” ends with an outro opening the way into “Night of the Swallow” on the original album is significant here as well: one of the many reasons it took me so long to write about this tape is the suicide of Cleveland underground legend, J. Guy Laughlin. I was very concerned about him for the last six weeks of his life, but we couldn’t figure out what to do. The day he died, having no idea yet that he was gone, I listened to “Night of the Swallow” over and over again all afternoon into evening at work. Bear in mind here that I composed this tape before any of this happened. “Fourth Wall” thus also symbolizes the way his suicide can and should be a cataclysmic event in the Cleveland underground–something which disrupts the whole scene, or which should. We’ll see if it does.
I finally made a friend who I can talk to about Dog Faced Hermans and Gang of Four at work at a job in Cleveland gardening, a mutual friend of J. Guy, which is how I even found out he was entering a mental health episode of some kind in early June. The day after this friend expressed concern about J. Guy’s well-being, I “rock[ed] the flowers” at work and rage quit in defense of the truth. I had gone home from work the previous day and spoken to J. Guy on the phone enough to confirm this friend’s concerns were definitely valid, but had no idea what to do, because he was being really paranoid. My gardening friend wasn’t at work the next day and since it ended up being my last, I didn’t see him again until J. Guy’s memorial. I was already listening to the finished summer tape the day he pointed my attention to the situation.
My friend Stephanie has been trying to get me into prog all summer. We would have gatherings at her mom’s house and make dinner and try to figure out what to do with our concern about J. Guy. We both had a lot of very demanding things going on and it made it hard to know what to do or be able to do anything. (At the memorial, we learned a lot of people tried to intervene and nothing was successful.) She played me the album Discipline by King Crimson and I was like, “hell yes, this is going on the tape.” Then she told me she wants to write an academic paper in favor of Yes, but she feels like she needs a “Real Head” to look over it and make sure she actually has a good, solid argument that is not just an expression of her own taste, and I told her it wouldn’t be me. 😉
“Discipline” opens a sequence about having to wake up and work your ass off every day in the hot ass global warming sun in order to survive. It’s followed by the four alarms I have had set as a sequence to wake up to this whole season of my life. It mimics my entering consciousness: every day, another early and intense grind. From Memorial Day until July 3rd, I worked every single day, leaving only to get my dog out of the city for the 4th of July (a catastrophic failure of an attempt.) Then I worked every day July 6th-August 1st. I was so busy and exhausted I still haven’t updated my radio show page or sent a newsletter out or attempted to write about this tape that has been finished since late spring. It’s a good sequence, though. Moves:
Dirt Merchants – “Cavernous Location of Low Activity” for easing into action from a state of deep, thoroughly exhausted rest
African Head Charge – “Orderliness, Godliness, Discipline, and Dignity” for continuing to move forward enthusiastically without knowing how things will work out or what will happen (trust and faith, also was working for Christian militant vegan schizo hippie boomer couple at the gardening job, so heavy religious vibes also make sense here)
Hot Snakes – “No Hands” to describe the way I am feeling less disabled by my trauma in Cleveland, learning how powerful I still am, especially now that I was reborn in the spring and get to have a second Cleveland childhood unadulterated by evil and be at home in my home, both the city of Cleveland, but also my Aries nature ❤
Bo and the Metros – “Buttered Out,” because if all else fails to get me out of bed, I’m gonna need a proper Cleveland funk to melt me out and into the endless toil of working every day outside in the hottest summer in Cleveland for 2,000 years
The song “Forward motion is never a straight line” had to be the cut from the new Jessica Ackerley on this one and it had to drop right in front of “Garbageman” by the Cramps–my music journalism theme song, and a song that signifies my emergence as a music writer. I had a vision in 2021 early on in my correspondence with Mariana Timony, who became my editor at Bandcamp shortly thereafter, in which I (from Northeast Ohio) would be Lux Interior and she (from California) would be Poison Ivy, and we would be beating it with a stick ’til it’s thick, and music journalism would improve because we were taking out the trash. The only problem is that Mariana Timony is the trash, so she’s not in the band anymore, and I no longer write for the indie capitalist online retail store owned by billionaire assholes and run by unapologetic scabs. And now, instead of the amazing writing about Cleveland music I was doing in my time there, they put out horrible garbage nonsense like this, and the indie capitalist wannabe celebrities running the scene here think it’s great, and EMD has to take to the “tapes” to scream for Cleveland. A brilliant trifecta ensues in defense of the Land!!! We feel the hammer coming down TWICE, the first time for energy and righteous anger, the second so we can hear all of the lyrics clearly and know exactly what the hammer coming down is. “With drunks, scumbags, a flight of doves…”
I spent a lot of this spring talking to anyone who would listen about how people in Cleveland have no idea how to relate to one another outside of shared patterns of substance abuse. How all the shows happen in bars and seem structured intentionally to keep people bored and anxious in a bar, so they stay longer and drink more. How all the people centrally involved are in toxic relationships with other people who all work in bars in various capacities. I started timing the breaks between sets. I stopped going because most of the sets were sloppy or boring or just totally uninspiring. I started finding it disrespectful, especially since I’m one of the greatest living culture writers, and having me at your show should be an honor. It’s insane to me as a college-educated disabled single woman working an entry level job doing manual labor at 37 that people feel entitled to my hard-earned money, so they can spend their lives getting wrecked and jamming with their friends. They offer nothing and charge us for it like it’s something, when I put everything I’ve got into these mixtapes, sometimes working on them very intensively for multiple moons, and pay for Google Drive space to make them available for free to anyone with the internet. It’s fundamentally ungenerous. It brings shame to Cleveland and it’s over. My work shifts fucking reality.
By this time, if you follow this project consistently, you’re probably familiar with my General Life Announcer, Miss Emma Louise Niblett–astrologer, cheerleader, player of guitars and drums, shouter of urgent messages…and a perpetual reminder that songs do not need to be complicated to be powerful. The image below is from the Uptown Top Ranking EP the song “Dare!” is from, but in the album art it says: “I absolutely adore him!” In the spring, Scout Niblett’s “Valvoline” communicated my insistence on my vision of love, and here my true love is revealed, the point all along: Cleveland. Fuck the total lack of imagination in this scene; it’s not worthy of our legacy. The city is handsome and huge to me. It could and should be good here. And it will be.
It had admittedly been too long since we heard from Th’ Faith Healers, but I do think it’s exactly the right time; I am only accepting disciplined energy at this time, in myself and others. Don’t distract me, don’t jones me. Soooomewhere…theeeere’s aaaa…..EMD becoming very, very powerful. Pod by the Breeders is an ultimate summer album for me, and “Fortunately Gone” captures a few things:
- The insistent optimism along the endlesss grind, the sense that something is very present and real despite not manifesting physically at this time.
- Along with Scout Niblett, the many, many recordings I love engineered by Steve Albini (RIP).
- The “soup of magpies,” eating an unknown future! I wait for you in Heaven, which we already established on spring 2023//this is the chariot!!!!! is CLEVELAND, on a PERFECT STRING OF LOVE…holding on until we can kick off the Cleveland Renaissance for real, at the absolute highest vibration…
Leaving my tape open followed from leaving my life open, trusting it would come together. Gardening taught me a lot about how much my mind wants to resolve things, comes back to them…how much time and energy I waste and how anxious I get thinking endlessly about things that do not need to be considered or resolved immediately. I made so many silly choices being stressed this summer and wanting to end the extended sense of everything being chaotic and unresolved, wanting to force a definite future. I found my new job at exactly the right time, within 24 hours of deciding I just had to have faith. And it’s the correct job; it’s perfect for me. It’s the total opposite of the granola butter factory in every way. Beyond that, it’s also evidence that I am healing, because for a long time I couldn’t handle customer-facing jobs, and now I’m doing it all day, every day. Except not really, because I’m back to getting days off sometimes!
I no longer believe that the meaning of my tapes is entirely conscious, as I discover so much listening back to old ones that I didn’t intend. A lot is revealed later. The work is both conscious and unconscious, but I do feel like I’ve gotten a lot better at working with magic. So much of the meaning of this tape was revealed through the whole summer which immediately followed from the moment I completed it. Life became so intense and required such a constant, demanding presence and focus…it became clear I had to wait for the work to unfold. Weeks feel like centuries now, but we have command of all seasons and have developed the strength of lions. We both have jobs we really like and things are stabilizing nicely, despite this Mercury retrograde being such a seriously heavy hitter. It’s drawing our attention to all the correct things it needs to be drawn to. And that’s what it’s for.
All because we let the weirdness in…
TELL ME WHAT YOU’RE LETTING IN! Leo Goddess, Kate Bush, presides over this season of our lives and is wildly proud of us. In like a lion, out like a lion. Everything must be necessary, as powerful as it can possibly be. Why do anything less?
That outro in “Leave It Open” is a perfect frame for the nonconsensual field recording I took of one of my gardening bosses, who is a Dead Head, telling the story of the time he made Jerry Garcia smile while we were gardening early on in May, during my first week. Letting the weirdness in is relevant to my gardening bosses, because they kept letting a little more crazy out every day I worked with them, and I really wanted to stick it out through November and not have to find a new job so soon, but it became wildly untenable as more days passed. “That was true, it wasn’t just a dream…” It sure feels like one in retrospect, so I’m glad I had this impulse to record it. Evidence.
Secret Drum Band also return for an outro track, “Terra Firme,” literally meaning firm land or solid ground. The Land standing firm, yes. Holding its ground. Having discipline. Not being full of shit. Every bell rung is a final touch of magic on the spell that saves Cleveland.
And then to close it out, I’m finally able to play you all “Screaming Moon/Someone Like Me,” the epic (and “a little self-indulgent,” according to my brother) closer of the latest release from Noah Depew under his Burning Plastic Blues Band moniker. Noah released this one last December, and I had been trying to get a tape since then, but he never had one when I asked about it. He kept saying he would bring one to the next show and he never did. Then, I believe sometime in the mid-to-late spring, after I had gotten frustrated and quit going to shows, he came by and dropped one in my mailbox while I was in the basement working on my first collaborative radio show with CLE Magazine’s Jim Ellis and discovering that something was going on with my cats that I only just now that the cycle has completed started to have the time to really notice and attend to. I distinctly remember asking Noah when it had just been released, “what if one of the songs needs to be on my winter mixtape?” Suffice it to say, it’s beyond clear to me now that it arrived exactly when it was supposed to.
The part where Noah switches to playing chords reminded me of “Dream Baby Dream” by Suicide and I had been toying with having the cover of it by Black Tambourine close some retrograde tapes for years, but it was never correct. Usually they were romantically-focused tapes about misguided romances and it feels perfect to end I Scream for Cleveland expressing my devotion to Cleveland and wrenching dreams into realities exclusively. And my insistence on not accepting any less than what I deserve and what the city of Cleveland deserves.
It’s also significant that at the end of composing this tape, I captured this image of this baby deer in the yard across the street from my house. During the most traumatic part of my life, my family lived in Westlake, on the border with North Olmsted, and we had an acre of woods that went right into the Bradley Woods Reservation. There were always lots of woodland creatures in our yard every day. It was at this time in my life that I started having powerful dreams about deer which have continued throughout my life, even when I didn’t live here anymore. They have evolved over time, as my life has unfolded, and specifically along the course of my trauma recovery. They bring me important messages to attend to. It was fitting then, that the grand finale to a tape about screaming and dreaming was learning that my neighbor saw this baby deer get birthed in my yard. Apparently, its parents thought my house was the safest place to have their child. And could there be a more beautiful image to attach to this era of rebirth in Cleveland? I may just find one along the path to fall 2024, but you won’t know about it until Sagittarius season…
This mixtape is dedicated to the spirit and the memory of J. Guy Laughlin–also a Leo!
Leaving it open with insistent faith forever,
EMD
© 2024 COME AWAY WITH EMD
COME AWAY WITH EMD 