New Tunes

Exciting day! The new Stripmall Architecture CD showed up in the mail. If you don’t know them, they’re essentially Halou plus friends. If you don’t know Halou, a delightful discovery awaits you. I think I have more CDs of theirs than of any other band’s, particularly when you count all their various side projects. They’re both fairly prolific and consistently good, and they haven’t fallen into a rut. Every new album of theirs is different enough to be a little jarring. My first reaction is always, “Oh, I’m not sure I like the way they’re going with this,” but then it grows on me and often becomes my new favorite album of theirs. They’re one of a very few bands who have managed to pull that off.

Anyway, so first off, there’s something lovely about getting music in a hand-addressed package. This particular disc is also the close of an interesting arc. Last fall, they put up a project on Kickstarter. Kickstarter lets you say, “I need X amount of money to do this cool thing. Who wants to chip in?” People pledge money, and if you get enough, you go ahead and do it. If not, nobody gets charged. In this case, the project was to press an actual CD for their new EP, instead of just putting it up on iTunes. Call me old-fashioned (or maybe paranoid), but I like having a physical artifact (and high-quality archival copy) of my music. It’s also a good excuse to throw money at a band that I really like, and encourage them to keep doing cool stuff in a much more direct way than is usually possible, especially from the other side of the continent. They ended up getting nearly three times as much money as they asked for, so they not only pressed the EP, they also put together a couple more discs worth of demo tracks, interviews, etc.

I donated $20, and over the last several months have gotten a steady stream of behind-the-scenes updates, track previews, and so on. Today the little bundle of joy arrived, containing four EPs and a signed thank you note. The CD slipcover also has a thank you section listing everyone who contributed to the project, including me. So add to all that the frisson of seeing my name in print. I’m feeling a bit overwhelmed by the generosity—I think I need to go throw more money at them. Good thing the also have cool t-shirts and prints.

I don’t know if this is the future of music or anything, but I hope so. I definitely prefer the Adorable Panda Future, with teeming multitudes of web-enabled indie bands, to the Grim Meathook Future of stadium rock.