Belated thanks to Paddy Johnson for her plug of my LP release on Bandcamp. She calls it micro-fundraising but my cleverly-worded announcement actually said "If you've been a reader/RSS follower this is a way to support the blog without me having to do annoying fundraisers." Maybe that was disingenuous, but I would love for you to buy the LP so that you can have, as one listener said, "something in heavy rotation on my home server," not because my blog needs financial support. I have no staff (despite occasional use of the editorial we) and hosting fees are cheep. When it's time for this thing to die it will just stop one day.
A curator once told me "your blog is your art." This was irksome because he was making a studio visit and pointedly ignoring the artwork on the walls he'd asked to come look at. (This was before I showed the blog as art, but that was a performance, not a Mary Kelly-style life work.)
All that said, I greatly appreciate everyone who bought the LP (including Paddy) or even tossed in a little extra, whatever the reason.
I'm proud of the music and felt like it kicked up a notch at the end of 2013. I wanted to show my own commitment to it by making it non-free.
Am pretty much ready to go with release #2 but have been debating whether to restrict it to tunes I consider catchy or whether to include some of the art shit.
I kind of feel like if I'm asking you to pay you should have 10 tunes that are somewhat fun to listen to, in the post-8 bit, not quite PC Music mold (more great tunes over there by the way, and free d/ls).
This means either saving up the "art" tunes for a later "difficult" omnibus or continuing to release them piecemeal on the blog, with production notes as I've been doing.
Unlike yours truly, Paddy is having a fundraiser (or just concluded one, with a benefit upcoming) and I recommend you kick in. I wish she hadn't used a quote from Holland Cotter saying that magazine-style online efforts were an improvement over (by implication) those nasty unidimensional (ick) solo blogs. His exact words: "a feisty mix of voices [that is] a welcome alternative to the one-personality blog of yore." Of course he'd say that, as a New York Times journalist who lost much Godlike power in the last decade to those pajama wearing goofballs who can incidentally write circles around boring mainstream journos.