And Out Come the Wolves

11: 43AM

A couple of music announcements...

The "Philosophy of Velocity" vinyl project is fully in the planning stages. Masters are secured. Artwork is being collected. Manufacturers are being assessed. Look for lots (and I mean LOTS) of goodies over the summer and fall as we prepare for a 10/3 release.

In other music news, you can catch my curry vocals in a bonus track on the upcoming release "Before the Animals Know You're Dead" from DC's Calm Bomb Collective. It's a new rager with rappers Kurupt, Apathy and Bub Styles, and if you like your hip hop old school along with bands like Prong you might dig this. Look for it to drop on April 25th.

Until then...

I just returned from a work thing in Las Vegas.

(Yes, I have a 9-5 to make ends meet.)

The band played the Hard Rock Cafe under the Mandalay Bay casino once. They offered us a room at half-price for performers, so we took it. The fanciest digs we'd had the whole tour.

The guys went out to play nickel slots and I stayed behind to take a long bath, listening to this track by Estonian band Galaktlan on repeat because it captured a certain momentary vibe looking out over a neon city designed to take as much money out of your soul as possible.

I lost my shit when our roadie drank a $5 bottle of Fiji water that would be billed to the room. A bit of an overreaction on my part, but we were squeezed for cash like we always were.

(Sorry, Dan.)

Same for Montreal.

We did an exhausting five-week tour in Canada and I remember having saved enough spare change to split off and have a gourmet burger at a table for one in some bistro near the Old Town before sleeping at a hash dealers crib somewhere up on Saint-Laurent.

Like Montreal last month and Vegas this month, these places hit differently now that I'm in a new form of life. But being there always floats up vivid memories of the salad days.

Life comes at you fast.

Sometimes I pull up that Galaktlan track when I tuck in to a downtown hotel just to try to feel what I felt then.

Adult me now makes ends meet in the world of technology, and I'm old enough to remember when the industry was full of optimism and the promise of connection.

But gentrification happens to everything. Money chases fire.

Music was a cash crop at one time, and out came the wolves. The shabby little corner of town became the new creative gathering place, and out came the wolves. New ways of providing service came to be and made some people rich. And then out came the wolves.

In the end, everything is reduced to shareholder value.

Enshittification. A new form of life.

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What I’m reading: Low (Hugo Wilcken, for 33 1/3)

What I'm listening to: Source Tags and Codes (And You Will Know Us By the Trail of Dead)