A List; A Loop

Brief reflections on the good and bad of 2024

Philadelphia through a Ricoh GRII on SEPTA regional rail

It’s December, when all kinds of opinion and discourse is suddenly squeezed out of the proverbial year-long tube and splattered all over the internet¹.

I really do love this time of year, though. I love all of the reflection that happens. I love listening to the Charlie Brown Christmas soundtrack on repeat late at night. I love basking in the palpably nostalgic vibes of this month as society seems to slow down ever so slightly, and we all start to turn the page on the year that was…in that spirit, I thought it would be fun to hit pause on the “music process” stuff and just reflect on my own year in a brief and personal way - just because².

I’d genuinely love to hear your own “year-end list,” if you’re so inclined to comment with it down below or send me a message on here. To set the mood and accompany your reading, here’s an excerpt from a studio session I had the other day. This is Slate & Ash Cycles turning a piano part that I played into mush, then recorded to a really bad cassette tape.

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Good things that happened this year (no rank order):

• Left social media for good and reduced my screen time by more than 50% to less than two hours a day³

• Released an album and featured on several collaborations that I genuinely enjoyed

• For the first time in years, made a significant amount of music without any thought to release schedules or promotional effort

• Recognized the value of my time and said no to a lot of work

• Similarly, saw the value in my expertise and began to offer 1:1 lessons - met some truly wonderful and supportive people all over the world this way

• Took 3 amazing trips out of the country with my family

• Completed a 2nd full year using public transportation to commute to work; in other words, I spent 0 minutes in automobile highway traffic to/from work

• Learned to see the world with renewed wonder through my daughters’ eyes - this honestly felt like magic, and still does every day

• Rediscovered a sense of purpose and identity outside of my musical practice

• Started the Sound Methods podcast, and had 10 enriching, motivating conversations as a result

• Played our first Gray Acres set in years, and had a blast

Bad things that happened this year (no rank order):

• Experienced intense burnout and exhaustion

• Stressed too much about losing Bandcamp subscribers and seeing numbers go down

• Stressed too much about maintaining Substack subscribers and seeing numbers change

• Felt consistent and moderately uncomfortable financial stress for the whole year; enough to noticeably affect my day-to-day thoughts

• Lost family members to terminal illnesses; felt powerless

• Tried and failed to help friends with addictions; felt sad and angry

• Fell out of love with music a little bit, and listened to a fraction of the music I wanted to listen to

• Lost sleep and generally didn’t feel healthy very often, at least physically

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1. You can recognize “end of year” season most easily when the Spotify Wrapped discourse restarts anew: we all loudly and angrily agree that the streaming music economy sucks, then we all participate in it anyway while the world keeps turning and music keeps getting made because we realize that we love and care about it enough to continue doing it regardless of the larger economic apparatus around it. Around the same time, we’re hit by a wave of “best albums of the year” lists. This coincides with anger that the list is out too soon, followed by resentment about the content. Everyone forgets that “best” actually means “favorite.” So on and so forth.

2. When I started typing this post, I’ll admit that I did think about how to “optimize” it and improve it with more relevant content to market and promote, like making a creative segway from the list into a full-blown Studio Diary post or something, but I’m not going to do that. I do have quite a bit more music material to share soon, but I’ll do that separately when it’s ready instead of pushing it out now. This is something I’m taking into the new year with me: a sense of ease, restraint, and levity about my creations (musical, written, or otherwise).

3. For those of you who, like me, appreciate the idea of an alternative place to share and gather that isn’t traced and monetized, I love this new concept called izzzzi birthed by some of the folks behind Monome and the Lines forum. You can find me there as “andrewtasselmyer” if you sign up. Let me know if you do, so I can add you too. More about the project:

izzzzi is an experiment which might be called "slow social media" where we are exploring a multitude of constraints imposed on the standard mechanism of people making posts:

1. posts are collected into a digest once a day.

2. posts from yesterday are deleted, forever, every day.

3. posts are a draft and can be edited until the moment that yesterday is deleted and tomorrow becomes today.

4. posts are only visible between people who "add" one another ("mutual follows").

it's become a sort of collaborative daily newspaper written by friends. on the surface the parameters feel antithetical: it's ephemeral, it only changes daily, hardly anyone sees it. this is precisely what makes it interesting.