CHILLFILTR Indie Music Round Up for January 2023
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CHILLFILTR Indie Music Round Up for January 2023
Let me tell you a story.
Read on below ‘Radio Adds’ for a story about my obsession with content creation. :)
First we will feature the short list of posts from the new year (it’s a very short list):
Lauren Curtius - Enough
Mon, 13 Feb 2023 21:21:00 -0500
A very tangible and positive symbol of Lauren's recovery from more than a decade of an ex-partner's emotional and sexual abuse
Rosemary & Garlic - Midlands
Mon, 13 Feb 2023 20:36:00 -0500
Delivers as promised on a 'lush and lilting' style of indie folk.
Moozy - Always The End
Mon, 13 Feb 2023 19:50:00 -0500
We are reminded of the importance of family, the ephemeral nature of beauty, and the infinite presence of love.
Luke Beling x Joseph Pennell - The Light Is Coming
Mon, 13 Feb 2023 18:39:00 -0500
A soothing reminder that life is lived best in harmony with the past, the present, and the future.
Israel's Electronic Power Duo. - Introducing Lola Marsh: Shot Shot Cherry
Sat, 14 Jan 2023 14:10:00 -0500
A mix of electronic pop flourish and synthesizers combined with orchestral melodies that hint at throwback greats like Donna Summer and Sister Sledge.
Krister Axel Live. - From the Mail Tribune archive
Sat, 14 Jan 2023 11:49:00 -0500
Once there was such a thing as a local newspaper. Krister performs "Weightless Heart" on the Weissenborn from the studio in Medford.
UK Songwriting Duo Offers Gorgeous Preview of New Album. - Meadowlark: Goodbye
Sun, 08 Jan 2023 14:37:00 -0500
One day, it's just clear that happiness is possible again.
Radio Adds
Indigo De Souza - Hold U
Indigo De Souza - Pretty Pictures
boygenius - the record - 02 $20
boygenius - the record - 03 Emily I_m Sorry
boygenius - the record - 04 True Blue
Rosemary & Garlic - Midlands
Joel Ansett - I’ll Be Here
Joel Ansett - Layers
Krister Axel - Survive feat. Jinnee Joos
Krister Axel - Your Only Light feat. Jinnee Joos
Lola Marsh - Shot Shot Cherry
Luke Beling x Joseph Pennell - The Light Is Coming
Moozy - Always The End
Noah Derksen - Love is Such a Hard Thing
Sara Noelle - 01 Blooming Yucca by Sara Noelle
SYML - The Day My Father Died - 01 Howling (ft. Lucius)
SYML - The Day My Father Died - 02 Believer
SYML - The Day My Father Died - 04 Sweet Home
SYML - The Day My Father Died - 09 Chariot
SYML - The Day My Father Died - 11 Better Part of Me (feat. Sara Watkins)
Trapper Schoepp - I Am a Rider
So let me tell you a quick story.
After we moved to New York, and I was still sort of desperately trying to create cash from my blogging enterprise, which never got past maybe a thousand dollars a month in income, if I worked 50 hours weeks; it just never got to that point that I was hoping for. I pitched myself to Nettwerk Records, to Tidal Music, to just a bunch of different groups that I thought might be interested in a presence in the musical blogosphere. And of course that never went anywhere, which is fine. What CHILLFILTR® is, is really sort of a hobby and a side hustle maybe.
What I was telling my wife at one point, it's a retirement play—really is what it is. Because eventually when I can retire for real and actually have nothing else to do, it'll be a great place for me to continue to blog and write about music and perhaps even get back into non-fiction, which I've always been excited about. But anyway, the story (after all that prep work!) so the story is basically we got to New York and I was still in my entrepreneurship phase and I really kind of felt like I had put my tech career behind me for whatever reason.
At the time, I was kind of over it. I was just kind of, just burnt out completely on tech in general and certainly Ruby on Rails and web architecture and databases and migrations; all the stuff that basically I'm really good at had just kind of turned into a chore. So I needed to get away from that and that's what CHILLFILTR® and the blogging was all about. And then years went by. That was 2018 when I started the blog, and we moved to New York in 2021, if I remember correctly. So three years later we make the move and then we're here for a while. And then I got that call from a recruiter about the job at Corning.
So just to fill you in, in case you're not completely up to speed on my technical career (\s), I spent nine months last year working for a company called Corning, which is a manufacturer. They've got a number of locations, but one of their locations is nearby in a town called Canton. And so I spent nine months driving out there. It was about a 25 minutes commute and I made some good friends and really kind of found my stride as a technical analyst and developer, and got a lot of good work done. I was really sort of surprised by my own leadership abilities, oddly enough. But the story that I wanted to tell is about sort of this continuous fascination, almost obsession that I have with creating content and how sometimes that goes well and sometimes not so much.
So the idea was, when I got this job and I'm still in that sort of blogging mindset, I'm saying to myself, all right, well, you know what I'm going to do? I've got this commute, this 25 minutes commute, and there's no traffic, which is true. It's really low key. Almost never any traffic. Literally, 99% of the time, I barely even see anyone else on the road. So my idea was, oh, I'll just get a good microphone for my phone and start dictating blog entries on the way to and from work. Perhaps because I had just recently discovered that (sort of like I'm doing right now) I can just talk. If I do a decent job of staying on point, then I just press stop at the end of the recording and I use artificial intelligence to pull the copy out of it. I tell the computer, basically to transcribe it for me. And then all of a sudden, I've got a blog post and an audio thing, and then I just need some art, which I go to MidJourney for, and there we go. Then I've got a new blog post; for some of the use cases, that's my format. That's my goto production flow.
And I thought at the time that I would just jump into that. And of course, as it turns out, I don't even have that job anymore. I've moved on to a different position. But in the nine months that I was driving to and from Canton for that job, I dictated a blog exactly zero times. It just never happened. And the reason I'm thinking of that and talking about it now is it sort of reminds me about where I am right now. It's this pattern that I go through. And perhaps it's common to a lot of people. I can't imagine it isn't, frankly. Seems like a certain kind of person does this a lot, which is you really just sign up for all this stuff and you have all these goals and projects that need to get finished. And you sort of you spend some time kind of pulling all those things together. And then one day you sit down and look around. You’re like, oh my God, I have way too much work. Oh my God, there's no possible way I can get all this stuff done. So that's kind of where I'm at right now. I've been having to push away different projects and just come directly to terms with the fact that when I was building out CHILLFILTR® and the CHILLFILTR Review, and a lot of these other sort of companion hustles to CHILLFILTR®, that was when I had my whole work week dedicated to blogging and to content creation. I'm just not in that position any more.
Largely thanks to the job I took at Corning, I have now transitioned back into being a full time developer. And it's great. Pardon my French. It's fucking fantastic. It's interesting because if you'd have asked me in 2018 or 2019, you know, what my future looked like, I would have told you that I was completely retired as as a technologist. And, you know, things change, life changes. I have to admit that I like the money you make as a developer way more than the money you make as a blogger. So it's a no brainer, you know what I mean?
So anyway, I don't mean to hijack this update, which is supposed to just be sort of a monthly log of the things that I've written and the songs that I've added to the radio playlist. The issue with January is that I wrote almost nothing for the reasons that I just described. It's just been insane with the amount of work going on, largely because I started a new position in December, and I've been coming up to speed ever since then, and I'm nowhere near done coming up to speed. It's one of those jobs that is going to take months and months and months of getting up to speed on. But I do feel pretty strongly that I can get to a point where it feels at very least manageable and; what's the word I'm looking for? - predictable, in some way. That's where I'm at now, and unfortunately, it means I have to let go of some things. Of course, CHILLFILTR® is not going anywhere, nor is the blogging just in general, but I am forced to take a break now for a little while. And just like what happened when we made the move from the West Coast, I had to turn the blog off for, you know, three or even six months, if I remember correctly, just to kind of get everything back together. And so that's where we're going right now. I've shut everything down, I think until maybe the first week of March. I'll probably stay open for submissions for maybe a few days and then shut it down again until the summer. I've got a lot of catching up to do, and the only way to do it is just to get started, which means I can't have any new stuff coming up.
So anyway, that's a long, very long-winded way of announcing that CHILLFILTR® will not be taking new submissions just for the time being, although I will continue to scout and add new songs to the playlist. So the monthly roundup will continue to go out. I just won't have a whole lot of new [blog] content, at least until probably this summer. So that's it for now. Thanks for being a fan and for subscribing to this newsletter and for supporting independent music in the many ways that you do. I see you and I appreciate you.
Photo credit: Krister Axel via Midjourney
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