It’s been quite a productive and interesting year for my musical identity as Monkey Typing Pool (and not just as that: see below). Two and a half hours of entirely new music, plus another 37 minutes of reconfigured, remixed material…with another 40 minutes or so in the pipeline. And I bit whatever bullets needed biting in order to make all of this stuff available on all your major platforms from Spotify to YouTube to Amazon etc. (with one minor and annoying side-effect: see below).
Here’s a recap of my year.
January, under the name The Parabola Group, I released Maybeness. I used a different group name because the process of writing and arranging these tracks was quite different from my usual.
A Thousand Falling Pianos
Dyer’s Woad
The Belville Twins
The Clocks of Montecito
Unsigned
With Ghost
136 Western Corners
For some reason, the distribution services impose restrictions upon cover art (restrictions which do not seem to apply to releases on labels) which required me to alter the art for the versions available thereon. The real artwork is here (and on Bandcamp). (This is true for, I think, every title described below.)
July, I released Agriculture & Mortality…whose cover (and one track) obviously riffed on Orchestral Manœuvres in the Dark. Turning quite a bit a ways from my procedure with the Parabola Group recordings, here I made zero effort to unify the release stylistically. I redid two songs from the Parabola Group album in quite different style (although, amusingly, in both cases, I reused the lead vocal with effects or other alterations).
November, I released Everything Is in Subtitles…which takes to further extremes the “we don’t need no steenkin’ stylistic continuity!” vibe of Agriculture & Mortality to further extremes. (Edit: Because tonight we’re going to rock you tonight.) The cover image conveys that half the tracks are rather grim and dark while the other half are sometimes just plain goofy.
Also in November, as part of the rollout of the MTP catalog on streaming and downloadable media, I reconfigured the songs on the first handful of EPs and singles onto a single new album, titled The Train Who Sang in Daylight. Some of these tracks were remixed for the occasion, others were fine as they were. But all had previously been released.
Little Audio Sparkler and the Slightly Scary Gentlemen of Rock
Lawns & Industry
The Singing Train
Lance Crocker, Almanac Cracker
Stephin Merritt Writes Another Song About the Moon
I’m slowing my efforts in 2026…but not ending them (in fact…there is already a Celltab title I’m readying for release, probably Bandcamp-only). In the pipeline is a collection consisting largely of covers with a few instrumentals: I hope to get to this in January or February.
Recently I watched Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another which is, of course, inspired by Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland. I’m one of the apparent minority of folks who enjoy Vineland quite a bit, but there’s a reason Anderson changed the title and says the movie was “inspired by” rather than an “adaptation” of Vineland.
Anderson moves the time setting forward, creating some cognitive dissonance (right-wing fantasies notwithstanding, there really were no violent left revolutionary groups operating in the ’00s…) but allowing the present-day action to have sharper resonance with our sadly besaddled reality.
But: taken on its own terms, the movie works well, focusing on its three main characters (Bob fka Zoyd, Willa fka Prairie, and Col. Lockjaw fka Brock Vond) and motivating Lockjaw’s government action against Bob and Willa in his obsession with Willa’s off-the-grid mother (Perfidia fka Frenesi), with whom he’s sexually obsessed after what he imagines was an affair with Perfidia. By making Perfidia Black, Anderson is able to focus the right-wing grotesquerie of Lockjaw/Vond on race (which IMO is a correct read of the current Right).
What the movie misses (I mean, what I miss in the movie compared to Pynchon’s novel) is much of its humor and, more importantly, the sense of longing and community unifying and driving the old (and younger) radicals in Vineland. I recently read Peter Coviello’s Vineland Reread, wherein Coviello observes that one reason he loves Vineland is that it was among the works that unified a group of his friends in college and grad school. Coviello refers to “idiosyncratic sodalities,” communities formed around and unified by a playful yet serious approach to culture and language, language which resists what Coviello, quoting Emerson, calls a decline into mere “municipal speech,” language denuded of everything but brute instrumental functionality. Against such decline, nerds (Coviello doesn’t use the term but he could have, in all affection of course) revel in “the unsung affordances of articulacy” (beautiful phrase), the way such “idiosyncratic sodalities” are unified by their love of a vivified language that refuses the “debilitating calcification of our view of the world, a terrible stifling of emergences and possibilities.” (Yes, “emergences” not “emergencies.”)
The exception, and the part of the movie that comes closest to realizing this collective vision, is the community led by Sergio St. Carlos (fka DL Chastain), which is highly organized to protect immigrants and presents a more functional chosen family compared to the (rather pathetic) radicals in Bob’s past. (This is another reason I sort of wish Anderson had not altered the time frame: there’s an argument to be made against the historical failings of the Left’s embrace of violence in the ‘60s and ‘70s…but because Anderson’s chronology forces him to invent a fictitious violent left group in the early 2000s, that critique is muffled.) But these scenes are brief, and we see more than really feel that sense of community. Much more emphasis is given to St. Carlos and his compatriots’ ability to mobilize in protection of one of their own (Bob), no matter how lost and pathetic Bob may be at this point in the movie.
Which is another issue: Bob (real name Pat Calhoun) is not all that sympathetic a character. The opening flashback scene has Pat and Perfidia freeing a group of detained immigrants. While the younger Pat is more focused and competent, he still seems a bit prickly. Leo DiCaprio portrays this character well…but he lacks the sad-clown pathos of Zoyd Wheeler from the novel. In the movie’s present-day, he’s perpetually stoned, grouchy, alternating between paranoia and neglect of the very real possibility that the powers-that-be might one day clamp down upon his life. Anderson plays this partly for laughs, and twits overzealous “revolutionaries” for insisting upon signs and countersigns even when it’s obvious to both parties that they’re legit…but there’s a contrast drawn nevertheless between St. Carlos’s approach—which clearly is focused on protecting his people—and the once and former members of Bob’s radical cell, “French 75,” who seem a bit too enamored of gestures, cool nicknames, and so on (one of the funnier scenes features Bob berating “Comrade Josh” for the (definite) lameness of his chosen revolutionary sobriquet).
So: the flavors of the book and movie are rather different. The movie is a more straightforward political thriller, with some nicely done action scenes, and Chase Infiniti is fabulous as Willa. But the book is less interested in political violence as a tool of radicalism and more in the human and humane community that underlies any such radicalism, the utopian horizon that, however far away and seemingly unreachable, tends to motivate later Pynchon novels. Regardless, it’s a very good movie. I’m just cautioning Pynchon fans that you are not going to get as much Pynchon flavor as you did from Anderson’s earlier Pynchon movie, a straighter adaptation of Inherent Vice.
My very favorite albums released during 2025 (not including live, reissues, compilations, etc.)…not in any particular order within tier:
My favorites: Destroyer Dan’s Boogie, Alan Sparhawk With Trampled by Turtles (which is), Lake Ruth Hawking Radiation, The Black Watch For All the World, Anton Barbeau Glitch Wizard (best cover art), Cass McCombs Interior Live Oak, Future Clouds & Weather Big Weather.
Next tier: Lucy Dacus Forever Is a Feeling, Stereolab Instant Holograms on Metal Film, Sparks Mad!, John Cale Mixology (Volume 1), Cate Le Bon Michelangelo Dying, Packaging Packaging.
And: The Minus 5 Oar On, Penelope!, Wet Leg Moisturizer, Luke Haines & Peter Buck Going Down to the River…to Blow My Mind, Sloan Based on the Best Seller, Throwing Muses Moonlight Concessions, Guided by Voices Universe Room, Wednesday Bleeds, Samantha Crain Gumshoe, Big Thief Double Infinity.
Plus also: Sharon Van Etten Sharon Van Etten & the Attachment Theory, Neko Case Neon Grey Midnight Green, The Besnard Lakes The Besnard Lakes Are the Ghost Nation, Wednesday Bleeds, Momus Acktor, Robert Forster Strawberries, The Penrose Web The Least of Our Concerns, Total Wife Come Back Down.
(the playlist below is drawn from the above titles plus a couple of EPs)
The rest (not counting, of course, anything I haven’t heard, or anything too new for me to have formed an opinion on): Chris Church Obsolete Path, New Candys The Uncanny Extravaganza, The Salt Collective A Brief History of Blindness, Emma Swift The Resurrection Game, Anton Barbeau Dig the Light, Bicentennial Drug Lord You Are Never Alone, Momus Quietism, Trolley A Carnival of Grey & White, David Lowery Fathers, Sons, and Brothers (not entirely new), Ichiko Aoba Luminescent Creatures, Car Seat Headrest The Scholars, Momma Welcome to My Blue Sky, Peter Holsapple The Face of 68, Anton Barbeau Klaust!, The Third Mind Right Now!, Shriekback Monument, Madison Cunningham Ace, Guided by Voices Thick Rich and Delicious, Andy Bell Pinball Wanderer, Franz Ferdinand The Human Fear, Horsegirl Phonetics On and On, Julien Baker & Torres Send a Prayer My Way, Mekons Horror, Miki Berenyi Trio Tripla, Lida Husik The Voyage Out, Suss and Immersion Nanocluster, Vol. 3, Superchunk Songs in the Key of Yikes, The Beths Straight Line Was a Lie, Flock of Dimes The Life You Save, Rip Van Winkle Blasphemy, Preoccupations Ill at Ease, Mclusky The World Is Still Here and So Are We, House of All House of All Souls, Panda Bear Sinister Grift, Snocaps Snocaps.
Best EPs: Nodega (Bodega) Rot in Helvetica, Swervedriver The World’s Fair, The Waeve Eternal, Jessica Lea Mayfield Choose Myself, Sparks Madder!, Nilüfer Yanya Dancing Shoes, The Everywheres Factory Floor Dust.
FINALLY, THE PLAYLIST…
As I’ve done in recent years, on the logic that if the album is solid, it doesn’t matter much which track I use, I arbitrarily chose the 5th track. Except when I didn’t, in which case I might then have chosen the 7th (2+5) track, or the 10th (2×5). Or some other track. My list, my rules.
As I’ve been doing for quite some time now, I’ve uploaded a selection of 25 interesting cover songs that have come my way during the last half year. Some are new, some are not. The tracks are presented in two seamlessly segued mixes of 12 or 13 tracks each, as listed below.
Here’s my winter songpile, the usual selection of 25 or so tracks carefully segued together, most of which are new or newly came my way during the last three months. This one is called (and as usual for no good reason) With Singing Alphabet for Beginners, and here’s the tracklisting for each half (each playlist):
It is a brand-new recording from Monkey Typing Pool! It’s called Everything Is in Subtitles. You may download it from Bandcamp.
The title of this record is based on misremembering and conflating a couple lines from Elvis Costello’s “Dr. Luther’s Assistant.” The cover image is meant to suggest the rather bizarre binary of its songs: about half of them are pretty ridiculous, while the other half are more serious (even—raises pinky from teacup, adjusts pince nez—rahthuh pretentious, dahling). Musically it’s also wildly inconsistent. I don’t care: the dozens (if I am lucky!) of people who might hear it, well thank you and I’m grateful…but I’m under no illusions that I will ever be a great big super-greasy glossy smarmy showbiz star (thank you, Viv Stanshall).
Here are some notes on each track.
1. “DC al Coda”: A few years back, quite briefly in vogue was an Australian podcast, whose mission was to find out who (as Australians, known for their subtlety, indirection, and refinement) shat on the floor at the main podcaster’s wedding. It was called, inspirationally, “Who Shat on the Floor at My Wedding?” I decided this podcast needed a theme song. The chorus here, and the first verse, are pretty much what I wrote (in fact the verse lyrics are almost identical). But my own sensibilities, taking in a fine-grained analysis of the music market, led me to believe that the subject matter perhaps was not one a lot of people would, from the song’s title (same as the podcast’s), wish to hear.
So of course, I decided that changing the main chorus line to “who’s holding the ax at the beheading?” was clearly much more in line with contemporary taste. (The title is a musical term meaning approximately “from the head to the tail”…)
I hope that the source of the drum intro doesn’t pass you by…and yeah, I was pretty clearly homaging pretty hard on this one.
Also: I am pretty sure this is the only pop song (ha!) to mention Archibald Campbell, 1st Marquess of Argyll.
I used names of a few people I know (not all of the names) because, I mean, of course.
(Fun fact: at the wedding in question, there actually was a guest named “Henk”! Where has he been to?
2. “Wagga P”: I gave myself complete permission on this set of songs to do just whatever the hell I felt like doing, stylistic consistency be damned. So…this track is the same brief song fragment, repeated three times, in radically different styles. Wagga Wagga is a city in Australia (wait up: is there an Australian theme on this record I am just now discovering?!?)…and, in one of my social media groups, there was a discussion of songs with reduplicating elements in their title. My friend James from New Zealand noted this place name…and I came up with two absurd ideas for what the song might be about. This is one of them.
3. “Uncle”: Sometimes, purging poisons helps. Nothing Australian here. Italian, though, yes. And I sing a line in Latin, one well-known to residents of Virginia.
4. “Amid” (with The Parabola Group): This is a song about a video that does not exist for a song that does exist, which is in turn, about a real person who no longer exists. Our travelogue takes us this time to Russia. The Parabola Group helped out here…it felt compositionally more akin to what I was doing on that project. Also: I’d rather like to hear this with a real tenor singing it. (No actual orchestra was harmed in the making of this recording.)
5. “I’m So Vain”: What if some person, of dubious contiguity with reality, decided that he was, in fact, responsible for, or the subject of, a whole bunch of famous songs?
I obviously did not want this to sound anything like the very well-known song of similar title (I did steal a melodic shape, however). I think I came up with the dry collection of main instruments, and then the lurching 6/8 rhythm. The Paul McCartney bit comes from a story I read a long, long time ago: can’t remember any context, but it involved someone having seen Paul McCartney on his bicycle and, as a dumb American, imagining that the gesture McCartney offered was a “peace sign.” |
I stole “Dave Bowie” from the fabulous Great Pop Things comic by Colin B. Morton and Chuck Death. The Britney Spears verse comes from the actual fact that I was quite literally in Las Vegas at the same time she got married to that one guy for seven hours. I tried telling people the guy was me…no one believed me. O ye of little faith. Travelogue to Putney, Vegas, Memphis, and some random Home Depot (where—would you believe?—I also saw Joe Henry and Willie Mays).
(I also threw in two related musical jokes in the backing vocals on the chorus.)
6. “Wagga E”: This is the other one. In both cases, I had a specific musician in mind (different for each part)—I’ll let you guess. There’s a big clue in the chorus though. Also, this one ends with the same horn and flute chord (no actual etc….) as the other “Wagga.” For reasons.
7. “Bearing”: The lyrics here are very abstract transformations of some thoughts and ideas I drew from a long newsletter a friend posted, and my own extended response to her post.I wanted to go for a sort of electro-psych, 21st-century Hawkwind thing…but it ended feeling more Eno circa Nerve Net, so I went with that. Also…yeah, I stretched out with an extended “electric violin” solo so shoot me. Usually any solos in my stuff are carefully planned, edited, etc. This is actually pretty much what I improvised, with one or two edits and a few notes slightly corrected because (after the editing) their harmonic context shifted slightly.
8. “Night Winter Garden”: The last track completed for this record, because the intended track suffered an unanticipated delay along the way…and I decided it wasn’t quite the right mood to end the record after all. Despite being (at the moment) the last-completed MTP song, its elements are all salvaged from older recordings…outtakes from two or three earlier tracks, in fact, collaged into this nice little impressionist instrumental closer.
After listening to this album, please be clear that nothing you heard is in any way the fault of any of the following:
Speaking of Monkey Typing Pool (well, I was…), all MTP music is now available via yr major streaming services (and many minor ones, too), iTunes/Apple Music, YouTube…and so on. I bit a small bullet and signed on with TuneCore for (most of) this job.
I’ve reconfigured the back catalog a bit…once everything everything is out out (by the end of the year if all goes well), I’ll post listing all of the noise, so you know exactly which searches to avoid.
Time for yet another selection of songs, mostly new but all new to me, which struck my ears pleasingly during the past three months. As usual I’ve arranged and segued them into two non-stop playlists, linked below.
A few comments: Yes, the sequence of artists from “Wednesday” through “Mercy” is intentional. Chime School sounds exactly what you’d think they’d sound like. I’ll stop including songs by the Reds, Pinks & Purples when they stop putting out supercool songs that I like a lot. I did not intentionally put a song called “The End” after a song that also included the words “the end” at the end of its title, but there you are. I like the idea that the ticket torn by the Paranoid Style is the one Lucy Dacus used to get on her bus to Richmond. I included this version of “Handshake Drugs” because I needed to strip some paint from my walls, and that lead guitar absolutely did so.
You know the drill (dugga-dugga): bunch of covers that came my way (or which I was reminded of) over the past three months, segued into a flowing set of songs to tickle your earholes.
The usual: a carefully edited and segued playlist of selections of songs, most new, some not, that came my way in the last three months and impressed me.
The Architectural Dance Society 