Flotsam and Jetsam: Feb 25, 2025

First off, as you can probably imagine from the domain name, I bought Liz Pelly's excellent book Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist and I absolutely devoured it. It's been extremely heartening to see the discourse and public perception shift around Spotify and streaming in recent months, and her work in the years leading up to the book was a huge inspiration for me starting this site in the first place. I highly encourage everyone with even a modicum of interest to give it a read.

One of my many New Years resolutions* was to write more, but I've had trouble in the past with trying to reconcile this project--dedicated solely to relatively underground music--with my tendency to avoid any topic where I don't think I have decent fluency. How many different ways can I say, "I found this on Sophie's Floorboard and there isn't much information out there about them?" Conversely, is there any benefit to me rehashing the well known biographical details of a bigger artist just to write up a one-off song that never made it to streaming? The jury is still out but I was in search of a format that lets me write faster and more freely, one where I can just say "this is sick" and move on to the next thing.

*I like to cast a wide net and then lean into what's sticking. Two out of seven starts to look pretty good when you convert it into batting average notation.

So this is the inaugural "Flotsam and Jetsam," a miscellaneous dump of cool shit I've found floating around outside the streaming universe. I'll still devote time to the larger, more in-depth entries, but this way I don't have to let a fear of not being able to expound prevent me from sharing music that I think is worth hearing. Without further ado...

Cranberry Lifecycle - Cranberry Mixdown

Despite the fact that I made at least one friend freshman year of college off the strength of a Neutral Milk Hotel recommendation, I've never really considered myself an Elephant 6 guy. I have a lot of respect for E6 and like most to all of what I've heard, but people are real diehards about this kind of thing, and it admittedly doesn't make up much of my day-to-day listening (unless Masters of the Hemisphere count? I do listen to a good bit of Masters of the Hemisphere). Case in point: Cranberry Lifecycle is a near-mythical collaboration from Jeff Mangum (Neutral Milk Hotel) and Will Cullen Hart (Olivia Tremor Control) from 1991 or so. These tape recordings were part of an archival project at UGA to digitize various artifacts belonging to Robert Schneider (Apples in Stereo). I'm pretty sure this was just next up in my YouTube algorithm one day--the comments are filled with stuff like this:

Turns out it's pretty great! Cranberry Mixdown comes ripping right out of the gate with "Arms So Real," a nugget of fuzzy pop that almost sounds like LVL UP song (LVL UP songs exist on a spectrum of very good to transcendent, ergo, this is a good thing). The spoken pre-chorus adds some flair and feels pretty wholly apart from either of the two main projects to spawn from this collaboration. Towards the end of the tape is a beautiful fractured psych-pop tune that feels much more of a piece with the classic E6 sound. In the zip file I snagged off the Internet Archive this is titled "What Are You Looking For?" but it also might just be "Untitled 2" (as it is in this YouTube video). I'm also partial to "Take My Bones," a haunted acoustic number which includes background chanting that sounds rather like the Jimmy Neutron caribou hunting song.

I think what I enjoy most about these songs is the "frozen in amber" nature of two friends fucking around with minimal expectations. There are clear through-lines with their most famous records, but even the experiments that don't stick often work on their own merit. It's especially interesting, given Mangum's eventual reclusiveness, to hear him in a freer, looser iteration here. Above all it's a nice reminder that many an influential songwriter started by throwing shit at the wall and combining a bunch of weird ideas in the hopes of making something new and unique.

Julianna Barwick - "You Were Waiting"

I'd heard Healing is a Miracle back when it dropped in 2020 but never really went through her back catalogue. I've been haphazardly checking out old "Best New Track" recipients from 2010 or so, which led me to "Bode," after which "You Were Waiting" autoplayed. I love the way she layers her voice until it sounds quasi-synthetic, even though as best as I can tell it's all vocals and piano. As someone who started smoking weed right around when Bon Iver released "Woods," I'm contractually obligated to go up for this kind of thing. I ended up grabbing her whole Daytrotter Sessions EP on Soulseek and it's all beautiful, but I wanted to highlight this song in particular-it truly froze me in my chair during work when I first heard it.

Maria & The Mirrors - "Gemini: Enjoy My Life"

This came up on my Twitter timeline recently (I want to say courtesy of BillDifferen). I was mostly listening to pop punk and House of Balloons in late 2012 and had no idea this kind of thing was going on. They're named after a Warhol quote about the opera singer Maria Callas and make deafeningly loud music that sounds like... techno Sleigh Bells? The mp3 copy I downloaded called it "Power Noise." Whatever's going on rates very highly on the "would I drink a beer and jump around wildly" axis. Sometimes I lament that I didn't have "cooler" or more avant-garde taste as a teenager--I'm not sure what I would have made of this at that time--but it's also fun scoop up bits of what else was out there in the present. It's Learning About Guys™️ as opposed to Remembering them, if you will. In any case this rips and I keep going back to it.

Weatherbox - "GUESS THAT THIS MUST BE THE PLACE"

Three of my favorite things: the band Weatherbox, weird early YouTube musical detritus, audio that sounds like absolute dogshit.