A view of the dojo on a Saturday in January. 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… Continue reading Winter 2025//page of swords
Coffee grounds reading from mid-October, in my kitchen with my friend, Stephanie. It immediately looked to me like a woman walking through fire, or through parted seas, which is exactly how this season of my life felt. "With water proof matches and fireproof fabric." You can see the past coming into the present and the… Continue reading Fall 2024//New Roots
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… Continue reading Summer 2024//I Scream for Cleveland
I am very pleased to share the first seasonal mixtape of 2024. This tape is for my best friend, Oz, and I hope it keeps me with them through this winter, since I cannot visit them in LA, as I had planned to. Oz was the first person to point out to me that mixtapes… Continue reading Winter 2024//as above, so below
Front cover taken in one of the last truly Cleveland sort of areas remaining, industrial zone full of trash and debris being reclaimed by nature across from West Side Metals, around W. 65th and Clark Ave. If you follow my Seasonal Mixtape Series closely, you may recall the song "New Harm" by Tara Jane O'Neil… Continue reading fall 2023//new harm(ony)
This tape has had a strange and uncertain path to becoming the official seasonal mixtape of Summer 2023. It was originally supposed to be for Maria Barrios, but then I thought I had written it too far ahead of summer and that I should give it to the person I was spending the most time… Continue reading Summer 2023//it’s a rainy day, sunshine girl
In truth, the first half of 2023 in mixtapes fit together to tell the story from the fall-winter transition to the winter-spring transition, a period in which I decided to move back home to Cleveland. Where the Winter 2023//forces at work tape was about returning to the age I was when I got into punk… Continue reading Spring 2023//this is the chariot!!!!!
The seed for this winter 2023 mixtape was an earlier tape that I made for my colleague in music journalism and supreme sound selection, John Morrison, during the earliest days of fall last year. Within a day of my Lifetime Achievement article on David Thomas dropping on Bandcamp, news of Anton Fier's death became publicly… Continue reading Winter 2023//forces at work
"Spring Into Winter" was a perfect title for an incredibly productive Mercury Retrograde Sanity Mixtape Series which yielded 17 one-off tapes for pals and TWO seasonal mixtapes: winter 2023//forces at work and spring 2023//this is the chariot!!!!! Now all this shit is going into a box until I return from the Black Eyes reunion Easter… Continue reading Spring Into Winter: A Mercury Retrograde Sanity Mixtape Series
This time around, all Mercury retrograde mixtapes began as studies for my fall 2022 seasonal mixtape. Starting each one with "Weather Radio" was abandoned as I moved to a new format of high bias 60 minute tapes and wanted to try out drafts of equal length sides. (The first two tapes were 90 min normal… Continue reading Weather Radio: A Mercury Retrograde Sanity Mixtape Series
COME AWAY WITH EMD 