24: The Flower, or the Soil That Grows It?
Hey friends,
HAPPY NEW YEAR! I am so lucky that my family & friends have mostly been well and made it together through this awful, grueling, demoralizing annus horribilis. The ladies and I are well! We added two kittens to the household last year for Christmas, and we got to spend LOTS of quality time together as a family this year.
Pearl & Trixie, left to right
When I last checked in with you via e-mail newsletter, it was the (relatively) blissful fall of 2019. The girls were both in school five days a week, I had a bunch of time to myself for music-related nonsense, I was hosting a biweekly radio show and DJ’ing at bars, keeping pretty busy! El Muntz, my co-host on our radio program HELLFISH BONANZA, and I decided to host a program weekly beginning in March 2020 (lol).
My DJ life, as I would venture that most of our lives, got real weird and temporally elastic in March. Freeform Portland closed their studio after our last radio show in mid-March, opting to air pre-recorded material that was copyright free. The station eventually switched over to randomly playing pre-recorded DJ content with songs and talkback (if possible), which we submitted to the station days in advance of airing. This quickly became popular with the DJs to have themes, like “Movie Night” and what have you. All the DJs would submit a 30-minute mix based loosely on whatever theme was decided upon. This was a nice distraction, but it felt a bit trifling in the wake of a public health crisis, when it seemed live DJs may be able to provide important, timely information to listeners. Most important to me, it meant music I played must be censored for language, and that my co-host El Muntz & I couldn’t really host a show together.
I spent time & resources furiously trying to understand the basics of live-streaming, to send a good audio signal with a video camera and make the whole thing look and sound decent. One of my first chances was to DJ my daughter’s school fundraiser, where they had me in my own breakout room in Zoom, and anyone who wanted to could join up and dance to ‘80s and ‘90s music. In the meantime, I got a Twitch account, and I did a little live-streaming in Mixcloud. Both were pretty cool, and I appreciate that they seemed more functional than trying to stream through social media.
When George Floyd was murdered at the end of May, and the resulting wave of grief & frustration washed through Portland, music helped to anchor me. With radio, my heart wasn’t in it, because it’s tedious to edit music for language, and it dulls the message of the song in my opinion. ESPECIALLY when I value the voice of local Black artists speaking on police violence, gentrification, white privilege, and injustice against Black and Brown people everywhere. Paired with the lack of institutional responsiveness to the need to urgently address a social movement, this led me to part ways with the radio station in June. Shortly after, Muntz hit the road for San Diego, to be with his gente and the sunshine & waves.
We all lost so much in 2020, and I am lucky that most of my loss was only the personal identify part of me that DJs. It definitely hits home how much I appreciate Muntz as a friend and collaborator. It’s been frustrating to figure out how to channel my creative desires without the platform the radio show allowed, or the fun allowed by DJ’ing live. Still, I have a few ideas for the coming year, hoping the vaccinations come…
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DJ’ING ON TWITCH
To commemorate the fucking excellent music that was released this year, I’m gonna DJ this afternoon at twitch.tv/djmrmom. I’ll be playing all of my favorite artists & music from this past year. No need to create an account to watch, but if you do, you can chat, get e-mail notifications when I go live, etc.
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MY FAVORITE RECORDS OF 2020
Here’s my habitual end-of-year list of my favorite records. Much respect to Bandcamp (and other outlets) that decided to do away with ranking albums numerically. I agree with the sentiment that it’s weird to try to quantify art on a numerical scale. I love listening to all different kinds of music, both old and new to me. New & contemporary music has always held my interest, I think because it allows me to participate in the conversation about quality, and in part because it speaks to the times we are living through. For me, music serves three primary purposes: 1) to help me identify the emotions I’m experiencing, 2) to help create lasting memories of important milestones and good times, and 3) to allow me the empathy of understanding someone else’s perspective. Hahaha four purposes, I forgot about making me shake my ass.
For these reasons, the music being made by artists in 2020 was of urgent concern for me. Like SZA sang in Rihanna’s “Consideration,” when I look outside my window, I can’t get no peace of mind.
My favorite artist this year was definitely Pink Siifu. When I heard NEGRO in April, I was deeply unsettled by the music on first listen, expecting a blunted-out session with jazz loops. Instead I was met with a white-noise, free jazz, hardcore, vitriolic outburst against an unjust system that oppressed Black people at every turn. As the year ground on, it became apparent to me that NEGRO was a prophecy and not a vision.
Pink Siifu & FlyAnakin released their collaborative project FlySiifu’s in the fall, imagining a day in the life of two hilarious stoners working in a record store, aka my perfect dream job. It delivered on the dusty loops & blunted tangents I’ve come to expect from Siifu, with a helluva nice complimentary set of rhymes from Fly Anakin.
THE NEXT TIER
In my opinion, these records fucking ruled also and deserve consideration and attention. I think it was a really strong year for the kinds of music I personally dig.
I made a Spotify playlist of my favorite music of 2020 if you use that awful vampire leech streaming platform. Let me know if any of y’all are Tidal gang.
PDX REPRESENT
As it’s been since we moved here in 2016, the music made by Portland artists, especially Black artists making Hip-Hop, R&B, and beats, is the music that personally meant the most to me in 2020. Lots of these folks had been the voices I’ve listened to
Here’s a list I made for buymusic.club with links to buy music directly from my favorite Portland artists.
REISSUES // COMPILATIONS
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DJ MIXES I MADE THIS YEAR
Rudie Can’t Fail; an elegy for the fuzzy buster. For our beloved Rudie, who died last summer.
An imaginary soundtrack I made for Style Wars, my favorite documentary of all time.
Throwback to July of 2001 on KZUU in Pullman, WA. This is the radio show where Ronda & I got engaged.
Here’s a summer-into-fall mix I made as a demo for a community radio station. Spoiler alert: did not get a show.
Finally, I digitized for y’all a mix I made for two of my best friends for their late November birthdays.
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As I look back on 2020 as a DJ, Muntz & I have lots to be proud of. We hosted nine radio shows, played nine gigs, and did nine live-streams in 2020, and I made three DJ mixes. Thanks to the Doc, I got a serious upgrade to my mixer, and I’ve been goofing with my MPC & DJ controller in combo with vinyl & tapes. For the first time in my life, I love goofing around with music composition/construction, though it’s mostly sample-based. I wish I had more time to write about music—I feel like I’m no good at all at it, but I really still love reading good music criticism after all these years.
I’ve considered a few things—maybe a Patreon with a monthly subscription that delivers a cassette or digital mix, a newsletter about Portland music, or writing more about my identity as a middle-aged, cis-het, white man and how that relates to my love for Hip-Hop, R&B, and music created by Black folks. We’ll see what the year brings, I guess. If you have any strong feelings about what you’d like to see, hear, or read from me, let me know.
My love to all of you, and may luck be with us.
Andy // DJ Mr. Mom
North Portland
December 31, 2020
