Scene Report: Indianapolis is Enough

A shaggy mid-week ambient happening + Bandcamp Friday recommendations

It felt like a deliberate act of ageist violence: An evening of experimental and ambient music that starts at 9pm, with three artists on the bill before water is the sun – the guys I wanted to see. Not tryna lean into the “get off the stage!” vibes when it comes to opening acts, but the correct number of openers is usually one (1) or none (0), according to this almost fifty-year-old man who has never booked shows or operated a bar or a live music venue. Also did I mention this mid-week mini festival – three bands is too many openers, while four bands is technically a festival which is generous but there needs to be a campground onsite – was happening at State Street Pub? A very mellow and friendly bar with very cold free water, but nevertheless as someone who does DJ ambient music for an audience, I’ve grown soft, hoping for a setup where you can lounge around, stretch out a bit. So when the bud who was gonna go with me fell ill, I was in need of motivation: A two-hour round trip to sit alone quietly not drinking in a bar full of strangers while soft noises drift from the speakers is a hard sell.

“Do y’all do VIP bottle service but for Diet Pepsis?” asks the elder baldy-beardo (me) that nobody knows who isn’t drinking because he’s here alone with an hour of midnight Indiana highway between him and bed, yet also thirsts for something more than the designated driver mocktail of “tap water in a red solo cup.” But since I wrote a whole self-righteous newsletter rant (see below) about how it’s important to support the musicians and other artists (also me) that you care about, I kinda had to go.

In keeping with the narrative that I started when I first wrote about timber rattle – one of the projects from half of water is the sun – I decided to swing by the Indianapolis Zen Center for Wednesday night meditation practice first. If you’re here in Central Indiana, Wednesday is usually the best time to make an inaugural visit to IZC. The very simple pre-fab website – built by yours truly many years ago when I lived there – says it’s an orientation, but really it’s just the night when they get ready a little earlier in case anybody shows up and needs extra time to decide if they want to use a cushion, two cushions, a little bench, or a chair.

Practice was great. One guy read some classic Zen stuff, and we chanted the Heart Sutra. I read a passage¹ from the The Spider’s House, the 1955 Paul Bowles novel that I’ve been reading. The group talked for a minute about whether or not his language about devout Muslim practice was applicable to Zen.

Sitting on my own is important because I live far away from my sangha, but sitting with other people can be incredible. In the meditation workshops I used to host, I described it like eating an avocado: If I’m hungry, and I read a book about how satisfying and nutritious avocados are, I am no less hungry. If I eat an avocado, I satisfy my hunger. And if I prepare guacamole as part of a meal with other people, I eat more slowly, am less tempted to eat in front of the teevee, and the experience is often more satisfying beyond the baseline of “I am less hungry now.”

Afterward, Linc – the octogenarian guiding teacher – was feeling talkative. Sometimes I miss living with him – although I do not miss arguing over kitchen hygiene or sharing a tiny bathroom with him. Everyone else slowly made their way to the door, while we sat in the dharma room going back and forth for two hours. He repeats stories often. But his stories range from melancholy and extremely intimate memories, to tall tales from the heady early days of American Buddhism in the ‘60s and ‘70s when he and other figures – many of whom have gone on to international prominence – were experimenting with . . . uh . . . sacraments . . . that are not always part of traditional Zen practice. “If my teachers had not been curious about the world outside the dharma room,” he says as part of a an unverifiable story about someone somewhere sneaking into a cemetery for a midnight trip, “I would not have been able to sit with them for long.”

Since I was a weird old guy about to roll solo to a possibly 3-4 hour long ambient music show where I’d probably be standing alone in the back trying not to be the weird old guy standing in the back, I was happy to sit with Linc for quite awhile. A little after 9pm I stuffed some money in the donation box and headed out the door while Linc went for one last walkthrough of the IZC gardens before heading upstairs to bed. Linc likes to claim that he’s the oldest living teacher in the Kwan Um School, and that he is the only Kwan Um teacher in North America who plays the role of live-in dirtbag abbott at a residential Zen Center. I would not have considered becoming his roommate if he wasn’t still curious about the world outside the dharma room.

I pulled up to a mostly full parking lot at State Street Pub a little before 10pm. Paid my $12 at the door, and walked into a modest but still impressive crowd of 15-20+ people. Not bad for experimental ambient music on a Wednesday! I figured I was gonna be there for awhile, so I quietly splurged on a Pacifico in the tall can from the bar, and sat down. I grabbed my phone(s)² out of my pocket to silence them, and looked up to watch as water is the sun finished their final song and everybody clapped and the bartender collected eight dollars from me.

But this was good. The two people who played later were both great, though very different. For art-damaged DIY noise clatter DJing, see Ironing. For soothing neo-classical drone optimized for walking, Rob Funkhouser is your person. I didn’t get to hear much of water is the sun’s live set, but the lived experience makes for a better story than “I went to see the good band and they were good.”

And their tour-only cassette appeared on Bandcamp literally just now as I’m typing this.

I talked briefly with Adam – who makes music as timber rattle, in addition to his water is the sun collaboration with Drekka. We did the usual “friendly chatting between strangers who have a common interest in an obscure thing” and he said one of the best things that an artist that I’ve written about can say to me: He liked what I wrote, and he felt like I understood something about what he was trying to do. Then we both packed up our personal vehicles and drove off into the night.

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Anxiety over “why am I doing this” is common in my cohort of small-time newsletter writers. It’s common among many artists, but it’s more annoying with writers because writers like me think it’s an interesting thing to write about how sometimes it feels like nobody is reading our writing, and then send it out to you³, the people who read our writing. I’ve already heard the only song I wanna hear about how nobody listens to the songs so many times that I now feel worse for the slandered sit-down drunks of Lodi than I do for John Fogerty.

For further discussion, please see this good edition of friend-of-the show Jamie Ward’s Sermons!. It’s an easygoing yet emotionally-engaging newsletter that shows up outta the blue with unexpected and most welcome nuggets of outsider folk, liberated Texas punk, and vintage Houston rap:

Everything Is Turning Out the Same

When taken in moderation, some of this sad-posting can be a good way to remember one of the foundations of my Zen practice: You are not alone. Everyone suffers. It’s easy to get annoyed when people with 10x my 400+ subscribers write about the same anxieties that I feel. It’s more useful to remember that “more” is different than “enough.” More is only relevant to what is here now, and can never be enough. The happiness found in analytics is, along with nicotine, among the most vicious, yet also fleeting and disappointing dopamine rushes on the market.

On a good day when my brain chemicals aren’t too over-carbonated, I get to decide what is enough. On Wednesday it was more than enough to remember that I was part of a flow, that everything is connected. When one person talks to me about something that I created, I can remember that conversation and use it to fight down the ego-driven delusion that I need something more in order for making things to be worthwhile. You can have room for more but you can never have more. Or you can have enough. You can never experience tomorrow, or yesterday, you can only be here now.

But it’s also very nice when people pass this newsletter to their friends. It’s all so confusing!

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On a related note, today is Bandcamp Friday and while I have very loud opinions over the undeserved veneration that Bandcamp receives for this act of charity as documented in a previous issue of Vøid Contemplation Tactics . . .

. . . Bandcamp Friday is a better-than-average opportunity to be part of the “enough” that might help a musician whose music you have enjoyed continue creating music. For the uninitiated, Bandcamp Friday is basically a tax holiday when the charity-minded Bandcamp landlords waive the fee that they collect for hosting artist’s music for 24 hours, and all of the 100¢ you give to the band selling their music for Name Your Own Price shows up in that artist’s account minus whatever convenience fees the billionaire tech landlords charge us for using the payment-processing websites that we have to use if we want to buy things online. Forced wealth redistribution is a real thing in the US, it just feels like something different since it’s going the wrong way.

Here are a few NYOP or very inexpensive things that I’ve enjoyed recently. Even if you’re gonna go stream the tunes on a website owned by people who invest more money in manufacturing weapons for ethnic cleansing campaigns than they do in independent musicians, perhaps take a moment to reconsider your concept of the value of art and make a $1 donation not because you’re investing it in some commodity, but in the idea that the artist might feel good about putting things that do not have massive hegemonic appeal into the world.

LET THE JUBILEE COMMENCE:

Bongripper is beautiful. All the doom yoga people are saying this. I slept on the Chicago band for a long time. I love to sleep, I enjoy weed, and I appreciate Sleep. I’m not mad at Bongzilla, Weedeater, Stöner, et al, but I don’t need more weed-themed metal at this point in my life. Or so I thought.

Spouse Rachel took me to the Hideout in Chicago to see Bongripper on a Halloweed⁴ date in 2016, and it was romantically slow-moshing with her in the sweaty crush of heaving heshers when I realized that Bongripper is closer to shoegaze than Cannabis Corpse. Their albums are all⁵ good, but the titles became more representative of their lush heavy melancholy with 2014’s Miserable, and Terminal in 2018. This is instrumental music, so album titles like The Great Barrier Reefer, Hippie Killer, and Satan Worshipping Doom can predetermine a noob listener’s impressions of the music. Just as giving titles from the provisional realm of names and forms to our feelings can create unhelpful narratives that allow us to avoid the root of those feelings. Nothing → Remains → Forever → Empty reads more like Dōgen’s poetry.

For those who take their dharma doom and meditative sludge more didactically, there’s yet more fresh tunes from ID Music mainstays Dhyana, the “one man project dedicated to buddhist teachings and meditative practices” from Galliano, Louisiana. As I wrote to a friend earlier today, “it's an artifact from an alternate timeline where Sleep spawned a legion of OMs rather than a legion of Sleeps.”

Sam Shackleton is among my favorite living musicians. I don’t like putting things in terms of commerce or hierarchies, but he’s one of my only “buy on sight” guys and all of his music is a contender for the AOTY list that I never make. Both of those sentences make me cringe, but with Shackleton it’s true. As fellow devotees of the self-proclaimed “psychedelic ritual trance maestro” know, 2023 was a massive year that saw the first new long and short form compositions from Shackleton under his own name in years, along with a continuation of his extraordinary run of collaborations. Following his Woe To The Septic Heart! label is one way to stay in touch, but Shackleton’s collaborative efforts can slide beneath the radar. The Three Hands of Doom is one such collection that appeared on the always excellent Kampala-based Nyege Nyege Tapes label in January 2024. I see no reason not to duplicate the wonderful promo language from Boomkat:

Heavy, heavy, heavyyyyy rhythmic madness from Shackleton, Scotch Rolex and Omutaba, invoking new rhythmic traditions on an enchanted debut album for Nyege Nyege Tapes, twisting galvanic rhythms from HHY & The Kampala Unit's Omutaba into sozzled, psychedelic peregrinations. Dubby, kinetic and viciously mind-bending, it's peak gear if you're into anything from African Head Charge to Mark Ernestus' Ndagga Rhythm Force.

Also! Almost the entire Nyege Nyege discography is available as NYOP for Bandcamp Friday. Peak gear, nice price.

For those of you suffering from a pathological craving for more vaporwave even though you can download more vaporwave than you can listen to in a lifetime for $1, the vaporwave GOAT desert sand feels warm at night just announced a vinyl edition of their 2022 album シ​ュ​ロ​ッ​プ​シ​ャ​ー​の​景​色, which according to online translates from the Japanese as Views of Shropshire.

The digital version is available from No Problema Tapes for $4 until “10am on Saturday” which is maybe UTC -5 if the label is actually based in Chile. I think I remember reading somewhere that this is more of dsfwan’s sample-free slush, but I can’t find the message in the deluge of Bandcamp Friday announcements. If geographic accuracy and confirmed artistic provenance are a concern for you, vaporwave is gonna make yr head explode, as we discussed previously in the “Form is Emptiness, Emptiness is Form” issue of Vøid Contemplation Tactics. You can also stream/DL our two-hour Inter-Dimensional Music mix of vaporwave and adjacent sonics here.

 

And finally . . . diligent practitioners who join us for the weekly FM manifestation of Inter-Dimensional Music on WQRT Indianapolis and Marfa Public Radio may recognize Maral’s extremely wonderfully disorienting experiments in threading “pulverized dub” through “samples from her library of Iranian folk, pop and classical musics.” I don’t think we’ve archived any of those shows yet, so if you want to listen again you should give her $1 to stream or DL “the feeling of perseverance that love can imbue in you but also the melancholy of having love, because it can always be lost.”

Thank you once again and forevermore for listening and lurking anonymously, introducing yourself in the comments, subscribing for free, subscribing for money, or smashing that unsubscribe button if our direct-mail blog service makes you feel itchy. Together is always enough.

blessing up + blessing down,
Daniel / Cosmic Chambo

Also! Today is the last day of Marfa Public Radio’s Spring Fund Drive. I know there are a lot of “perhaps give your money to these people” links in this newsletter, but MPR was the original home of ID Music and despite the loud minority of extremely rich people who live there, nonprofits in Marfa must rely on donations from outside of this town of 1700-2000 people where food insecurity is a very real thing. Click here to read more, and tune in on Sundays at 11p CT to experience ID Music in the wild.

1. More to come on this weekend’s episodes of Inter-Dimensional Music but if you want to read along with the FM broadcast: “The man whose destiny is bad, he's lucky, because all he has to do is give thanks But the man whose destiny is good-Ay! That's much harder, because unless he is a very very good man he'll begin to think he had something to do with his good luck. Don't you understand?"

2. Extremely white guy rapping Kevin Gates lyrics but not doing Kevin Gates voice: I’ve got two phones / one is for the pod connected to my body that drips insulin via sub-dermal cannula, compensating for my genetically-unviable pancreas / and one is a phone.

3. I love you and thank you for reading my writing.

4. Literally an actual [massive bongrip sound] Freudian slip.

5. Shout out to Cleveland friend and drag-racing enthusiast Kapusta Diamond for explaining that the Bongripper song “Tranny Ride” is about transmissions and not a slur. Serious IRL phew!