I’ll be returning to the WCDB airwaves on the morning of Sunday, May 20. My new timeslot: 10am-noon Sundays! I hope you’ll join me… I love sharing music, even when I didn’t write it.

Still no word on whether the radio station will be open for overnight broadcasting. This is such a cowardly move by the UAlbany administration, and its timing is so suspect… handing down this “punishment” right before summer break is the equivalent of announcing bad news on a Friday. If these “Student Success” clowns think people are just going to forget and get over it, they’re as stupid as they are out of touch.

To their credit, the station staff has kept up the pressure and a ruling is supposedly forthcoming. Let’s watch closely.

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I want to thank the folks who bought Sevendys merch this past week to help with Chuck Rainey’s medical bills – very cool and generous of you guys. I’ve forwarded the proceeds right on to Chuck with my match, and I’ll keep the program going until further notice.

Again, if you would like to donate to Chuck directly, you can do so here.

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My next album is on track for a July release; I hope to make it available on CD and vinyl at that time. It’s twelve songs and seven are mixed. All but one are with the mix engineer, Pete deBoer, and he’s wrapping them up very efficiently.

It’s a weird record. The upbeat songs are very upbeat and the sad songs are very sad. I previewed the rough album for a friend and she cried at the end. Like real tears and everything. I thought it was maybe because she couldn’t stand to listen anymore – which was okay at that point because the record was over – but she said it was because the last two songs were that upsetting.

So I apologize in advance for whatever this album does to you.

Eschatone’s distributor requires a few months to properly set up an album, so while I’ll make it available here in all formats July, I would assume it won’t be in stores (if there still are actual record stores) until the fall. Not that this matters to you since you’ll be getting it the day I put it up on my site, right?

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I got Eschatone Records a PO box in Albany today. We’ll be closing down the New York City address and preparing our next round of releases as a bonafide 518 operation. I’m excited to be back with the company; I withdrew from the partnership in 2009 and returned late last year.

We have a plan and some really crazy stuff lined up to release this fall and winter. We’ll be experimenting with formats. We’ll be working with artists whose music will shock you. And we’ll be working with artists whose names will shock you, because you’ll be like How the fuck did they get that guy?

One genre into which I am excited to expand Eschatone is noise. I’ve been dabbling with Avi in our Space Toilets project… it’s fun and visceral, and the recordings, as abstract as they are, really do manage to say something. I think noise can be the ultimate musical metaphor – all feeling, no context, a direct emotional transmission. We’ll be putting out some stuff from Maryland’s Pregnant Spore; I am always surprised at how listenable his work is, and how much it communicates.

Thus even as Eschatone brings you new folk from Brian Dewan, it shall also put out staticky scrapey instrumental noise.

Come to think of it… there is an artist – a guitarist – whose work has long bridged the gap between the two; we’ve got him also. To be announced.

We started Eschatone Records officially in 2006 – LB, Crazee Joe and me. My cousin declared himself our lawyer, drew up the papers and filed them all wrong, then we filed them again on our own. We signed some bands to a record contract that was one page long and then blew all the money we had on them. Most of those bands broke up; then the music business collapsed; then the economy collapsed. And here we are!

I still wouldn’t trade the experience. We learned a lot and along the way helped midwife some great albums into the world. It was worth doing… and I think it still is.

I resigned my position at Eschatone in 2009. Wasn’t thrilled about it, but we felt my presence on “the board” was a conflict of interest since I was aiming to release a ton of music through the label – everything I had spent years pushing back so we could put out stuff by other people. Eschatone released I AM JED DAVIS! that year, followed by “Yuppie Exodus From Dumbo”, Celebration Party! and The Cutting Room Floor in fairly rapid succession. Then I decided to draw down a bit music-wise, concentrate on Sevendys and my monthly independent singles, and circumstances were such that I was able to return to the company.

But what could I do there in 2011? Nobody wants physical manifestations of music anymore. And anyone can distribute music digitally. Even stuff we developed for our website, like the ability to package digital downloads with multi-option physical products like t-shirts (unfathomable when we implemented it in 2007 – there was not a single shopping cart system that could handle it!), is now being done better by awesome sites like Bandcamp.

And the whole nature of interaction and information gathering on the Web has changed. Interested persons – of which there are fewer than you think – now learn about your project from third-party gatekeepers and then get the latest info about it from Facebook and Twitter feeds, which in turn help you aggregate fans and keep in touch with them. Loading up a remote homepage in the wilderness with features and minutia is kind of pointless. I’m not sure what the Eschatone website really needs besides the online store with streaming music, and YouTube, Facebook and Twitter links.

So many websites are now just CSS-treated WordPress blogs (for example, this one). I’m trying to reconcile that with necessity… most of the shit on the rhetorical you’s website is just not that important. Content is – if you’re a musician, you should have music; if you’re a writer, you should have writing; if you’re a visual artist, you should have artwork; if you have a piece of pertinent information that just can’t be found anyplace else, key word pertinent, then make it available. But – and I fall victim to this as much as anybody – the potential for self-deception is so high when you’re trying to imagine what people might be looking for when they visit your website.

I spent the weekend fucking around with the Eschatone Web situation… thinking about utility, but also design and color as I relocated the online store to the superior Bandcamp platform. I ran with bright colors on an almost-black blue background; extremely simple, with boundaries defined by text and the weight and color of that text – no lines, no boxes. The old site was all lines and boxes and dullish colors. It was sophisticated, very “grown-up”. I’d like something more whimsical this time around. The colorful little Eschatone omegas in the upper left corner remind me of those floating glowy* eyes you would see in old cartoons.

But no amount of design can redeem a pointless endeavor. So what can Eschatone do? And what can I do to help?

I have some ideas. Stay tuned!

(You can do so by becoming a fan of Eschatone Records on Facebook and following us on Twitter.)

*Dang, I love getting an opportunity to use the word “glowy” in a sentence.

All right! Busy couple of weeks as we count down to Michael Bassett on October 10 (and wax.on wax.off on November 14). I’ve been movin ahead with other projects to pass the time:

The Rebellion went into the studio a few days ago and cut six drum tracks for our digital EP. I can give you song titles: “Caught”, “Make My Heart Stop”, “You Are Boring The Shit Out Of Me”, “Photograph”, “Pop” and “The Day My Baby Broke My Heart”. As of now we are not naming the collection, though the “cover photo” we associate with it has words that I assume will become the de facto album title. We’re back at it in a couple of days; you can expect to hear the complete results in November and I’ll probably premiere a track or two here first.

I’ve also started moonlighting as a contributing editor for UGO, writing their coverage of the DC Comics series 52. Every week I do a plot synopsis of the latest issue; the 52 mini-site only launched last night and we’re already 13 weeks in, so I had to scribble out a few thousand words in a handful of days. It’s been a pleasure so far, mostly because 52 is such a fun read. Hopefully my recaps can bring a little of that across.

After six months of grueling setup, Eschatone Records is ready. Our first release: Michael Bassett’s puddleskinwaving, one of my all-time top-five albums, on October 10. It’ll be in stores nationwide, on all the radio stations that matter, and Mike will be touring in support.

The puddleskinwaving packaging has been completely refurbished – we turned up all kinds of cool stuff that wasn’t in Mike’s original self-release. Want to see the album cover? Okay:

The US debut from German punks wax.on wax.off, A Lecture on Geek Mythology, follows on November 14. Not only does this album kick like a motherfucker, but Eschatone’s own Brian Dewan provides the cover art! At this label, we got each other’s backs.

That last sentence really sums up the experience of starting up this company. It’s been a shitload of work, but really beautiful. Eschatone is one of my few musical endeavors where partners have supported me instead of fighting all the way. The result: with everyone pulling in the same direction, we’ve gone from an idea to a nationally-distributed record label with six great artists and a full promotion machine in just a few short months. We’ve done it fast but we’ve done it thoughtfully and we’ve done it right. I feel like I can pause here for a moment – just one – and congratulate Lisa, Joe and myself.

Okay, enough of that shit… back to work.

The Rebellion is only a couple days away from getting into the studio. All new material, including a couple songs so fresh I’m still shoring up holes in the verses. We plan on prereleasing the first six songs digitally this fall – in advance of a full-length CD next year.

Michael Bassett, The Visitors and wax.on wax.off will all be touring to promote their fall/winter Eschatone releases and The Rebellion will join each of them for select live dates! This is gonna be fun.