A new recording from yours truly, finally out
Five years later, we are so back
It’s out! After numerous holdups, my recording of Florence Price’s Fantasie nègre No. 2 in G minor is out on your streaming service of choice, iTunes, etc.
Now I know you know this, but just in case someone out there didn’t know it: this is a different Price work (Fantasie nègre Number Two) than the one (Number ONE) that kicked off that VAN article and that radio feature. Price’s Fantasie nègre No. 2 was the first Price piece I ever played, and I recorded it in 2023, back before I knew that the situation with Price editions was a bit of a mess and that there are contradictory scores and recordings of the same pieces floating around out there. In short, this is a recording from a slightly simpler time.
It’s also the first recording I’ve released since [checks notes] 2020. Good god. The fortunate news is that you shouldn’t have to wait five years before I drop the next track; I’ve got the files ready to go and I know a lot more about music licensing now.
Speaking of, a sincere and extremely heartfelt thank you to everyone who reached out after I posted my last newsletter to offer constructive, nonjudgmental help and advice on this part of the industry I know so woefully little about. A special shout-out to Meerenai Shim, who runs Aerocade Music, for patiently explaining a lot of basics and answering all the queries I sent her that started with “Sorry, I have another dumb question!”
Also, thank you, as always, to everyone who voluntarily pays for this newsletter, and therefore funds these recording projects. Making studio recordings without the backing of a label is a an expensive endeavor (and deservedly so—the engineers are absurdly skilled and all that state-of-the-art equipment is pricy) and I feel incredibly fortunate that enough of you believe in this (and me) to make it possible.
Anyway! Go listen! Enjoy! And tell your friends!
A reminder to my San Francisco Bay Area friends that I’ll be playing a (free! public!) solo concert on June 17 in San Francisco with the Noontime Concerts series. The info page for the concert is here and as you can see, it’s a pretty sweet (I think) program.
I’d love to see you there!
Reads I Enjoyed
Between friends curating the best articles for me (thank you!) and Bluesky more than capably filling the ex-Twitter void of surfacing interesting reads, this was a banner week for great reads.
It also was a week for treasuring what I've taken for granted; I got the upsetting email this week that Pocket, an app I genuinely cannot live without, is shutting down. I have depended on Pocket for over a decade to not only save reads for later, but to effectively manage and track the tens of thousands of articles, essays, and thinkpieces I read—it's thanks to Pocket that I have intimidated friends for years with what appears to be a supernatural ability to say "Hang on, there's an article about exactly this thing," and produce the link two seconds later.
I am so dependant on Pocket, in fact, that at some point in the early pandemic Pocket interviewed me as a power user and I used the payment from the interview to buy garment sewing supplies.
RIP, Pocket. (I have already been given suggestions for alternative services, which I will check out—the big test will be whether any of them can handle transferring the truly massive amount of data I have in Pocket.)
Callie Holtermann: They’re 15. Wait Until You Read Their Newspaper. (New York Times)
Their goal is to distribute 2,000 copies of the paper a week through Labor Day, funded entirely by ad sales. And they do not want their parents to be involved — except for when they need their parents to drive them places.
This piece was an utter DELIGHT—kudos for making me fully laugh out loud. The kids are alright.
The Costco Club at UC San Diego launched in 2021 with the simple purpose: “to provide new and existing Costco enthusiasts a safe space to express shared interest in wholesale products,” per its bylaws.
THE KIDS REALLY ARE ALRIGHT.
Amanda Mull: American Shoppers are a Nightmare (The Atlantic, gift link)
It’s from this morass that “The customer is always right” emerged as the essential precept of American consumerism—service workers weren’t there just to ring up orders, as store clerks had done in the past. Instead, they were there to fuss and fawn, to bolster egos, to reassure wavering buyers, to make dreams come true.
[...]
As department-store barons built a market for their businesses, they were also quite intentionally building something far grander: class consciousness.
This article is a few years old, but is still ultra-relevant and incredibly fascinating; once you understand the uniquely American way class and consumerism intersect, you can't unsee it.
John Paul Brammer: Low-Risk Flier (Substack)
“When I call your last name, line up over here,” he said, without telling us exactly where “here” was. The first name was called, then called again, and the corporate guy got up with an apologetic little wave of his hand and walked over to a spot so goddamn incorrect that I physically rolled my eyes. I was happy to see him punished with a firm and irritated, “Sir, line up over here.” Yes, I thought. Humiliate him. It turned out “here” was not where I would have gone either, but I certainly wouldn’t have gotten it that wrong, Christ.
This essay is the classic type of writing I adore: bitingly funny and yet so insightful and relatable that it hurts a little to feel so seen.
Emma Goldberg: Living the Slop Life (New York Times)
“It’s complete blah blah blah,” said Danielle Carr, an assistant professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, describing the experience of scrolling through slop on her X feed. “Lacan has this notion of empty speech, which is when the patient in analysis is going through their same blah blah blah, empty speech that doesn’t signify anything. It’s similar to that. It’s mind-deadening.”
[...]
Kyla Scanlon, an economic commentator who coined the term “vibecession,” notes that across different kinds of consumption — how we eat, how we dress, how we post — people are choosing to minimize thought and maximize efficiency, even when the outcome is a little less expressive (your outfit is the same as everyone else’s), a little less satisfying (your lunch bowl tastes just like yesterday’s) or a little less human.
This is one of those articles that had me mentally punching the air, going "YES!" The slop aesthetic predates the recent rise in AI—I'd say that it really took off when TikTok became ubiquitous, though you can trace its origins to the golden age of Instagram—but it's one of those ubiquitous elements that I can't escape. (I'm not on TikTok/IG Reels myself, but judging from the videos that people send me, which is my sole method of short-form video consumption, the bar for content is so low, and the vibes radiating off all this slop content are absolutely rancid.)
Thanks for reading and listening, everyone! 🎹
Any chance you'll be putting the new recording up somewhere like bandcamp? I'd prefer to pay a few bucks to download CD-quality audio rather than stream.