Two Year Anniversary

Yesterday was the Ventilator of Cold Example's two year anniversary. It's been a long time since I've posted. A quick recap of the last couple months of my music listenership involves a couple artists.

John Maus put out his new album We Must Become the Pitiless Censors of Ourselves back in July. It's an awesome album, although it had to overcome my skepticism that it could be anywhere as good as his previous album, Love Is Real. Here's one of my favorite tracks from the album, "Head for the Country."



Almost as beautiful as his music is the video work for his song "Believer."



In the end, I love the music of We Must Become.... In some ways Maus' arrangements and production are richer than ever. But his vocals are harder to make out, and I really find Love Is Real to be a more powerful album emotionally.

Listening non-stop to Maus for a couple weeks, I soon gravitated to the music of Ariel Pink. I had briefly listened to him at one point in time, but now I really got into him. Eventually I came to his most recent album Before Today, which is fantastic. He and his band recorded a live in-studio set for their label 4AD, and it's an amazing performance. "Menopause Man" knocks me out.



Transitioning out of my Pink kick I began to rediscover the music of Can. In particular, Ege Bamyasi and Future Days have been exciting me.



Getting deep into Can makes me want to write music like theirs. I like the hypnotic rhythms, the catchy bass lines, and the haunting atmospherics. I find recently that as I develop songs with my band I keep being drawn to turn them into Can songs.

And this brings me to my main reason for writing today. In coming weeks I will be revising my posting strategy. I'd like to turn this blog into a running account of my experiences with writing music and being in a band. This will still include talking about the music I'm inspired by, but I'll try to tie it to my thoughts on music-making and songwriting. I'm also excited to post sketches and demos of my music as it develops, the idea being that I can show each stage of the process of fleshing out songs as they happen. I might even switch over to my own website if that seems to make most sense. I'll be in touch.