My Year Of Flex and Self-Congratulation
Plus an interview with Producer and Podcaster Saint Thrillah
This week I have another return guest to Lamniformes Radio. Joey Hurtado was the last guest on Lamniformes Radio to record an interview in person at my apartment in Sunset Park way back in December 2019. This was back when episodes would come out once a month, if that. Once things locked down three months later I tightened up my work flow and started pumping out podcasts at a much faster rate. Appropriately one of the topics that Hurtado and I touch on in his return is improving our organization and planning, subjects that aren’t usually the sexiest parts of the creative process. We also talk about Hurtado’s latest project, making lo-fi hip-hop under the name Young Moth, as well as his work producing for his brother 303Bam.
The least charitable interpretation of the annual tradition of ranking one’s favorite movies, music, books etc is that it is an extended exercise in self-congratulation. After all, it’s not like anyone doing these rankings could have experienced every eligible entry in any of these given fields. We are all racing against the clock and there are more important things to attend to than being a consuming completist. Therefore, again being uncharitable, a “best of” list could be boiled down to patting oneself on the back for making the right choices with ones allotment of hours in the day. If this is the case then I’d like to simplify the equation and just congratulate myself in public directly instead of doing it through my curation of other people’s work. Lo and behold, Ian’s 2021 in personal accomplishments.
Lamniformes Radio was a weekly podcast for 21 straight weeks
Wow! Not bad, me! For the first 21 weeks of 2021 Lamniformes Radio reliably churned out an episode every Monday. I produce, host, book guests, edit, and promote this podcast entirely by myself. That’s a lot of work for a medium that basically comes across as two people yucking it up for an hour.
Some of the episodes in that stretch are interviews with near-to-total strangers whose work I admire deeply. Dan Barrett and Mike Schleibaum have written songs that I can say with absolute certainty are some of my favorite pieces of music. Gary Suarez has been one of my favorite music critics for a long time. I even interviewed a bigger name artist, Randall Taylor aka Amulets, whose work I was completely unfamiliar with before the conversation and we ended up having a really delightful talk. Filling out the rest of the 21 week stretch were conversations with people closer to my social circle about an interesting range of topics. New Age! Writing about music from Japan! Playing metal in Shanghai! Being a music teacher during a pandemic! Concert photography! Online music fandom! Graphic design! I’m still proud of the episodes that came out more intermittently after that run, but my work during those first five months is what I’m going to hold up as proof any time I have doubts about keeping the project going.
The Human Instrumentality Podcast was a hit!
Part of what makes that 21 week stretch so impressive to me is that it coincides with the bulk of the first season of The Human Instrumentality Podcast. Most of the actual work recording and editing this podcast happened in 2019 and 2020, by the time we started publishing episodes most of my work was making dumb memes to promote the show. Turns out I didn’t even really need to go through the trouble of meme-making. Way way way more people than I ever expected tuned in every week to listen to Joseph Schafer and I talk about Neon Genesis Evangelion. So many people listened that we were even able to record a mailbag episode. If that isn’t a non-monetary sign of a podcast’s success then I don’t know what is.
The original run went so well that Joseph and I reached out to a bunch of guests with much higher profiles to talk about the Rebuild of Evangelion films. To our collective surprise, all of them said yes. It turns out the cool people are only an email away and if you aren’t a total creep they won’t murder your whole family for daring to reach out to them1. They might even come on your podcast and say insightful and funny things. While each of these guest-featuring episodes were a blast in their own way, I’m particularly proud of the episode about the final Evangelion movie Thrice Upon A Time, which we recorded 48 hours after the movie’s US premiere with Emily Yoshida. Despite the super fast turn-around I think we had a smart, balanced, and entertaining conversation about the film, in no small part because Yoshida is one of the best in the podcast biz as far as I’m concerned. This whole ride was a dream come true. Here’s to Season 2 being even better.
New Lamniformes album and the first Lamniformes Music Video
You might get the impression that I’m more of a podcaster than a musician at this point. That may be true in terms of raw output, but the only reason I put so much time and effort into pumping out podcasts is to help build an audience for my music. Do I enjoy doing it? Sure, but the point remains the music.
In April I released a whole batch of tunes that I made in collaboration with a bunch of my friends. Well, technically I made a bunch of songs back in 2018 and then sent them to my friends to rework how they saw fit. The result is You Can’t Do This Alone, a remix album that successfully cracks open the doom & gloom of my previous album Sisyphean and reveals a kaleidoscopic of new sounds and textures. I’m not one of those musicians who listens to their own work once its out in the world, usually because I spend so much time listening to their unfinished versions that the songs hardly have any meat on their bones by the time they’re released, but this album is an exception to that tendency. Everyone did such a good job, and defamiliarized the material just enough that listening to it feels like a fresh and new experience for me. I know that a remix album doesn’t have the “new car smell” of an album of original material, but I think this is a great standalone collection that probably would appeal to people who don’t even like the rest of my stuff. If that’s you, well thanks for never telling me you didn’t like my music, give it a shot!
This album cycle also marked my first forays into visual content. As seen above, I teamed up with my friend Andrew Napier to dig into the specifics of his remix of the song “Deep Despair In Covington, KY.” The end product sort of works as a visual version of the Lamniformes Radio podcast, where we picked apart the nitty gritty of a particular song instead of covering the whole of a record. This was a fun project, and the format is one that I’d like to explore more the next time around. In general I want to step my video production game up for the next round of releases.
I also made the first Lamniformes music video! What started as an extended reference to a scene from Infinite Jest (the bit where a character gets their face stuck to a window during the winter) gradually morphed into a neo-expressionist horror show where my good friend and remixer Saint Thrillah (see the podcast at the top of the letter for more on him) distorted my face into grotesque shapes by remixing my song “Hypothermia”. The video would not have happened without the hard work and creativity of Richard Gin and Cammi Upton. My involvement, while necessary on a surface level, honestly feels incidental to theirs. Upton’s make-up is the real star here, and Gin’s lighting makes it sing. It could be anyone’s face under there, really. The process of making the video was equal parts invigorating and exhausting. I will forever more tip my cap to any actor required to don pounds worth of prosthetics to portray even the dumbest looking of Power Rangers villains. It was a lot of work and I can’t wait to make another one.
I originally planned on having two more sections where I moved beyond the more concrete things that I accomplished this year to discuss more abstract benchmarks but then Omicron hit New York like two tons of bricks and needed to lie on my bed staring at the ceiling for too long to make my Sunday night deadline. So stick around for next to hear more about video games, quitting my job, learning to enjoy failure and more!
This is a joke about being socially anxious. Obviously I don’t literally believe that Logan, Justin, Eric, or Emily would actually do this. I’ve found that I have an easier time overcoming my fear of contacting people if I say the worst case scenario out loud to myself and thereby reveal to myself how silly it sounds.