Shoebox Office

If you’re reading this, Shoebox Office is off the air. :^(

It’s been a truly transformative time at WMUC, and I’m sure I’ll be around occasionally in some capacity, but this marks the end of my time here as a DJ. This has been my favorite part of UMD and I’m lucky beyond words to have shared this space with so many amazing people.

But not all is lost! Although I’ll no longer have a radio show, I’ll still be sharing music (and hopefully visual art?) in the year to follow. I’ve (somewhat reluctantly) made an instagram account which will be the new home of Shoebox Office, in whatever form it takes. It’s currently private but expect to see some activity in the coming year :)

If hosting a modestly-listened-to college radio show is roughly equivalent to shouting into a void that doesn’t shout back, I don’t even wanna know what posting on tumblr resembles.

I’ve had a pretty good summer, but this has to be the longest I’ve gone without chattering on air. For the unaware among us, WMUC was undergoing some renovations that were scheduled to last all of June, which is a euphemism for all of summer. But I’m happy to be back and I’m sure you’ll hear me fawning over the new carpet and walls in the coming weeks. My dream of wheeling around on the studio stools without running over gaping wounds in the carpet can finally be realized.

Assuming I actually graduate, this is Shoebox Office’s last semester! You can tune in Tuesdays 6-7 p.m. on 88.1 WMUC-FM College Park, or wmuc.umd.edu, or the mobile app, etc. etc. I had my first show yesterday, but if you missed it you can check out a very shoegazey playlist here.

To good music and good friends and good conversations. :)

The two lists may be identical, haha… My feel-bad songs are often associated with specific times in my life, or they’re heavy in lyrical content and have a line or topic that’s feels real personal. I’m going to use this ask as an excuse to gush/angst over some of my fave sad lyrics. Not comprehensive, and in alphabetical order…

Baby Birch - Joanna Newsom

There is a blacksmith and there is a shepherd and there is a butcher boyAnd there is a barber who’s cutting and cutting away at my only joyI saw a rabbit as slick as a knife and as pale as a candlestickAnd I had thought it’d be harder to do but I caught her and skinned her quick

De Soto de Son - Animal Collective

Baby canteen, when I thought your heart stopped beatingThe room brought out the silence in your breathingA birth in wooded housing will help you live beyond your numbersLet us pray to pan let in the lightAnd see us bathe and sleep among usSmell the bodies of our eldersAnd wake up to the milky way at breakfast

I Don’t Love - Have a Nice Life

I don’t loveI don’t feel anythingI don’t feel anything where this love should be

The Past is a Grotesque Animal - of Montreal

It’s like we weren’t made for this worldThough I wouldn’t really want to meet someone who was

Sometimes, I wonder if you’re mythologizing me like I do you

Simeon’s Dilemma - WHY?

I still hear your nameIn wedding bells, will I look better or will I look the same?Rotting in hellYou’re the only proper noun I need, hurryMy copper crown’s gone green

Pull me on out of this tree, I’m stuck up a branch waitingClearly caught between two things unclear to me

But some of the ones nearest to my heart are less about the lyrics alone.

Thanks for the question, anon! I answered this on the show but felt like rambling here too. :p

I really like RYM! In recent years I’ve had less luck with algorithm-based recommendations like Spotify and YouTube, although I’ve found some cool stuff there in the past. I like discovering music in a way that’s human-curated–it’s more personal to me, but in times when I haven’t had communities in real life to foster that, I’ve relied on internet denizens to fill that void! I’ve frequented personal Tumblr blogs and 8tracks mixes in the past, but RYM has been a really great resource due to the size of its community. There’s a lot of cool user-created lists and genre-specific charts to browse though. It’s a male-dominated website, which has definitely impacted the selection of music I’ve discovered recently, but if you lurk hard enough there’s some good lists of more diverse artists and styles.

Even though I’m surrounded by college radio people all the time, I’m not really sure I get a lot of recommendations from people I know in real life. But that’s probably because I’m a bit reticent. I’ve been discovering some cool stuff from live shows recently, though.

Out of personal curiosity, I decided to go through some of my scrobbled artists on last.fm and see if I could recall how I discovered them.

Animal Collective: someone posted Banshee Beat on Tumblr, I fell into a pit of obsession and never clawed my way out

WHY?: also Tumblr, their blog title was a line from Good Friday, literally changed my life

of Montreal: last.fm rec! The Past is a Grotesque Animal is one of my favorite songs and almost hurts to listen to. It feels painfully biographical. There are certain insular experiences we have with other people that feel isolating, but you consume art like this and realize it’s not really unique to your circumstances. There are lines in this song that cut real close.

Baths: After I discovered WHY?, I was trying to find new music like it, but high school freshman me had no idea how one… went about doing that. I ended up looking through the other artists on their record label, Anticon, and found Baths. I’ve been listening to Human Bog on repeat lately.

Elliott Smith: I feel like I was always aware of Elliott Smith’s brand of Relatable Sadness but started to listening to him a lot more this past year after hearing a recording of his 1997 performance at WMUC. He played part of an unreleased song, Misery Let Me Down, and the recording was lost until someone unearthed it a few years ago.

Some interesting RYM finds:

Klimperei: Alice au pays des merveilles is an album I keep revisiting. I played this at my friends’ apartment and I’m not sure it was received warmly, haha. It reminds me of a slightly haunted music box.

Throttle Elevator Music: One of my favorite releases last year… maybe my AOTY but I don’t know if I really had one for 2017. I know very little about jazz so my opinion’s completely uninformed, but I recommend checking it out. Liminality’s a good one.

R. Stevie Moore: This guy has self-released like hundreds of albums. Lots of cool lo-fi experiments. I recommend checking out some of his interviews… he’s been making music for a looong time.

The Green Pajamas: Discovered them while looking for paisley underground music. I feel like they’ve been slept on… I’ve been listening to Higher Than I’ve Been on repeat, it’s just really fun. This song is sitting on 6 views on YouTube right now??

Fashionably late in updating my tumblr, but this semester, Shoebox Office airs Thursdays 7-8 p.m. on WMUC-FM / wmuc.umd.edu / the WMUC Radio mobile app! It’s my first evening slot and I’m unused to this lack of sunlight in the FM studio, so perhaps you’ll feel the weight of my personal darkness through the airwaves. 🌙

Moved back to my favorite timeslot this winter! Tune in to Shoebox Office today 1-3pm for a new year’s episode. My plants survived 2017, and if you’re reading this, you did too. I’m incapable of playing purely feel-good music, and years are rarely good all the way through anyway, so expect some motivational tunes, some morose, and some overwrought and nostalgic.

Thanks for tuning in! I lurked around on the internet and found out that Steve Wynn was also in a band called Hazel Motes:

This comment made my morning! I’m going to get extremely long-winded because I love talking about this, so forgive me. Short answer: my “taste” hovers in the nebulous cloud of experimental electronic, indie rock/shoegaze, psychedelic folk... this isn’t super representative since it’s essentially just my Spotify play count, but here’s my most-played artists on last.fm:

Loooong answer after the cut! You’ve been warned.

I listened to a lot of generic pop punk and folk punk in middle school/early high school. I didn’t (and still don’t) have a great grasp on music theory or music composition, which I don’t think prevents someone from enjoying non-popular music. But for my Younger Self, it meant that my main way to appreciate and think about music was to read lyrics sheets. During my first year of high school I was browsing a blog that quoted the lyric “and I’ll see you when the sun sets east, don’t forget me,” which really intrigued me. I looked it up and found this:

It was stranger than anything I had heard before, and I couldn’t stop listening to it. I sent it to my friends and they all thought it was bizarre, and I was frustrated that I didn’t have the musical vocabulary to articulate why I found it compelling and find other stuff like it. WHY? was my favorite band throughout high school, and I also got into the other electronic/alternative hip-hop acts on their label at the time, anticon. Nowadays I read music reviews and small blogs, but back then I didn’t know how to discover new music besides looking up their label or browsing YouTube suggestions. I listened to WHY? nonstop until my third year of high school when I discovered more mainstream indie acts through Tumblr. I started browsing curated music-oriented blogs and communities, and my taste began resembling what it is now.

In college, I didn’t join WMUC until my third year, but before then I got really into shoegaze. At some point I watched Lost in Translation (which has an amazing soundtrack) and started really delving into shoegaze and some of the alt rock that preceded it. When I discovered WMUC, I had the idea of pitching a shoegaze show, but I wanted to explore new music and eventually scrapped the idea.

There wasn’t any one person at the radio station who introduced me to new music, per se. I think it was the ability to curate what was on the air that motivated me to discover and play unfamiliar music. If I played based on my music taste, we’d just be listening to Animal Collective and Pavement nonstop, haha. I wouldn’t be listening to as much jazz or ambient music now if it wasn’t for Shoebox Office, and my pipe dream is that someone out there is listening to my show and has found something new, too.

That being said, I’d like to believe I’m the station’s biggest Animal Collective fan. A few years ago I watched this old video of Winters Love and felt secondhand embarrassment. I thought it was a really weird song and horrible live performance. But something clicked recently.

Experimental music is such a visceral experience for me. I think a lot of people listen to music because it’s a pleasurable experience, which pop music is. But I think you can develop strong emotional connections to things that are weird and dissonant and noisy. Browsing the performing arts library on campus has made me realize how much history is behind every sound and pattern in pop music and music of every tradition. When we listen to music passively, we don’t pick up on these things consciously, but we do internalize it and make connections. I love experimental music (and visual art!) for messing with those connections and pushing sound to weird places, and I want it to be represented more in the content we consume. Life is a lot richer that way. There’s not really art that I dislike. I like to believe that it’s just art in a language and history I don’t understand yet.

Shoebox Office airs this Sunday May 28 from 1-3pm! At the end of my show I’ll be giving away a pair of tickets to see Aldous Harding on June 5 at DC9 Nightclub. She’s a gothic folk artist from New Zealand who recently performed on Later... with Jools Holland along with fellow New Zealander Lorde. Tune in on 88.1 WMUC-FM or listen online at wmuc.umd.edu.

Catching up on old posts! I hope your finals week went well. My grades are still trickling in, but I survived all of them. [citation needed]

Played some recent releases today! I use “recent” somewhat loosely, but these albums were all released in 2017. No specific theme, but expect some jazz-inspired instrumental tracks and ambient pop. You can listen to the playlist on Spotify or access the text version here.

If you enjoyed this playlist, I shared some other ambient and avant-garde/free jazz releases from this year earlier in my show!