It’s pretty wild to be entering year five of the Seasonal Mixtape Series with Winter 2025//page of swords. This series began in the waning crescent of the previous Trump administration, and in many ways, this mixtape harkens back to it in the swiftly waxing fascism of the current one. This tape was composed between late November 2024 and mid-January 2025, however, before these realities came into such brutal being and rather loomed as horrific potentialities.
While packing up my things from the basement to clear it for a new room mate in November, I discovered one last sixty minute high bias cassette that was not from the last huge batch I bought that were all cursed and led me to abandon physical media with my own creative projects. I had told Hugh McElroy from Black Eyes when I made him a Mercury Retrograde Sanity Mixtape Series tape in fall 2023 that I had a great idea for a special tape that I wanted to make him that I thought he would really appreciate: a tape of “sacred songs” encompassing all sorts of cultures and religions and sounds. I just didn’t have the time or energy to attend to it at that time. I decided that was what I wanted to do with the last high bias tape that wasn’t cursed; it would be the last physical tape I ever made.
The first opening four songs came to me pretty quickly and I recorded them onto the last tape, but I got stuck there for quite a while. I had yet another extremely unpleasant and deeply concerning room mate move in for a couple months and all of the energy in my life became stuck until I got him out of my house in mid-January. I came home from work an hour and a half early this one Friday when I was alerted by a neighbor and my Ring cams he was there after he had moved all of his things out and was just trying to catch me having locked him out or doing something else illegal, so he could try to sue me, and was refusing to communicate if and when he might show up after bringing the cops to my house two times in one night the previous week. When I entered, he was in the shower and had made a mess of the room I had cleaned and prepared to show to other tenants. I didn’t know what would happen or what to do, so I just took my dog for a walk and decided to behave as normally as possible. When I came back in, he had left the shower and was in the room he had been renting, listening to an annoying podcast really loud. I turned the opening sequence of this mixtape on loud enough to make the house shake on its foundation to cover up the undesired sounds and began to do the dishes. Within a minute or two, he came into the dining room and kitchen with his cell phone pointing at me (like to record anything I might do towards him) and left his key on the dining room table and walked out, making the most comically evil laugh as he walked away and texting me to forward his mail to an apartment complex owned by his parents in Florida. I told him he was an adult and could forward his own mail. Freedom! (It was a very dramatic soundtrack to him running back home to his parents, but I was thinking about Odetta’s absolutely menacing spiritual as an assurance that evil will be disrupted more generally following the 2024 election, for sure.)
The view from acupuncture before they ended Saturday community acupuncture again. ;(
After that, the stuck energy in my life immediately began to flow marvelously and the rest of this tape just came to me one track after the other, every song I considered was powerfully and obviously the next song. Some of the songs I had been considering for a while: what Mike Weis track from In Low Light (Music for the Winter Solstice) to highlight? (There’s been one on every winter mixtape in this series and I only have three remaining options! There’s no rules against using songs more than once, though. The sonic quilt of my life can have many different patches cut from the same cloth. I return to songs again and again for sustenance and guidance along the road.) I had to listen to the Mike Weis tape and the Moondog album Elpmas a lot to figure out what songs from each would be correct; I studied that for a long time. Both of those albums are perfect winter albums to me. The John Lee Hooker song “Onions” got me over the hump of the new year and I decided that was the jam I wanted to sled into 2025 on. It became the transition to the rest of the tape, to the energy flowing in my life again. I feel that it speaks to my desire only for what is utilitarian, necessary, versatile, nourishing, soulful, and powerful (can make you cry!).
While I was stuck in this really tense and stressful home situation, though, I was coming to realize in my study of Aikido that I hold enormous amounts of stress and tension in all of my joints and muscles at all times. The tension in my house, which exacerbates my complex PTSD (most likely the main source of my struggle to ever truly relax), was making me really resistant on the mat and resulting in me getting hurt. One of my senseis noticed that I unconsciously lock my knees all of the time, which is the main way Aikido has been hurting me. I discovered this is most likely how I fainted on the very edge of the balcony of the 9:30 Club back in September at the Kicking Giant show–fortunately, I fell backwards instead of forwards, or I may not have lived to make this incredible next mixtape or understand the source of my fainting episode! (If you stand in the same position with locked knees for too long, you can faint, because it impedes your blood circulation.) The same sensei was there alone with me for the better part of an hour one night in January, so he did all of the Aikido stretches really slow and explained to me exactly how and why we do them (finally!!!) and I figured out that a lot of them are designed to remove tension in your body, because Aikido is centered on active relaxation with a partner, which it turns out is really hard for me.
I read this book by Wendy Palmer sensei called The Practice of Freedom: Aikido Principles as a Spiritual Guide and it made me think more about how aikido is about freedom and improvisation (ultimately). There’s this one exercise we do most of the time called “shake the tree” which is supposed to release tension in the body and when we do it in class, I started to hear the voices in Yusef Lateef’s “Juba Juba” singing *bum-bummm-bummm* “freedommmm!” Shake your chains. (These words also happen to be the title of the opening track from Tripod Jimmie’s Unclaimed Freight, one of my very current favorite albums.)
The title of this mixtape comes from the first in a series of swords cards that appeared in my 2025 tarot reading (also pictured above in the background) covering the period of my trial membership at the dojo, which I am referring to as “The Sword Cycle.” The series is Page of Swords, Two of Swords, Ace of Swords. There’s also a Ten of Swords later on and a Seven of Swords at work defining the year. All the swords came out for Aikido.
On a related note, I have not had any alcohol in ninety-three days. This is relevant, because it’s making me realize that I feel like I never learned how to relax outside of using substances to get that effect. I still do small doses of weed edibles daily for help managing my PTSD symptoms, but I try to avoid being high at the dojo, which has forced me to consider things I can do to relax that don’t make me high or make it harder than it already seems to be for me to focus. I was conceptualizing the other night that the hard dancing for many hours, many times a week, Chicago era of my mid-to-late twenties was my first attempt to relax in a social setting; it really helped me release tension that was stuck inside of me and blocking the flow of my life energy. But it was pretty much always accomplished with the aid of substances and it was a very solitary, unregulated thing that existed only between me and the music and anyone who tried to get between us often encountered a lot of aggression.
The next phase of my healing is to learn how to be relaxed in a social setting as a mostly sober person and doing partnered activities that have a lot of forms and rules to remember, which in and of itself makes me very tense, worried that I will do something wrong and really seriously injure myself or someone else. Once you know the kata and can remember all the things you are supposed to be doing simultaneously, Aikido is free and improvisational; at a high level, it looks more like really beautiful partnered improvisational dance than it does combat. For these reasons, I believe that Aikido is very important to my healing and self-actualization. If I can get through and beyond all of the aspects of it that are extremely hard for me, there is reason to believe that I will be very good at it and it will be very powerful medicine for me. It already has been. But it really does require me to move beyond all of my fear. That’s what the Ten of Swords card is supposed to represent later in the year: the end of fear.
I knew the physical tape I was working on for Hugh was not correct, because I ran out of tape while recording Arthur Russell’s “Make 1, 2 (Gem Spa Dub),” and I was like “oh hell no, that is definitely the next track.” It really confirmed the magic was never in the actual physical tapes; we are truly beyond physical media now and so much better for it. I figured out the next move when my friend, Stephanie, came over and asked if we could listen to the Chemical Brothers. I played her my favorite song by them, “Hoops,” and it brought me back to an all-time New Year’s sequence which originally appeared on the first seasonal mixtape in winter 2021. All of my seasonal mixtapes will be wildly self-referential this year in celebration of our 5th year doing whatever this is together. So, there are a few references to the winter of the birth of this project:
- The Mike Weis and Moondog album selections
- The Chemical Brothers into DJ Spooky edit of Swirlies sequence
- The A.R. Kane and Lyman Woodard Organization selections were introduced to me in the composition of my musical haiku essay on snow and consciousness from that season
The rest of it just kind of flowed out, where every song that came to me was exactly correct. We take the smooth and relaxing “Joy Road” and what do we see? The truth of the fear we have been living in since we were children.
Since last spring, I have been following this line of thought in my mixtapes that my traumatic upbringing wounded my Aries nature, which is to be a child, to be a beginner, and to possess the unthinking bravery of someone who doesn’t have the life experience required to have anxiety about the outcome. The initiator. And what I have noticed is that I constantly put off what I need and want to do and believe that other circumstances or people are necessary to make things happen. “I’ve been waiting for tomorrow all my life.” And I think in a major way this stems from a fear of criticism, which follows from my formative abuse. I developed an “expert” personality, which helped shield me from ever being less informed or having less power in an intellectual situation, but I didn’t do it by becoming good at everything: I did it by focusing only on the things that came naturally to me and ignoring and dismissing everything else. Studying Aikido is like going back to my childhood: I have to learn the most basic things about breathing and posture and how to hold yourself upright properly, because growing up poor, I never got the music, dance, and martial arts lessons where these basic life skills are taught. And being a novice is so painful to me! I’m extremely hard on myself.
But the Page of Swords says “just do it!” Everything has cleared away for me to return to my original power and my original nature and lead the way.
“Brendan #1” is just the sound of staunchly committed, exuberant initiation, I think.
“Black Beach” was honestly not familiar to me at all before I made this mixtape. Happening upon that album and that track was really a touch of magic at the end. I thought maybe it would be followed by a Spike in Vain or Minutemen song that would flow nicely in these sonic waters, but it became clear quickly this 10+ minute Tripod Jimmie wintry epic was the most powerful energy to ride out on.
And then, unbeknownst to me, I discovered this mix also has a textual component. I came upon a poem by Cleveland Poet Laureate d.a. levy I had never encountered before, which quickly became my favorite poem I have ever read. Please enjoy this mixtape along with consideration of this section from “Tombstone as a Lonely Charm (Part 3)”:
if you want a revolution
return to your childhood
and kick out the bottom
dont mistake changing
headlines for changes
if you want freedom
dont mistake circles
for revolutions
think in terms of living
and know
you are dying
& wonder why
if you want a revolution
learn to grow in spirals*
always being able to return
to your childhood
and kick out the bottom
This is what ive been
trying to say—if you
attack the structure—
the system—the establishment
you attack yourself
KNOW THIS!
& attack if you must
challenge yourself externally
but if you want a revolution
return to your childhood
& kick out the bottom
be able to change
yr own internal chemistry
walk down the street
& flash lights in yr head
at children
this is not a game
your childhood
is the foundation
of the system
walk down the street
flash lights in yr head
at children but be wary
of anyone old enough to kill
learn how to disappear
before they can find you
(that is, if you want to
stay alive)
if you want a revolution
do it “together”
but don’t get trapped in
words or systems
people are people
no matter what politics
color or words they use
& they all have children
buried in their head
if you want a revolution
grow a new mind
& do it quietly
if you can
return to your childhood
and kick out the bottom
then become a being
not dependent on words
for seeing
whenever you get bored
change headlines
colors politics words
change women
but if you really want
a revolution
learn how to change
your internal chemistry
then go beyond that
walk down the streets
& flash light at
yourself
*The spiral is the core idea of all of the movement in Aikido.
Thank you for reading and listening if you did.
© COME AWAY WITH EMD 2025
COME AWAY WITH EMD 