I met Tom Mullen years ago back in New York, through some random interactions that I honestly forget now, but that led to us talking about my old band, Speedwell (this is Troy writing, by the way). Searching back through old emails as I write this, I’m finding ones back and forth between us in the fall of 2011, shortly after Mullen had started an interview series that attempts to capture and record the mid 90s/early 2000 emo and post-hardcore scenes, largely in an effort to defend their legacy as they began to morph into something a lot of us hated—a very commercialized, highly-polished, and totally inauthentic version of themselves; something some of us termed ‘mall emo’ (props to Brian Minter—I think he’s the first I heard call it that).

Since Tom and I first met, his website and interview series has grown exponentially, as has his (now long) career in the music industry—Tom’s now a music industry executive at Atlantic and has spent time at Equal Vision, Vagrant, TVT, EMI, and Sony, where he was a 2016 Clio and Cannes Lions winner for his work with Bob Dylan. Yeah, that guy. But his passion has remained this strange, edgy scene we both grew up in, more or less, and it’s been a common thread that’s kept us in touch over the years. In addition to his site and interview series/podcast, Washed Up Emo, Tom created a popular emo-themed DJ night in NYC (the good, original one; not the bobo one) and started a pretty uncannily thorough search engine that answers the age-old question—Is This Band Emo? (sometimes with very entertaining results).

He’s also just published his first book, Anthology of Emo Volume 1—376 pages of band interviews, rare photographs, set lists, and more.

On the occasion of its release and the book party tomorrow night at one of our favorite places in Los Angeles, Donut Friend, we took a deep dive with Tom to talk music, and how Bernie Sanders’ wife changed his life as a youth.

raven + crow: Alright, Tom, so, first off, great to talk with you again—it’s been too long, man! I guess let’s start at the beginning—you’ve got a long, prestigious career in the music industry and you’ve clearly ‘paid your dues’, as they say, but what got you into the emo scene in the first place? What was the scene like where you grew up/went to school and what were some early bands—known or not—who pulled you into the scene?

Tom Mullen: Thanks Troy! I’ve definitely been in the music industry way too long, going on seventeen years in the professional world. A big part of my ability to stay relevant in the music industry is what I learned in the scenes growing up. I grew up in Vermont, a small state with no billboards and very few bands coming through. Thanks to Bernie Sanders’ wife, there was a teen center in Burlington, Vermont, which I lived about 40 minutes from and it had all these amazing punk, indie, hardcore, metal, and emo bands come through. They weren’t the biggest but to me, that was all that would tour that far up north. I would go see Only Living Witness, Tree, Sam Black Church, and others from Boston; bands from New York City that would trek up on their way to Montreal or on their way back from there. Burlington was so small that there was no arena, no big shows coming through, so the punk and hardcore scene to me seemed like the biggest thing in the world.

I was instantly perplexed and amazed by this underground scene that I had to dig and search for bands, labels, and scenes. I quickly developed an affinity for emo and all the bands. It was just another band on the hardcore bill so I was into all of it. I looked like a hardcore kid but listened to Karate and Snapcase. Vermont was limited due to their location and size so when I graduated high school, I knew I needed to get the fuck out to really get into the scene and see more bands. I went to school down in North Carolina, which was a culture shock for an East Coast kid. What it did have going for it were countless shows only 30 minutes away and cheap gas. After joining the radio station at the college on day two, I was off to the races calling labels, getting records in the mail, and trying to see as many shows as I could across North Carolina. One day it was Neurosis, or it was Bad Religion or it was A New Found Glory or Braid. I was taking it all in and I couldn’t get enough of it.

Ahhhhhhhh the 90s. As a quick sidenote and sign of the times, my 2017 MacBook just auto-corrected ‘emo’ to ‘emojified’, by the way.

Yes, a common issue with Apple devices. I’ve definitely asked my friends at Apple to fix that.

Get on it, Apple! So, do you feel like first-wave emo filled the same sort of role that, say, punk and new wave filled before, this sort of outsider role?

The first wave of emo, the late 80s/early 90s, was so all over the place that it was definitely an offshoot from the scenes of hardcore. The word itself derives from emotional hardcore, emo-core. So it was just different at the time and as you’d expect, hated as soon as the words were uttered in D.C.

Right, maybe we should back up for the uninitiated (and interested)—can do a quick breakdown on the various emo waves and history here?

This is heavily debated and argued about on Reddit, 4chan and wherever else people like to complain. I’ll caution that people describe these waves very differently. For myself, it’s the first wave of the D.C. bands like Rites of Spring, Embrace. The second wave of the late 90s, with The Promise Ring, Get Up Kids, Jimmy Eat World, etc. Third wave is the pop/hair metal era with Fall Out Boy, My Chemical Romance, and Dashboard Confessional. The fourth wave is the emo revival with bands like Foxing, Hotelier, and Free Throw. Let the angry comments commence.

Yeah, that’s why we disabled commenting on these pages. Suck it, audience! This is a leading question, but how do you feel the internet and this instant information-/cultural-exchange via the web have changed such formative cultural/musical genres and experiences?

The internet is fleeting. It’s instant and there’s very little work to get something but harder to feel a deeper connection to something you took time to find online or in the real world. That’s what’s missing to me when I think about bands and music today. It’s a kid in a bedroom talking shit that would never say it at the show. Maybe back in the day, he’d be at the show and still not say it or quietly say it but today those words can be heard by anyone theoretically, so it’s a false sense of being a part of something. I think bands had more time to cultivate and really cut through, but in the same sense, someone posting a song could get huge and learn the ropes after getting that help early on that they may not have gotten. I love it all but think it’s dangerous to just be on the computer tweeting all day or commenting. Get outside, meet someone, learn something new, sit next to a human and interact.

I do think music is one of those area’s that so heavily affected by the proliferation of use of the web that it’s resulted in this flooding of information/sounds/bands, to the point that it’s impossible to really fully know the bands that make up a scene because the’re so legion now. It does actually make going out to shows and relying on good line-ups at venues one of the best ways to find new bands you might like.

Was that a motive for starting Washed Up Emo though—both the site and the interview series—sort of preserving this scene, what it evolved into, and what came from it?

The motive for the site was to exactly that. The podcast was an extension of the story to have it be evergreen. Someone listening today or 10 years from now will understand where Matt Pryor‘s headspace was and what he was into and why he was doing what he was doing with the music and the bands. It’s a life story I hoped would be something people would listen to and not just have it be the news of the day or two people trying to be funny with each other and a guest. I don’t care if anyone remembers me, I just want the stories to remain.

Your new book then—Anthology of Emo Volume 1—I assume that’s kind of the natural evolution of the interviews; what made you want to channel all of that material into book form?

The book felt like a natural way to bring something academic and serious to the genre. The genre is more than often a punchline for a publication/press outlet to crack a joke while praising a band. Emo is the comedy genre of the Oscars. No respect and always a joke. So having the book look academic—taking a serious approach it—was a huge motivation to making a book from the interviews.

And are these full transcribed interviews? Speaking from experience, I know those can really add up to a lot of text/pages.

Yes, they’re fully transcribed but I edited out a lot of the stupid shit I say and anything out of context. It wasn’t a lot and I left 95% of the interviews in. It was all about flow.

Besides the interviews, what else is included in the book? Any favorite visuals?

Chris Barroner, who was in the band Ethel Meserve, helped a huge amount with flyers and photos for this book. Though my favorite has to be the photos of The Van Pelt. They’re fucking beautiful and it takes me back to the 90s whenever I look at them. The photos help break up the text and help someone realize the physical nature of the years when we would save things and not just scroll through our phones for that one photo we wanted to share with someone at the bar that one time. Ha!

Man. It’s seriously hard to have this conversation and not get nostalgic for simpler times. We’re old, dude.

I don’t know, though. Something tells me…can’t quite put my finger on what, but something tells me there might be more books to come…maybe even volumes. How did you choose what/who went into this first and what’s to come in the next volume(s)?

Yes, there will be more. It was all about whether the first one was successful and I wanted to do it again. The goal of this is not to make money, the goal is to make enough from each one to make the next. I just want the stories to be heard by as many people as possible. I’m doing this out of my own pocket with no publisher so I only have that motivation and no other person telling me to do it another way. I picked the first batch to showcase the depth of the genre across the eras and each volume will hopefully take that same approach. You may pick it up for Chris Carrabba but then learn about Christie Front Drive.

So love Christie Front Drive. Who did your book design, though? We really dig the typography, color way, size/format.

Jesse Reed did the design of the book. He’s a fucking genius and offered his time and support on how to make a book, which I had no clue about. It wouldn’t have happened without his help and I think he understood me completely after I spent a good fifteen minutes just spouting off about how I wanted it to look. He came back with comps of what the cover may look like and I was floored. It was exactly what was in my head.

I know it’s tough—akin to picking a favorite kid—but short of picking a favorite interview you’ve done over the years, can you call one out that was unexpectedly weirder or more interesting than you’d expected going in?

I, unfortunately, did Jon Bunch‘s last interview. Many know him from Sense Field but he was in countless bands and I was promoting one of them when we did the interview. Since the interviews are evergreen, I had the interview all edited up and found out that he had killed himself. I then had to go back and re-edit it because of things said about the future, meeting up, etc. It was heartbreaking and something I wasn’t happy about but I knew I had to do it. These were his last words about music and I had to do it justice. We ended up interviewing people at the benefit show a few months after and made an episode of all the fans, friends and band members talking about Jon. I had a tough time editing that and felt good after. I was giving this person the respect they deserved for their musical life. No matter what happened in their life and why they did what they did, I hope the music and his words live on.

God, I remember when you posted that. I never knew him, but by all accounts, he was a great guy. That was evident from afar by the outpouring of emotion and support after his death. It’s such a tragic, sad thing, but its also really heartwarming to see how his fans and friends and family have turned this tragedy into an effort to support his son too with the GoFundMe campaign.

I have no elegant way of segueing from that, but I am wondering if you have any thoughts on all these old bands reuniting now? It’s hardly a phenomenon unique to emo, but that scene has scene a lot of seminal (and less well-known) bands return of late.

Reunions are as old as time. I love tweeting out, no band breaks up. It’s so true. I mean, Jawbreaker is back. I love it when bands get together and play shows for someone that maybe wasn’t around to see them or was too young or just missed them because they weren’t in a big city then. If they’re doing it, most likely for money and to see their friends again, then hats off to them. If people show up, who cares. Shut up and play the hits.

Fair enough. Any favorites you’ve caught? I’ll say outta the gate that our mutual pick (between Katie and me) was the aforementioned Christie Front Drive at the Bell House some years back.

Christie Front Drive was fucking amazing. Eric Richter (of Christie Front Drive), featured in the first volume of the book, is responsible for so many bands connecting. He’s an unsung hero of the scene that deserves a lot more respect than he gets. It’s tough to say which ones over the years because I’ll inevitably forget one… If I had to choose right now… Refused, Boys Life, Mineral, American Football, Quicksand, and Texas is the Reason.

Totally solid picks. I wish I’d caught Mineral.

Not to seek out shade, but what’s your thought on new, younger bands coming out with sounds that are more-or-less mirroring what we heard in 90s emo?

What’s interesting is most bands don’t fucking realize it. They’re just making loud music and figuring it out. It just happens to sound like the 90s. Truthfully, some are referencing that era but most aren’t. They’re just in the basement figuring it out. That’s the beauty of music that I love and it always inspires me to answer an email to a band that sends me their site and asks me to listen. I have to because that next sound may be the next thing I get sent and I want to hear it and champion it. Music is still so important to me—all I want to do is share with someone that I heard something amazing and I have to share it. I just have to do it. So when I hear a band like Free Throw or Foxing or Hotelier, all I want to do is encourage them to make more music and to create more—to make that next great album regardless of the era. I think the kids have realized the earnestness of the 90s and skipped over the hair metal era of emo in the 00s. They saw how fleeting it was and superficial it was sounding. They went back to the drawing board and figured it out. I can’t wait to hear the next thing I click on or hear in a club…

That’s super-encouraging to hear and, yeah, I love that the ‘new’ emo sounds like what I’d consider to be the good stuff, not the ‘mall emo’.

Back to the book though, I know you’re doing your release at Donut Friend Thursday—any other book events planned around the country we can shout out?

Yes! We have another event in Brooklyn at Powerhouse Books in Dumbo on the 12th of January. An actual bookstore! Growing up, the bookstore was the toy store for me. It had every topic I could think of the shelves and I could peruse anything. Growing up, my dad would always let me run wild in the bookstore and I was able to figure out what I liked and disliked because of his encouragement to read. That’s still with me today. Unfortunately, my dad passed away in late 2016, but the thought of him seeing a book I made and then having an event at a bookstore, I know for a fact, he’s looking down smiling.

As for the NYC event, I’ll be selling the book and doing a little panel discussion/Q&A with Norman from Texas is the Reason, Chris from The Van Pelt and William from Rainer Maria. It should be fun and I can’t believe I get to do this.

Yeah, condolences again about your dad, Tom. Excited to see you again tomorrow at the event.

Speaking of Donut Friend, favorite donut there, either in name or culinary composition?

I love the Jimmy Eat Swirl and the Jets to Basil. Classics. Mark Trombino, a legend already, has made an amazing product and I’m so happy it’s successful.

Awesome, man. Thanks again for talking and see you Thursday.

If you’re an emo fan and in Los Angeles tomorrow (Thursday, Jan4), you’d be a fool not to come by Donut Friend in Highland Park from 7-9PM for some mingling, emo music, and excellent, post-hardcore donuts (most of which are vegan/vegan-ize-able, by the way).

Say what you will about 2017—It was the dumpster fire to end all dumpster fires; It was the emotional and cultural equivalent of a massive slap-to-the-face/sledgehammer-to-the-soul; It was a waking nightmare that continues to somehow get worse every fucking day but 2018 will be better right right RIGHT‽

Well. Anyway. Say what you will, but this year was a fantastic year for music. Film, writing, art-as-escape and -critical-change tool in general, yes very much, but here on these pages we’re focusing on 2017 in music; specifically, the year’s best albums.

Maybe it’s that aforementioned slap-to-the-face wake-up-call, but it seems like more artists are making more excellent work than ever and, as a result, our long list of top albums was longer than ever this year.

So many artists made albums in 2017 that we consider to be superb—Phoebe Bridgers, Broken Social Scene, Grizzly Bear, Lawrence Rothman, Ella Vos, Shout Out Louds, Cymbals, and Baths, just to scratch the surface. And Sampha‘s debut full-length Process was a beautifully innovative masterpiece that very nearly bumped more than one album off this list, which isn’t much of a surprise given that artist’s talent and creativity. What was a surprise for us was the eventual omission of new albums from two of our all-time favorite artists—The National + Björk. We still hold both artists in very high esteem and truly love their music, but something about both respective releases just didn’t strike the chord they usually do with us; which is totally fine—it makes room for so much more new music, much of it from very new artists for us.

As with last year, we’re presenting this year’s top ten chronologically, in order of release date…which oddly resulted in a noticeably split-down-the-middle list of, first, bigger (or at least better known) releases followed by smaller, more independent releases, with three of our ten being self-released (granted, one of them’s LCD Soundsystem, but nonetheless).

This playlist is a mix between favorite songs from each of these favorite albums and ones that work together on the same playlist and in this self-imposed order of release date, so, enjoy—it is indeed made to be listened to as a whole—but we also encourage you to listen to each and every one of these ten albums—they’re, every one, beautiful beginning-to-end.

And happy fucking new year.

Kendrick Lamar • DAMN. • Aftermath/Interscope
We’re guessing someone out there has a best-of 2017 list that doesn’t include this album, but if it exists, we haven’t seen it yet; and with good reason—DAMN. is razor-sharp smart, fucking catchy as hell, and demands to be listened to, word-for-word. And Lamar’s live show will blow up your brain.

Sylvan Esso • What Now • Loma Vista
We love these guys. Not only do they create organic, well-written electronic music that puts song-writing, vocals, and lyrics front-and-center, they just seem like genuinely nice people. And, oh yeah, their music is the best. See above re: excellent shows that explode minds.

SZA • Ctrl • Top Dawg
Jersey’s SZA blind-sided us in the best way possible—we knew she was someone to watch after first hearing her single “Drew Barrymore” but we had no idea what an amazing piece of work she’d put together with Ctrl; astounding from track one to fourteen.

The War on Drugs • A Deeper Understanding • Atlantic
We know full well there are haters out there, but we will defend this band and this album wholeheartedly as one of our favorites to our dyings days. Yes, A Deeper Understanding looks to music of years past, but it does it in a way to pushes forward into something new and—for us—genuinely endearing and innovative. We bought the album just before a trip back east and will forever associate with long drives through the weirdly beautiful swamps of southern North Carolina, which seems oddly fitting.

LCD Soundsystem • american dream • Excelsior Equity Management
Sonic Mastermind and King of Tonality James Murphy returns, and thank fucking god he has; this albums everything we want and need—the repetitive hooks that wedge their way into your subconscious, the monotonous talk-singing that approaches annoying and then pushes through into fundamentally real and undeniably beautiful, the tiny, weird little subtleties and shifts in sound that only someone with Murphy’s level of aural OCD would bother with; and all that while tackling aging and death and our socio-political climate. Thank god for James Murphy; more accurately, thank David Bowie.

Wild Cub • Closer • Mom+Pop
Wild Cub frontman Keegan DeWitt jumped on our radar back in 2011, after we stumbled upon some of his excellent solo work and discovered we had some good friends in common. We were fans from the start and have seen incarnations of his bands nearly every year since; this new from his Nashville-based band seems to be striking the perfect balance, pulling from DeWitt’s distinct, deep past writing style and building it into  something new and stronger as a whole—perfect dancing-in-your-bedroom-pop.

Vilde • Study / Dance • VILDE/self-released
Melbourne’s Vilde (AKA Thomas Vilde) is a totally random Soundcloud find for us, but one that strikes the perfect chord for us—glitchy, hyper melodic electronics melding with intimately weird vocals and distinct rhythms. We’ve said it before, we’ll say it again: Melbourne’s electronic scene is blowingthefuckup—Vilde’s one of our favorite new artists jettisoning out of that explosion of creativity.

Luwten • Luwten • Double For Me/self-released
Amsterdam’s Luwten prove’s the perfect balance of analog and digital for us—singer-songwriter-y arrangements put to softly played, gently sung acoustics paired with beautifully explorative electronics and rhythms that step into something new altogether. Read our interview with frontwoman Tessa Douwstra from early this year, wherein we falsely accuse her band name of being intrinsically dishonest.

Hanne Hukkelberg • Trust • Propeller
We generally avoid comparing artists, but this album filled a certain void left by the aforementioned Björk release this year—Norwegian musician Hanne Hukkelberg is weird in the most compelling way possible for us, pitch-blending vocals, glitchy electronics, elements of hip hop, and natural sounds into an unlikely amalgamation that we can’t stop listening to.

Liima • 1982 • City Slang
Liima is a band born of Mads Brauer, Casper Clausen, and Rasmus Stolberg of longtime favorite Danish trio Efterklang and Finnish percussionist Tatu Rönkkö. Efterklang has evolved from minimalist electronic musicians to choral folk group to high-art-opera-writers over the years (all incarnations well-worth checking out), but this newish incarnation of the group with Rönkkö delves into the hyper-melodic electronic, glancing back at the early eighties in style but morphing into something newly beautiful in form—these guys can do no wrong by us. And this track we feature is a great example of highlighting a song we love, but one that we primarily thinks fits this mix best—there are others that even more amazing. With this and all these albums, again, please listen to them all in full.

Thanks and, again, happy new year, all.

As all of us in Southern California remain on edge with multiple wildfires raging in the region, NASA Astronaut Randy “Komrade” Bresnik shares terrifyingly stunning photos of the fires taken from the International Space Station (as first seen by us via Daily Overview).

Stay safe, SoCal, and hope for rain and calmer winds.

As is pretty well-documented on these pages, we like what do a lot. ‘Making the world a prettier place’—as we put it in our bio—by creating what we consider to be strong design for clients working for progressive causes is a pretty great way to spend your days so far as we can tell.

But when it comes down to, no matter how great the client and how great the work, sometimes you just want to do something for yourself, you know? We started to realize this with our holiday cards especially, as we became aware that we started to look forward to the work involved in making them every year; they scratched an itch in a way that other work didn’t and struck us as something that was very “us” in form and style and inspiration—something we controlled from start-to-finish, which we really liked.

So we started brainstorming other projects in that ilk and arrived at large scale illustrations of Los Angeles’ famed mountain lion, P-22. We’ve always been fascinated by the dichotomy between the heavily developed, urban nature of Los Angeles and its wild side—at 4,210 acres, Griffith Park is one of the largest parks within city borders in the United States. Our neighborhood runs right up against the park and, from the roving packs of coyotes to the red tail hawks seen soaring overhead, the feral side of the city is constantly on display for us. No single animal better represents that schizophrenic LA strangeness than our neighbor, P-22, who mysteriously and safely somehow traversed multiple freeways to make his way to Griffith years back and, up until recently, enjoyed a solitary existence as the only panther in the park.

With holiday cards, one of us (Troy) focuses on the image illustration and the other (Katie) focuses on the custom typography; with these prints, Troy’s still focusing on image illustration and we’re employing set typography for the text in our design, which we had printed by the same letterpress company we use for our cards. In this case, they printed on 13″x19″ fluorescent white 300GSM, heavyweight cotton rag stock using their large-scale cylinder press for a high-quality, archival style print with a nice, noticeable feel and impression on the paper. We had a limited run of 100 made and Katie’s been hand-watercoloring them one-by-one; each totally different, each totally unique, and each numbered and signed by the two of us.

To date, we’ve only had the prints for sale in some local shops we love—namely, The Canyon in Franklin Village, Los Angeles County Store in Los Feliz/Silver Lake, and MooShoes Los Angeles (which, full disclosure, we run). You can still get the prints at those fine shops, but, as of today, we’re also taking orders ourselves via email and through our socials (mainly Instagram), billing via PayPal, and shipping them straight to your doorstep. Because we love you.

In honor of P-22 and keeping LA wild, we’re also donating 10% of our total proceeds to CLAW—Citizens for Los Angeles Wildlife—a local non-profit working to protect and restore wildlife environments in Los Angeles and California. Their mission is to promote, educate, and protect the fundamental importance of wildlife, wildlife habitats, and wildlife corridors everywhere. You can find out more about their work work and how to get involved on their site.

So, if you’re interested in buying a print for yourself or as a gift, email us or message us through IG and let us know if you have any painting preferences—colors, painting inside and/or outside the panther form, that kind of thing. We obviously can’t honor every request exactly, per se, given the nature of the process, but we’ll do our best. We’re selling them for $48, will write you back with shipping options once you give us your zip code, and then send an invoice through PayPal.

Thanks for helping us keep LA wild!

We now actually own 0.000667% of a parcel of land along the US-Mexico border.

How did this come to pass, you ask? Well, I got this email—no, no, it’s not what you think! This is legit! Ish!

Said email was from the people behind Cards Against Humanity, a self-described “party game for horrible people”, and it went something like this: America is being run by a toilet…blah blah blah….give us $15 and we’ll send you six surprises in the mail AND we’ll save America. Sounds like a no-brainer, right? I KNOW! So I did what any rational capitalist still climbing out of the post-election nightmare-slumber would do—I gave my hard-earned money to strangers promising unspecified gifts and seemingly unattainable goals. Because I’m an America, goddammit.

Yesterday we received the first of three surprises in the mail—a fairly fat business envelope containing the following:
• A very witty letter explaining that my money had been used to purchase land along the border in order to throw up as many legal barriers as possible to building this ridiculous wall between the United States and Mexico;
• A very lawyer-y letter from the law firm retained by Cards Against Humanity—Graves, Dougherty, Hearon, & Moody—explaining the exact legal mechanics and tactics to be used in impeding the construction of said ridiculous wall;
•  An official certificate of ownership;
• Six new, thematic cards for the actual game, Cards Against Humanity; and
• An awesome map of “the land”, illustrated by Dav Yendler.

Cards Against Humanity is going all in. And we love it. We need more of this as we all march and run for office and put our creativity to good use; as we collectively crawl out of the mucky haze that is post-2016-election America and work for what I honestly believe will be a better America than it would have been if Trump had not been elected to office; as we’re shaken from a slumber and realize that we not only can make a difference in our country, we must. We’re the ones that are going to make America great again, asshole.

We likely won’t post more about this awesome—let’s be honest—gimmick on these pages, but you can always check our Instagram feed and stories. I’m sure they surprises to come will end up there.

And we’ll leave you with the postscript from CAH’s letter of explanation:

“Since the Trump administration is committed to using 12th-century military technology, we have responded in kind by building a 30-foot trebuchet, a medieval catapult designed to destroy walls, on the border. We paid 300 gold to increase its attack damage, so it’s very powerful. You can see a video of our medieval war machinery in action at CardsAgainstHumanityStopsTheWall.com.”

See, mom—Dungeons & Dragons nerds won’t become Satanists! They’ll save the world!

And now we’re finally property-owners!

I totally thought I was over Baths (the Los Angeles electronic artist, Will Wiesenfeld, born April 16, 1989; not the process of immersing and washing one’s body in a large container of water—that, I love). I was pretty obsessed with his 2013 album, Obsidian, but as time wore on, the songs started to rub me the wrong way for some weird reason. Maybe I was too obsessed with the album; like that summer in middle school that I had to make lunch for my brother and myself and relied solely on Chef Boyardee because who doesn’t love canned beef ravioli every day for three months, right‽ Turns out maybe you can have too much of a good thing. Regardless, I went into Baths’ new album, Romaplasm, with a pretty skeptical point of view, ready to not like it right off the bat. Dude showed me. Even if Wiesenfeld’s voice isn’t 100% your thing, his musical intuition is fucking phenomenal—it was tough for me to narrow the tracks I liked down to just one to feature on this month’s mixtape and I’m excited to give the whole album repeated listens. You win this round, Wiesenfeld. You win this round.

This month’s mix (our last before next month’s year-ending best of) kicks off with a track from another local artist though—Echo Park’s Line and Circle, who gently ease us into the mix with their rolling, driving track “Man Uncouth”. Chilean band Breaking Forms follows that with their sparkling “Carnival” before we hit “Out” by the aforementioned Baths’, a song that anxiously celebrates going out and coming out with gloriously glitchy melodies and rhythms.

This mix also features some wonderful melancholic dance tracks (kinda the best kind of dance tracks) from Melbourne duo Kllo (who we first featured last August), Canadian band Young Galaxy, and Australia’s Airling (AKA Hannah Shepherd). PS—we just did the math, and almost every mixtape this year features one to two Australian artists. What is going on down there?

We’ve got a new one from deadpan new wave Norwegians Klanstof, a veerrryy chill track from NYC’s Folie, and even more chillness from Bogota’s excellent Ela Minus; some buoyant pop from Portland, Oregon’s Jessica Boudreaux of Summer Cannibals  and Nashville’s Jessie Early; a song that’s equally soulful and hopeful—”Start Again”, by London’s Roseau and the less hopeful but equally soulful “Good Plan, Sweetheart” from enigmatic flower-faced Cincinnatian Nova Moura.

Finally, we’re ending things off with two pretty epic songs—the droning, rhythmically driving “The One to Wait” by Northwestern musical collaborative CCFX and the hauntingly beautiful “Black Fly” by Circuit Des Yeux, AKA Chicago-based musician Haley Fohr, who plays Resident in Los Angeles’ Arts District in January. My guess is that her live show is equally epic.

That’s it—hope everyone enjoys and, as always, support the art and artists you love by following, buying, and loving them back.

We love a good party. And what better reason to celebrate and come together with friends and family than a wedding?

Friends and collaborators Paul and Mary reached out to us a while back about having us create a non-traditional wedding invitation for their equally non-traditional wedding reception. The result was this screen-printed 13×19 poster, themed—as was the reception—along the lines of an old-timey circus. The party itself, held on an old ranch in the mountains of Malibu, boasted traditional carts for popcorn, pretzel, and cotton candy vendors, a tuk tsk (Indian auto rickshaw) the couple rode in on accompanied by a hybrid jazz-Indian baraat, and an actual Ferris wheel, so, needless to say, the invitation to this celebration needed to communicate its epic, carnival-like nature.

Mary + Paul asked us to include illustrations of circus/carnival imagery such as clowns, elephants, lions (“Singh” is Sanskrit for “lion”), and the starburst pattern often used in posters like this, but also wanted to include traditional Indian themes and some of the elements present at the reception itself (Ferris wheel + tuk tuk) and their dog, Michael Corleone.

We took all of this inspiration and content and translated it into a cohesive look by giving everything an engraving feel before sending the files off to a Los Angeles-based screen-printer. The final three-color print included a pass of gold ink with metallic flecks for that extra touch of flare.

You can see more of our wedding and event invitation work in our design portfolio. And, as we always tell our clients, it’s not 100% necessary to invite us to the parties and events we design for, but, again, we do love a good party.

Mazel tov, Mary + Paul!

Bringing you a spookily good mixtape this October with tracks from largely new or new-to-us artists, all of whom we’re really excited about, starting off with Leila Gharib’s Sequoyah Tiger of Verona, Italy, an artist whose debut full-length on favorite Morr Music shows her trekking back and forth between experimental vocal-forward pop and stripped-down retro-weird electronic music of the best kind. We’d highly recommend giving the just-released album, Parabolabandit, a listen through. Following that, we’ve got a known favorite and top contender for album-of-the-year, SZA, with one of her poppier songs, “Prom” (PS—check out her site if you haven’t already; pretty awesome interactive concept). Then we’re featuring a slew of artists and tracks we discovered recently, largely through random Soundcloud exploration, including the excellent Melbourne-born, Stockholm-based electronic artist VILDE (née Thomas Vilde); Amsterdam’s duo Cut_; beautifully sombre electronic pop from England’s Art School Girlfriend; and the polar opposite—upbeat, R+B-tinged pop from Seattle trio The Flavr Blue.

Bordeaux, France’s Pendentif return with their trademark laid-back lounge pop; then we’ve got some great, rolling, breezy pop from Milwaukee’s GGOOLLDD, a hooky track from the all-too-aptly-named Los Angeles duo Smoke Season, and an awesome song from Melbourne duo ALTA that’s almost entirely percussion and vox. Seriously, the scene in Melbourne is insane lately.

While we’re on the topic of insanity, the new full-length from Norwegian musical child prodigy and ex-doom metal band member Hanne Hukkelberg is testing the limits of both what our sane minds can comprehend and how much we can enjoy music—it’s truly a magical album and another top contender this year. We follow a favorite track of Hukkelberg’s with a favorite from the (rightly) highly lauded French-Cuban musical duo Ibeyi, written after a 16-year-old Lisa-Kaindé of the duo was wrongfully arrested by the French police.

Ending the mixtape, we’ve got a really lovely new song we can’t stop listening to from Bristol-based Elder Island, a beautiful and poppier track from Icelandic/NYC-based composer and musician Úlfur, and, to finish things out, a slightly psychedelic, math-y track from Leeds band The Golden Age of TV.

Enjoy and, as always, support the bands you like here and local record stores alike—they all keep life beautiful.

It’s hard to say for sure where I first heard the band Lali Puna. It could have been a friend’s recommendation in the 90s or the ever-influential Other Music newsletter (RIP), where I got so many of my musical finds in those days. Regardless though, the German band struck a chord with me on first listen and demonstrated a depth and organic, layered approach that I didn’t know could exist in electronic music. After seven years of inactivity, Lali Puna recently returned to the scene with an album full of new material, Two Windows, that sounds at the same time true-to-form and explorative. I recently got the chance to speak with Lali Puna frontwoman Valerie Trebeljahr about the new album, art, and—as is so on the minds of late—the state of the world. Also, Katy Perry. Read on and give a listen to album excerpts below.

Two Windows by Lali Puna

raven + crow: Alright, I’m afraid I have to start with straight-up unadulterated praise and fanboy-dom—basically, your band and Björk are responsible for my longstanding love of electronic music and the realization in the late 90s that it could be much more than vocal-less house music thumpers (not that there’s anything wrong with those). So, first, thank you. Can you take us back, say, 19 years and talk a little bit about Lali Puna forming and what the scene was like then?

Valerie Trebeljahr: Oh, thanks a lot!! Björk was really important for me too. But I guess she was for everyone. 

I started to record as Lali Puna after my all-girl-group L.B.Page dissolved. I couldn’t play a real instrument like guitar or whatever. I just had a few years of piano lessons as a child. So I had a Korg Delta, which is a really nice old synthesizer, a drumcomputer (lent to me by my flat-mate) and a four-track. It was this DIY-time, everybody was in a band or had a label. So the first four songs I’d ever written were pressed on vinyl.

Man, now I have to try to find some L.B. Page archives somewhere. So, your last album—Our Inventions—was in 2010, I think; was there a deliberate or formal band break-up of sorts afterwards or did things just move in different directions in life for everyone?

We didn’t really talk about it in the band. But there was a point when I decided that I would stop making music and do what everybody expected me to do: Take care of the family, do a real job.

Well then what brought about the return with this new album some seven years later? Whose idea was that and what made now feel like the right time for it?

We got this invitation to play in Korea. And as I was born there (I am adopted), I always wanted to visit Korea. So we did this project. And I found out that I really missed making music. Markus and me then seperated and I thought I really have to do this, I want to record an album. So I slept less and wrote songs.

Where does the name of the album, Two Windows, come from?

The title Two Windows refers to a childrens’ book from the seventies by Maurice Sendak. It’s about Jennie, a dog, who leaves home. The plant says: You got two windows. I just have one. You have everything. But Jennie leaves home to be what she wants to be. It’s a strange and really great book—not really a childrens book. Some critic wrote it’s about a dog with a midlife crisis. I think it’s about empancipation. Maybe it’s both!

Oh, I’d never heard of that book. Big fan of Where the Wild Things Are, though…again, like Björk, who isn’t? And who did the art for the album?

The cover art was done by Catrin Sonnabend. I absolutely love the cover she’s done, because it is so very clear and focused. The photo was taken by my friend Patrick Morarescu. I had done photos with him for Scary World Theory. We tested a lot of things and buggered around, it was really fun doing these photos. He had this slide with the two colours, red and blue, and we used it as a projection. So Catrin and Patrick are resonsible for this cover.

Nice. Just took a look at Catrin’s portfolio via her site—really like her stuff. Patrick’s too.

I was happy to read in Two Windows’ press release something along the lines of ‘Yes, Lali Puna’s sound has changed; how could it not have when the world’s changed so much’ (to paraphrase). I think that gave light to something I believe but have never verbalized properly—that, when these bands reunite or just come back on the scene after so much time and sound exactly the same, I personally find myself strangely disappointed or just not into it, regardless of how much I loved that exact sound, say, ten years ago; My Bloody Valentine, the Pixies, American Football, so many bands for me. Was your music’s evolution intentional and planned or was the resulting sound so many years later more naturally arrived at than that?

Oh, today I read a review saying “Lali Puna sound exactly the same like seven years ago!” And believe me, I tried my best not to. But I also didn’t want to make an experimental noise-album or imitate Katy Perry. I think in the end it’s about credibility. Maybe this album doesn’t sound like it, but for me it’s such a major step in gaining self-confidence. This is the first album where everything is exactly the way I wanted it to be. I am so very happy I could do this album.

That’s really awesome to hear and, honestly, it does sound so different to me—in a great way though. I do have to say, I would love to hear your take on Katy Perry nonetheless.

I know you personally have done a lot of collaborative work in the past, singing on other artists’ tracks, but this is the first time I’ve seen numerous artists featured as collaborations on a proper Lali Puna album. Was that just something that made this new project seem more fun or do-able at this stage?

I am not good in working alone. In the beginning you think: Wow, I can do whatever I want. But after a time I need someone to talk about the song, I need other input. Maybe I am too limited, I don’t know. So I thought it would be great to do a collaboration album. I started to ask friends or people I liked to send me stuff. And I was always on top of the world when I got something. But, a collaboration album takes YEARS. So I wrote the rest of the songs alone. And then Taison (Christian Heiß) and me sat a long, long time in the studio and worked everything out and Caspar (Christoph Brandner) played some drums. So Lali Puna is still a band although I often just talk of myself—that’s a bit embarrasing.

Funny. Yeah, I’d personally never had much of a read on Lali Puna as a band vs more of a solo project. Sounds like it’s a bit of both.

So, lyrically, I feel like there’s exploration of the world in more cultural or societal or even political terms than I’m used to from you all—first, would you say that’s accurate and, if so, is that a product of these times and what’s going in the world?

I don’t know. It’s very personal at the same time, it’s just that I tried to combine that with a sort of a political sense. Or the other way round. I think one of the topics that is really important to me is that nothing is really private anymore. You think it’s your Facebook account. But of course it isn’t. It’s owned by Facebook. You get the right advertisement. Etc etc. Most of the people don’t care, big data whatever. But after Twitter-Trump we see: We better watch out.

Yeah, no kidding. I know I’m not alone in looking to our artists for insight into larger ideas or trends in the world—do you have any sage words to help put things in perspective? There seems to be so much violence and hate in the world and it seems so much more “allowed” than it used to be, in my lifetime, at least. Do you think art and artists have a responsibility to address these kind of issues?

I regulary work as a journalist for a small cultural and political radiomagazine. And I often walked home and felt so bad, like I nearly fainted. But what I came to understand after two years of being sort of “down and out” is that we have no other choice than to start to believe that things will get better. I was such a pessimist my whole life—it’s so easy. It’s so easy to say to all the activists, you are naive. But you probably need a bit naivity to make things better.

I don’t know if artists have a political responsibility. I like a lot of “unpolitical” music. But when I read an interview I always want to sort of learn something. How she or he did stuff, handled problems, sees the world. So artists have at least the responsibiliy to not talk shit, haha.

Fair enough! How are things in Germany these days? We get alternating impressions of a liberal paradise under Merkel and a nation that’s not so foreign to us in terms of societal tensions on the rise.

Politics can be really strange: Almost nobody—except the Greeks—will remember that everybody hated Merkel, at leat in the European Union. That was before Trump, before Brexit, before the refugee crisis, before the series of terrorist attacks in Europe. Now she seems like a solid rock, but what we shouldn’t forget is that the social gap is rising—and Merkel does not care.

Thats sounds all too familiar, sadly. Back to the music though—are there any new or lesser known bands in Germany or elsewhere that you’re liking a lot of late?

Well, the bad thing about doing a record is that you listen to your own stuff a lot. So that didn’t give me much time to search for new music. A few months ago I saw a DJ-set from Helena Hauff and that was fascinating. I also like what she does on recordings. She comes from Hamburg, which is where the other artist I also liked very much in the last months comes from: Sophia Kennedy. But they are both well known, so that doesn’t answer your question properly!

Shows what I know—I hadn’t heard of either! Finally, though, I know you’re touring to support the album in Europe; any plans to come to the States?

We would love to…But it’s really difficult for european bands to tour in the US, because Visa and flights are extremly expensive. We would have to become enormously famous, right now I can’t see that!

Damn Visas! We’ll just have to work on the enormous fame then!

You can listen to excerpts from Lali Puna’s new album, Two Windows, above; you can download the album or order it via the band’s BandCamp page and by way of your favorite physical or digital record store.

Feature photo by Patrick Morarescu; band photo below by Bernd Bergmann.

This month’s mixtape again dances on the line that divides somber and celebratory, easing into the whole thing with a beautiful new track by Los Angeles-based producer Nosaj Thing and his track “Way We Were”, featuring NYU Clive Davis grad Zuri Marley (granddaughter of that Marley). We’re following that with another Angeleno, Lawrence Rothman, and his addictive, 80s-tinged break-out “Wolves Still Cry”. The video for the track is a dreamy dancing ode to LA that’s worth a watch; we’re excited for this multi-faceted (literally; check his site) artist’s full album too, out October 13th. And keeping things local, we follow that with a great, brand new track from Los Angeles songstress VIAA.

Moving across the pond, we’ve got the unstoppable just-out single from a little artist named Banks; a wonderfully washed out song from Vancouver’s The Belle Game; a hook-filled track from Milwaukee duo Reyna; a new single from a favorite, Nordic band Liima (who had one of our favorite albums last year and who’s currently supporting Grizzly Bear in Europe); new wave R+B from Savannah’s BOSCO; a couple compellingly glitchy tracks from Melbourne’s Life is Better Blonde and Chicago’s Glances; a really nice song from Sydney’s Annie Bass (Sydney and Melbourne’s respective music scenes are so on fire these days); and not-so-new but can’t-get-it-out-of-heads one from Khalid (who’s so cool his middle name is actually ‘Legend’ and he doesn’t even use it).

We’re finishing up with Danish band CHINAH, another one from New Zealand’s ives. (who we featured in last September’s mix), and British duo Mount Kimbie featuring longtime favorite experimental artist Micachu.

Enjoy! And, speaking of cool videos, the one for The Belle Game’s “Spirit” is pretty stellar—it features India’s last remaining female “Well of Death” rider; check it out below.