Valentine's Day Compilation #6: Chorus

The theme of this year's Valentine's Day Compilation is: Chorus.

The chorus is the bit that repeats, and it's the coming together. It's the prologue and the epilogue, the voices that comment on the action from outside of it. It's sounds coming together, the moment the crowd joins in. The line of kickers, the harmonies, the refrain, the unison.

Here's a gif I made of what might be the cover.

As always, the theme is unimportant. Use it as inspiration if it works that way, or ignore it if it doesn't. And as always, we're open to just about anything as long as it's an audio file. I don't think I have had to execute my curatorial  powers once yet. Come test them!

Some background: Since 2016, we here at Fuck the Polis! have been organizing a compilation released on Valentine's Day. You can find them here: 2016 (Pop), 2017 (Solidarity), 2018 (Extra), 2019 (Digging In), 2020 Smash (b/w Pushing Through) These compilations have been home experimental, noise, plunderphonics, bedroom pop, poetry, folk, punk, country, darkwave, and a whole lot more.

To be on the comp, all you have to do is email me (uninterpretative [at] gmail) an audio file (preferably .wav or .aiff, but I can make anything work) before February 14th and I can probably include it. If you have any questions, hit up that email or @benladen or wherever you talk to me. I'm happy to support, whether with words or sounds or whatever.

Linkout: Island Demeter

Sorry for the radio silence the last couple months! I've been ... very busy. Between working holiday retail in a global pandemic and releasing Island Demeter I have had roughly no time to think. But hey, here's a show that I put together over the last 10 months and a thing I'm incredibly proud of having made with my friends. Season 2 is already in the planning stages, and it's going to be even more special.

Per the description above, Island Demeter is an Actual Play podcast (that means it's recordings of people playing tabletop roleplaying games) focused on critical play and queer bonhomie. I've played around with describing it in a few different ways, but the best is probably just to listen to the first episode where a handful of us introduce ourselves and talk about the games we end up playing. It's goofy and it gets serious at times. Boiled down, it's basically recordings of a handful of queers (that's us) telling short stories to each other and you - and including the process of how we got there.

I'm writing this at 7am on January 10th, and I just started preheating 2 Dutch Ovens to experience the basic recipe from Ken Forkish's Flour Water Salt Yeast book. I've baked some bread and some cakes recently, and been experimenting with eggs + pork again. Nothing quite enough for an Always Bee Cooking, but after December spending any time in the kitchen feels like a win for me. More soon, I hope.

Oh, I also popped into the massive reviewers roundup at Strange Horizons to yell from the rooftops for one final time in 2020 about how great Silvia Moreno-Garcia's Mexican Gothic is (plus some other science fiction and some picks on transformative justice, disability justice, and mutual aid that helped me imagine that a future might someday be a thing that could possibly maybe be looked forward to)!