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Episode 1 serves as an intro to the podcast and what it's about.
In 2014, after watching the TV show "Twin Peaks" for the first time, I got in touch with Phil Elverum, a music artist who's work has referenced the show and been a constant backdrop to my life.
We also got to talking about his life. In 2001, he made a record called "the Glow Part 2" under the name the Microphones that catapulted him into the pantheon of modern indie rock. Then he disappeared for a while, moved back to the place where he grew up and took its name as his new project, Mount Eerie.
Struck by some of these similarities (though I have yet to ascend into the pantheon of indie rock) I began to wonder if the way Phil makes sense of the world in his art––through the belief that it all originates from the mind (solipsism)––would also make for a better way to write and report on music.
the full episode is available here
https://soundcloud.com/brendanmattox-1/episode-1-between-two-elverums-mount-eerie
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Several weeks later, I turned 24 and found myself depressed and slipping back into a genre I used to listen to: Slowcore.
In college, I used to have these things I thought of as "Blue Periods" In music subculture, people who wear black all the time are often emulating goth and industrial fashion, but I was always too much a wimp for that and so I always wore blue. A softer form of depression.
Slowcore and the Blue Periods have a lot in common, mainly because they entered my life around the same time. My favorite album from this subgenre of a subgenre is called "Lowercase," by a band called Bluetile Lounge.
There was almost no information about the band out there, other than a few names, a place, and a time (Perth, 1995). Rather than transcribe the pile of audio I had from the Phil Elverum interview, I spent one January afternoon in 2015 tracking down the members to figure out who they were and what happened to them.
The story of how their album survived into the internet age to bring together me and one of my closest friends ended up being a kind of magical set of coincidences.
the full episode is available here
https://soundcloud.com/brendanmattox-1/episode-2-the-tragic-fate-of-all-hidden-scenes-bluetile-lounge
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In February 2015, I drove home from a friends apartment in downtown Philadelphia, feeling utterly displaced, wanting to tear the city apart, listening to an album called "Drifters/Love Is the Devil" by Dirty Beaches.
When I got home, I sent a message to Alex Zhang Hungtai, the man behind Dirty Beaches. I'd been trying to get a hold of for a few months without success, but finally, he agreed to an interview.
Alex had recently relocated to Los Angeles, so I sent an acquaintance of mine, a Venezuelan expat named Lorena Alvarado to do a tape synch. Lorena's visa was about to expire and like Alex, she was truly displaced.
full episode available here
https://soundcloud.com/brendanmattox-1/episode-3-alex-lorena-dirty-beacheslast-lizard
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August, 2013: I drove to Akron, Ohio, to meet a married couple who made music under the name of Trouble Books––my first story about music. As all of the sure things I had in my life seemed to be crumbling, I found myself drawn to the steady peace of theirs.
I began to question my ambitions about who I was and what I wanted to make.
full episode available here
https://soundcloud.com/brendanmattox-1/episode-4-a-story-about-the-trouble-books-part-i
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I spent the night in Keith and Linda's basement. Their life seemed so much better than what I was striving for. Meanwhile, Keith and Linda wrestled with their tumultuous transition into parenthood.
I decided to embrace my move home, and use it to figure out who I was and what I wanted.
full episode available here
https://soundcloud.com/brendanmattox-1/episode-5-a-story-about-the-trouble-books-part-ii
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In April of 2015, as I finished up my final revision of the Trouble Books story, my close friend Tyler (introduced in Episode 2) called to ask when the story I was producing about him would be done.
He was about to release his fourth album under the name Cloud, his first one on vinyl, and the debut for an Irish record label. I had felt this was a conflict of interest, but the more I worked on the story, the more I realized that it's my friendship with Tyler that first began to blur the lines between music, journalism, and my personal life.
full episode available here
https://soundcloud.com/brendanmattox-1/my-friend-tyler
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At the end of March, I went to see A Winged Victory for the Sullen to play with my girlfriend Michaela. Prior to (and just after) the show, I pulled strings with one of the few contacts I have in the music world to interview Dustin O'Halloran and Adam Wiltzie, the two formidable composers behind the project, and in between, slipped backwards in time to my second Blue Period, when I first began to reject the sad music I had built my life on.
available here:
https://soundcloud.com/brendanmattox-1/episode-7
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Two weeks later, in April, I conducted the last interview I would do for awhile, with Taraka Larson of the psychedelic, electronic, something duo Prince Rama. I had been trying to land an interview with her for a while to discuss her manifesto, The Now Age, which was the inspiration for everything that I had done.
Like Stories About Music, The Now Age was the product of an identity crisis Taraka had when her life had gotten out of hand, far afield from what she'd wanted or hoped for.
available here:
https://soundcloud.com/brendanmattox-1/episode-8
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Stories About Music is a podcast on the subjects of music, journalism, and memoir, and how the line between those three things is often not as clear as I'd hoped.
I moved home after college unsure of what I wanted to do with my Journalism degree (living in Boston during the bombing and its aftermath had caused a kind of existential crisis). I struggled to find work in radio, which is not unusual. Depressed by my lack of success, I turned my attention to music, the art form that I often turn to in my lowest moments.
released May 9, 2016
