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Easy Listening for Difficult People

by Ancient Champion

Ancient Champion


It all began with a 30-year hiatus. In 1993, I was living in Los Angeles. My band had broken up, and I was an acclaimed songwriter. I was sharing a house with my regular studio engineer, a house protected by an adherence to some Wild West frontier law — a legal loophole, really, that kept us temporarily in bank-repossessed homes before the hammer fell, and we moved on to another bank-repossessed home in limbo.

Diametrically opposed to the musical situation we’d left, which was a type of pastiche Jon Spencer Blues Explosion – abrasive, dynamic, feedback and polyester-driven mayhem, we were recording and beginning to assemble what we considered could be the quietest band in the world. Maybe you recall this was right in the middle of the Seattle grunge era. Those were terrible times for music. We were in the opposition. You’d maybe hear what we were aiming for these days in the likes of Timbre Timbre, but back then, in that environment, it seemed dissolute and unwarranted. And most likely unwanted.

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The Opposite Of Shapes

by Laura of Outer Shapes

Outher Shapes


“The Opposite Of Shapes” is a term I’ve coined for the sound I hear in my favorite songs – the one I strain my ears for, impossible to pick out of the mix, so loud and so subtle at the same time, until I just have to believe it’s the final instrument – the sound that bubbles in between all of the tracks, everything and nothing at the same time. The element that makes a song good or not, well mixed or not, a hit or a flop. Sometimes it’s a feeling, sometimes it’s an actual sound. When that final piece reveals itself in a song, I can float in it, become it, and insert myself into that mysterious and thrilling space. I feel like it’s been made just for me.

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30 Years’ Worth Of Music Making… And Beyond

by Jamie Hutchings

Jamie Hutchings
Photo by Jared Harrison


Hi, my name’s Jamie Hutchings; I’m a singer, songwriter, guitarist, percussionist, and sometime improviser and producer. I’m based in Sydney, Australia.

Music was a given in my family household as my dad was a woodwind session cat. He’s 83 now, but he still gigs here and there, but as kids, it was his bread and butter. So all of us inherited his musicality in some form, but still (particularly with my brother and I), we found ourselves gravitating more and more towards rawness and originality over professionalism and technique. I was looking through my mum and dad’s record collection the other night, and it’s almost exclusively Frank Sinatra records. Sinatra is amazing, but the overexposure to music in a show-biz format perhaps contributed to us going in a different direction!

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About a Musician

by Gerrit Walter a.k.a. The Song & Dance Brigade

Gerrit Walter


I am kindly asked to write something about my musical life, which has now spanned several decades. No one had ever asked me that before. Well, I have been making music since I was 13 years old. My mother taught me how to play the guitar, at least the rudimentary playing she mastered. That was when I was thirteen.

Since then, I’ve been playing the guitar. It’s the instrument I desire in terms of beauty, sound, and challenge. In school, they told me I couldn’t sing. I did it anyway.

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Scene from an Art Heist

by Nick Stevens a.k.a. The Eighty Six Seas

Nick Stevens a.k.a. The Eighty Six Seas


The most vivid artwork I’ve ever seen was a series of blank frames.

The first time I walked into the Dutch Room at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, I was gobsmacked. This room was the site of the most notorious art heist in history, where thirty-three years ago, two thieves disguised as police officers broke into the museum and stole half a billion dollars worth of masterpieces by Rembrandt, Vermeer, and Degas. I’ve never witnessed such a visceral display of the absence of art.

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A Momentary Cocoon Of Memory

by Hifumi Sasaki

A Momentary Cocoon Of Memory by Hifumi Sasaki (Loving Love)
We are Loving Love, an art project that was started in Kyoto in 2018 by Kotoku Tsurutani and me, Hifumi Sasaki, the lead songwriter, and guitarist. We have grown to five members now, and we have released our 1st EP, “A Momentary Cocoon Of Memory.” Please check it out!

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Buy More Chewing Gum

by Adam Majdecki-Janicki

Buy More Chewing Gum by Adam Majdecki-Janicki
We live in funny times.

The Artist writes his best song for seven years, suffers mental breakdowns, heartbreaks, crazy life situations, misunderstandings, self-doubt, rehabs, and other things that people might encounter in 7 long years. The song is finally ready. He records it. It takes a week. He releases it. Nobody buys it.

In the meantime, The Kid makes a beat on his iPhone; it takes him 3 minutes. He drops it. Someone buys it for $50, to rap about „bitches” over the mindless loop. The Kid buys more chewing gum.

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