After burning out on newsletter writing this past December — the final bout of essays before the collapse of my confidences came to be absolute defeat, save your circumstances, and against takes — I needed to take up something different, ideally something without any sort of cursor blinking on a blank page, so I threw myself into bedroom recording instead.

This little excursion was something of a success in that I recorded 50 songs and, since some of them were quite good, I’ll be releasing 42 of them over the course of ten months here on Substack.1

That’s the what of razzle dazzle doom and gloom. The lyrics’ readouts work as prose poems and the secret sauce is in the voiceovers. The first song will release on this newsletter next Monday, June 27th, 6pm central. The final song of this first batch will release on April 5th, 2027.

The medium is the message, even for the artist who approaches craft as a much-needed vacation from other things; there always remains an expectation of exhibition. As a way to avoid overthinking (and anxious overheating), these songs were composed and recorded specifically so they could exist in a newsletter, not as singles, not in an album or an EP. This is newsletter music.

Not too far removed in spirit from the 2000s blog-rock and bloghaus, the compositions here are, for the most part, scrappy and wonderfully lofi.

I made a point to record all of the guitar, bass, drums, piano, and vocal parts in single 3-4 hour session to preserve an organic, intuitive sense over technical quality. It was my intention to approach compositions as if they were paintings painting themselves and hopefully such an ethos rings through the recordings.

My reasoning is that, since AI music generation software such as SunoAI is perfectly serviceable at making technically “perfect” recordings, there is no real need to conform to “perfect” sounding audio. Therefore these are intentionally imperfect songs, assembled in a flow state, inspired by the work of David Berman, Dagmar Zuniga, and Daniel Johnston. I reserve the right, I mean to say, to make “bad” music.

That all being said, the songs don’t (thankfully) collapse into mere audio experiments and all of them seem to have translated into a casual, excited musical language which I’m excited to share. The first 20 are a bit tepid and nervous; but confidence in ability does eventually arrive around the 25th song. The latter half of the recordings will arrive in email inboxes between December and April and I’m especially excited to share those.

Here’s an example of what razzle dazzle doom and gloom posts will look like for the first year of this little experiment:

why release music on substack?

What are the options? The musical artist could release music on streaming and be a small node within an ocean swelling with AI slop, or they could find ways to make a streaming service of one using a personal Newsletter, Patreon, or an RSS feed.

I’ve opted for the latter, believing modest discoverability is preferable in a media landscape where explosive growth becomes something of a handicap. The rules of mass media have flipped with the pandemic and there’s real value to be found in intentional obscurity, in refusing to broadcast too widely.

Substack, despite all its flaws, is the best suited platform for a project such as this (beehiiv certainly might be as well although I know less about it); I can control the aesthetic project, maintain an intimacy with listeners, and release music directly without paying services such as Distrokid to do so.

I am of the opinion that, in a post-AI era, streaming platforms become graveyards for the independent artists working without label backing. Some stuff might shine through, but not very much.

An ambitious curatorial internet is required to break through the noise. The stuff that shines through makes it to massive audiences through various newsletters, instagram accounts, youtube channels; people have begun to take on the work of digging through the growing ocean to hand-pick the good stuff — the curator an admirable and needed role in the internet’s cultural architecture. The newsletter boom makes perfect sense in this light.

This project aims to cut out the middle-man, play a little game of inversion with the form. I’ll curate my songs myself, instead. For the time being, Spotify won’t touch any of this.

I like to think that these recordings will be delivered to email inboxes like quiet intimacies rather than be transformed into a product on the marketplaces of streaming platforms. The song becomes a newsletter and the email inbox becomes the streaming service. I think it’s a neat idea.

If I can succeed committing to the bit long enough that the novelty of newsletter music becomes more than a gimmick, I’ll have succeeded. If I have at least one imitator on Substack who releases better, more interesting music than I can muster, I’ll consider this whole endeavor to have been a success.

The important thing in my mind is that the newsletter form allows a project such as this to stand free from the whims of streaming apps while still maintaining an intimate playing field with people who might like to tune into this sort of thing every once in a while.

And by reducing it to a newsletter, the music never takes on the self-aggrandizement of official releases and instead gains a feeling of casual experimentation, the kind of which I’ve enjoyed over my two years of blogging. I would rather spend my time casually writing and sharing songs than spend that time fighting with an algorithm for visibility.

A quick note on the title:

I was in London in January with my girlfriend at the time and we wandered through Tate Modern on a particularly dreary day, describing the installations in two or three words.

R. B. Kitaj’s Erasmus Variations became “comic con 2099”, for instance. William Orpen’s Zonnebeke became “sophomore slump.” Lancelot Ribeiro’s Cityscape (Night) became “sort of a razzle dazzle doom and gloom situation.”

It wasn’t an original thought, not fully; I had been paging through Frank O’Hara earlier that afternoon. His poem Easter2, with its opening refrain of

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

"The razzle dazzle maggots are summary
tattooing my simplicity on the pitiable."

was on my mind as well, along with this particular project, still without a title of its own, so naturally its title became “razzle dazzle doom and gloom.”

Hope you enjoy the songs.

Until next time,

xoxo

briffin

Easter by Frank O'Hara (first stanza — the poem is a long one. it's available to read in full here.)

The razzle dazzle maggots are summary
tattooing my simplicity on the pitiable.
The perforated mountains of my saliva leave cities awash
more exclusively open and more pale than skirts.
O the glassy towns are fucked by yaks
slowly bleeding a quiet filigree on the leaves of that souvenir
of a bird chastely crossing the boulevard of falling stars
cold in the dull heavens
drowned in flesh,
it's the night like I love it all cruisy and nelly
fingered fan of boskage fronds the white smile of sleeps.

...