As I began writing this piece to exorcise some of my many thoughts and criticisms of streaming service platforms, I felt I had to live by my words and so I cancelled my Apple Music subscription. Since then, I have been steadily (re)building a library of digital audio files for offline music listening through Bandcamp purchases, buying CDs and burning them to my library, and downloading files from Soundcloud and zip folders uploaded to the internet. It takes a little bit more time, and money, to add a piece of music I like to my connection, but it has also made me more intentional and selective with what I choose to keep listening to. Through the frictionless ease afforded through a streaming service, I previously would add too many albums to my library, and thus many of them would receive maybe one listen before being banished to the furthest shadow realms of the listening cue.
Now, it is only the pieces of music I’m willing to do the work and/or pay the price to obtain that make their way into my collection. And with this intention, I feel I am re-establishing a sense of closeness with my favourite albums that was not felt when using streaming. When using Apple Music, the music may have been in my library, but it could only be there through paying my monthly rent to the corporation that gatekeeps access to the music. There was no true sense of me having a copy, no real exchange between myself and a human being on the other side of the music. It obscures and extends apart the listener-musician relationship that seems to becoming an ever-wider divide due to the insidious nature of music/tech capitalism.
One thought I sometimes have is that if there was some catastrophic event that shut down the internet for good, and I could never hear any music I hadn’t heard before unless it was at a live show or through obtaining a physical copy, at least I would have hundreds of hours of music available to listen to. I find comfort in that thought, and I’m grateful that these alternate methods of obtaining music exist and prevent streaming services from having the monopoly on music access that they obviously aspire to.
I wasn’t a voracious music seeker during the heydays of mp3 blogs and filesharing, but I have sometimes seen from music journalists and fans a sort of nostalgia for those times before streaming took its stronghold. Not only is less music shared and discovered through these avenues now, but the cultural pull of blogs as tastemakers has also declined. Much has been said about algorithms, platforms, and brands becoming predominant curators on streaming services, but many people are discovering new sounds from listening to user-created playlists on these platforms. It’s an evolution of old relations of peer-to-peer sharing of music, providing an alternative to uploading a mp3 or zip folder to Zippyshare or Mediafire and leaving a link to it in a blog or forum discussion post that your peers can access. It’s a subtraction of steps, and can occur all on one platform on the mobile device that for many is the primary medium through which they are playing music. It’s more convenient to add a piece of music to your library through streaming rather than downloading or buying an album, and it’s no wonder that most music listeners will pick this option. Capitalism has conditioned us to expect frictionless consumption through its self-purported “innovative” repackaging of previous forms of commodities, services, and their respective production and distribution processes.Of course, artists don’t get paid from peer to peer file-sharing, but receiving zero cents is only a little bit less than the fractions of cents they receive on streaming. However, not all music is available to stream or purchase online, and downloading someone’s vinyl rip may be the only way to listen to that record. And at least piracy deals a financial blow to record labels who may not have been paying royalties to their artists anyways.
Perhaps one of things that is most impactful about its legacy of mp3 blogs is that this history is still largely accessible on the internet in the present. The archives of old blogs are still up and viewable. Many links to download folders uploaded ten years ago are still operational, either on the original webpage or through a capture that has been immortalized through inclusion in the Wayback machine.
Some of my favourite recent discoveries have been found through visiting the vaults of filesharing history. I’ve been on a huge Dean Blunt kick lately, and RateyourMusic release comment boxes have pointed me to links to archived files of decade-old Hype William mixes. News of Holy Other’s return, as reported in Stereogum, led one commenter to shout out the artist’s excellent Sunshrine Mix from 2011. The record, however, that has most captivated me as of late, and was one of the main instigators for this post, is Phil Yost’s Bent City.I was first informed of this album via the ambient pop duo You’ll Never Get To Heaven, who returned late last year with their third album Wave Your Moonlight Hat for the Snowfall Train. The record takes its title from the closing track on Bent City, and was inspired by Yost’s “prescient use of delay processing in elevating spare beatless arrangements into haunting arrays of sonic afterimages.”
Having enjoyed Wave Your Moonlight Hat for the Snowfall Train, I needed to track down the record that the name and compositional inspiration were sourced from. Search engine results for Bent City were limited. A few youtube links to individual tracks were available, but I had the feeling that I needed to track down the record in its entirety. Heading to the album’s release page on RateyourMusic led me to user d____b’s list highlighting albums featured on the GhostCapital blog. From the search bar on ghostcapital.org, I was taken to a page with a little write-up and a downloadable folder of mp3s ripped from the vinyl.
I might have been the first person to visit the page in a while, but the blog was getting quite a bit of traffic back in 2012, as is made evident by the thirteen comments left by followers thanking blogger Nick Barbery for the post. Barbery hadn’t much to say about the release, providing only the below write-up:
“One of the more obscure and mysterious releases in the classic Takoma cannon. Out there, Bay Area hippie-improv jazz canoodlings. Woodwind, bass and echo-driven. All instruments played by Mr. Yost. Biographically, I’ve found next to nothing about him, online. 320 Vinyl rip by yours truly. Big thanks to D.”
Obscure and mysterious are apt descriptors of both Bent City and its composer. It was the first of Yost’s three records, released in 1967 on the Takoma record label. Yost’s 1968 follow-up record Fog-hat Ramble would also be released on Takoma, whereas Touchwood’s Dream would be self-released in 1970. As would be reported in a review of Touchwood’s Dream in 2015, Yost seems to never have been involved in any other releases beyond his own three records.
It’s been hard for me to put a finger down on why I like Bent City so much, but I think I found it at the perfect time, as many of my latest musical fixations were pointed towards sounds that hint at what is happening on this album. In the last year I have been getting more into both ambient and jazz, and I’ve developed a particular affinity for jazz records with compositions and atmosphere that mirror the slow and melodic tranquility of ambient. Particular records that I’ve connected to are Nala Sinephro’s Space 1.8, Pharoah Sanders’ Pharoah, and Antonio Carlos Jobim’s Wave. The sounds of these three records are unique from each other in their own right, but share a mellow, mediative feel and pacing. Bent City acts as a nocturnal and more mysterious and psychedelic blend of the slow and serene sounds of the records listed previously, and draws a picture of urban grittiness that is akin to the one may pick up to the aesthetics of trip hop.
Several tracks on Bent City feel less like songs and more like vignettes dotted with echoing artifacts of melodies. Basslines appear periodically, sometimes seemingly at random, to provide brief rhythmic grounding in a fast and furious flash, like a shadowy figure appearing in the corner of our vision before quickly darting into an alley and out of sight. Other tracks with a rhythmic backing throughout contain a propelled and peppier feel. One such example is “Lizard-Watchers Theme,” which, after following the long winding and abstracted odyssey of “Vision at 1000 Centigrade,” feels like steppng inside a jazz club after trudging through deserted streets for blocks and blocks.
Cryptic song titles, such as “Ethan Dreams Two People” and “Solace Stone Somewhere,” only heighten the disorienting and odd feeling that this record evokes. If Bent City is a place, it feels like a cloudy and deserted maze of towering buildings, lit by pale yellow street lamps and the occasional flickering neon sign of a dingy convenience store. We walk for great stretches alone to the beatless serenade of distant sirens calling through the whistling wind. As the uneasy feeling of being watched slithers in, it evaporates in the commotion outside a seedy club with its clattering chatter of smokers outside and the band’s playing leaking through walls and out from opening and closing entrance. When “Bent City II” comes in, with the same composition as the earlier “Bent City I” albeit with a horn replacing the guitar as the lead instrument, the realization sets in that your steps have carried you back to where you came from. The maze of Bent City leads you in circles until the fog and dark of the sky clear, and you find yourself at the station to “Wave Your Moonlight Hat for the Snowfall Train.” The locomotive arrives to whisk you off and out of that fever dream metropolis, and as you gaze sleepily out the window, you know you’ll be making a return trip sometime again soon.
Considering how little is known about Yost and this album, it feels miraculous that it can be listened to at all nearly 55 years after its release. For me to hear about it, all these little things had to fall into place, and it was made possible only through the blog scene. I learned about You’ll Never Get To Heaven when Gorilla vs Bear put me onto “Beyond the Clouds” in 2017. Four years later, the band would bring Bent City to my attention. Without the record on any streaming services or online retailers, only Ghost Capital had it accessible for listening. I suppose my writing of this post is just me doing my due diligence to continue turning eyes and ears to a record that, like so many others, could have so easily been lost in time when it went out of print, had it never been ripped to a digital format and then shared to the network.
In some ways, I feel like those delayed sonic afterimages that the record is filled with are resemblant of the ghostly afterglow of the heyday of mp3 blogs. Some of them are still out there, not yet relegated to the dustbin of internet history and its graveyard of dead links and error pages. And even if streaming services have instilled a toning down of this peer-to-peer sharing or release of music to reinforce the return of art passing hands through a corporate tech conglomerate as it makes its way from artist to listener, all the mechanisms for this kind of distribution are still in place. In the same way that Napster, Soulseek, and mp3 exchanges shook up the landscape in the internet age by striking hammers to the CD sales empire of the time, there very well could be a way in which artists and listeners find some replacement for streaming services that is a more convenient, ideal, and less exploitative way of sharing music. As big as Spotify, Apple Music, and other platforms may be, we know from the history of recorded music that the dominant form of music consumption, be it physical or digital, tends to have an expiration date at some point, and it would be naive not to imagine this trend continuing. Since streaming services were an attempt to curb piracy, it leads me to believe that a rejection of streaming in favour of file-sharing and direct artist support/mutual aid would again deal big blows to the capitalist class parasitically feeding off the production of music.
What is needed is a replacement of private streaming services by a public one, such as state-run streaming service proposed by Henderson Cole, in conjunction with grand-scale political and economic change. An expansion of the welfare state and financial support for the arts are also necessary. Capitalism romanticized the starving artist, whereas socialism would work towards ensuring that no one starves. If people didn’t have to sell their art in order to survive, music listeners wouldn’t have to buy music. Be cynical and call me utopian if you want, but I believe music and all other forms of culture should be freely accessible to all, and that mp3 blogs, file-sharing, and piracy have served as part of our collective recognition that this is how things should be.
Phil Yost’s Bent City can be downloaded via this link.
This is insane. I’m going to follow the same path right now.