Friday, March 8, 2024

Hi Prog readers!

If you've seen the ad in Prog Magazine, may I take this opportunity to say hi- Hi there! Welcome. My name's Gavin and I make music under the name worriedaboutsatan (it's a long story lol). 

Anyway, The album I placed that ad for is called JÆJA, sounds quite kosmische-y (think NEU! Can, Tangerine Dream, etc) and you can hear it here:

It's cheap if you wanna buy it, and please consider signing up to my Bandcamp mailing list too if you've a spare 5 minutes. 

Thanks and hopefully see you around,

Gavin

Thursday, January 25, 2024

gigs

Tour plan 2024.txt

- [city one] talk to promoter (promoter fully booked for 6-12 months as they're the only game in town)

- [city two] book cool DIY venue (venue now closed, nearest DIY one is triple the hire cost of that one)

- [city three] try to jump on a support (the only shows coming up aren't suitable or are fucking massive)

- [city four] talk to promoter (can only offer small fee, which is fine, but can't afford to travel on it)

- [city five] book cool arts space (is in a hard-to-get-to part of town, also hire cost is 20% more than it was last time I hired it, which was already way over my budget)

- [city six] talk to promoter (no response)



Thursday, January 4, 2024

labels labels labels

It's increasingly clear that social media is no longer a place for the little shower thoughts, or recommendations, or little stories you sometimes randomly remember - it's just a relentless hot take machine these days, so I thought I'd pop in here with a few words.

Just remembering, not so fondly, about a time where a label agreed to put an album out of mine, then spent 6 months not doing anything, then replied to a catch up email from myself by saying it now wasn't happening for some reason. Mad, isn't it? How someone can just waste half a year of your life and you just sit there and think 'oh well'. Absolutely insane industry.


Wasn't the only time that's happened in my life too. One label emailed me saying he'd literally just forgot to put an EP of mine out, and would I be ok if he just put it out later that afternoon. 'no, you're alright' I replied and did it myself a few months later.

There was a label, way back in the early days, that said I would have a contract in the post and could I sign it. It never arrived, and after asking what on earth was happening, the label just ended. Great stuff. This was like a year or so into the band (which, by the way, celebrates it's 18th birthday this month), so not a cracking start to the satan lifecycle.

One dropped me almost instantly after agreeing to put a record out, which was news to the legal guy who had just sent me a contract to sign. That was a fun afternoon.

Another said I'd have to change a record for them to consider. I did, and then got told it wasn't "sexy" enough. Lol, they got in the bin.

One never responded to me after putting out a record I did in conjunction with someone else, so ended up having to buy my own fucking CD. That was a new one. He ended up signing the other guy too, lol.

I've had my fair share of 'sure I'll listen to it' from labels, only for them to never listen, or sometimes they listen but never respond (the surefire way to tell me you weren't bothered), but getting so far as 'yes I will put this out', having masters and artwork ready to go, then having the rug pulled, is an altogether different experience. And not a nice one either.

So, I dunno what the point of this was, just wanted to get it off my chest, and let you all know that even when everything seems to be going well, this industry has a real habit of fucking with you.

 

Tuesday, December 19, 2023

Favourite albums of the year

Here you go, have a list of my favourite listening material from stuff that was out this year:

HEALTH - Rat Wars

Leroy Se Meurt - Voué à rouiller

Sigur Rós - ÁTTA

The Hives - The Death of Randy Fitzsimmons

Hot Tap - Washers

dEUS - How To Replace It

Orbital - Optical Delusion

M83 - Fantasy [if pushed, I'd say this is my favourite album this year]

Lil Yachty - Let's Start Here.

Rebecca Black - Let Her Burn

Depeche Mode - Memento Mori

James Holden - Imagine This Is A High Dimensional Space Of All Possibilities

Pan American - In Daylight Dub


And some stuff, musical or not, that I also enjoyed this year:

-This one old Catapin Beefheart live performance

-Aston Villa FC

-St. Pauli being top of Bundesliga 2

-finally getting a CD copy of Computer World by Kraftwerk after a hard-drive crash lost my old copy, and discovering that it's now more valuable than gold or something?

-Helensburgh, Scotland in the sun

-Discovering that if you're cold, you can just go to bed really early and it's fine.

-That Garth Marenghi book

-These videos of a guy racing marbles and getting a really over the top american to commentate on it like it's the superbowl.

-Leaving twitter


Wednesday, December 13, 2023

satan's 2023 roundup

Another year down! 4 studio albums, 1 live album (that's actually a double album) and a slew of remixes and one off bits. And that was just the satan stuff. Yes, it's the satan end of year roundup! Here's everything I was involved in that came out over the past 12 months, just in case you missed anything:

satan stuff:

Falling But Not Alone

 

I Hope You Like The Bundesliga

 

The Pivot



The Clouds Just Eventually Roll On And No-one Remembers Anything



Live 2023


The Marta Mist stuff:

Eyes Like Pools

 

Slowly


 

Remixes!

Orbel - Orbain Irekiak (worriedaboutsatan Rework)

Rich List - Bad Guys (worriedaboutsatan remix)

 

Collabs!

[ 3 6 / But I Was Happy ] - [B O L T ] & worriedaboutsatan

Wednesday, November 22, 2023

A thousand miles


lmao, just fuck off.

Please, for the love of god, if you want to listen to music, use anything but Spotify. 

Cheers.

Thursday, October 26, 2023

arrrgh me hearties

I swear to god, Bandcamp getting sold to Songtradr has made people lose their fucking minds. 

We don't know what will happen to Bandcamp, because it's too early to make an assesment. 

Yes, things look bad. I mean, just look at what that stupid company (put that E back in your name and grow up ffs) does to anything it comes into contact with. It's not good. Tangent, but they weirdly now own one of my old favourite online music stores, and whilst it sits almost abandoned (the landing page hasn't been updated since 2019), it is still operational somehow.

I, like many DIY artists, need Bandcamp. We need it to be operational, we need it to keep doing what it's been doing for the past decade+. We need the community, the freedom, the tools... hell, we need the money. 

But we're not stupid - we know that slashing 50% of your workforce never leads to good things (even though that was actually the brainchild of previous owners Epic Games), and a lot of us have been around the block a fair few times now - we know we're not allowed nice things because of myriad factors (rich people being twats being the main), and so I know we're all keeping an eye out on potential successors to Bandcamp's throne.

It's dominated the DIY space for years now, and in that time, perhaps we've been a bit too optimistic that it would never go away - after all, it was profitable and sustainable before Epic bought it, so why would anyone ever want to fuck that up? Yeah, rich people.

Whilst it's true that you can frankenstein all the best bits of Bandcamp into one whole, that would take an ungodly amount of time, money and effort - all three things that are in short supply for us having to make ends meet elsewhere. For example, you could sell a CD/ vinyl/ shirt whatever on something like Bigcartel, then have a mailing list on Mailchimp, digital items via distrokid/ your own hosting, gig listings on Songkick, etc. etc. but to do all that misses the point of what Bandcamp was - it let you do all that for free all at the same time, so when someone bought a shirt, they were added to the mailing list, which in turn let you market at them with a spam resistant email for future stuff, and you could also let them have a download with the purchase. To do that without Bandcamp, I'd need the customer to buy from Bigcartel, get them to allow me to add them to my mailing list (which is now £32.75 a month with no guarantee it won't get caught in a spam filter), and then also somehow email a download of whatever it is they've just bought the physical item of, using my own hosting. Each way round someone interacts with this mad network of misery, it gets infinitely worse - someone buys my album via itunes, but I can't get any of that information for myself for future marketing, and also they don't know I have t-shirts with that album cover on there that they might like, or that I have a remix of it for free somewhere. It's a fucking nightmare.

You can write an entire essay about the community aspect of Bandcamp - the feeds, the solidarity, the feeling that you were finally doing something good for artists and labels, all of that. It's much more than just a storefront (although it's great at that too), and it remains to be seen if this new lot of vulture capital stock guzzlers understand that enough. I'm betting they won't, but (and here's the kicker) until something else comes along that can replace whatever it becomes, WE ARE STUCK.

You can leave twitter and go join bluesky or threads or insta or whatever, and you can leave spotify and go to tidal, apple music, deezer or whereever too. But Bandcamp... man, it's one in a million and an absolute lifeline to a lot of us, so please - please, for the love of god, don't lose your fucking mind and start advocating for piracy, streaming, or any other shit we battled so hard to try and swerve people away from. 

We spent the best part of 10 years trying to get smug little shithead pirates to buy something off us, however small, under the not-so-hard-to-understand principle of 'it cost us money to make this thing, so if you could pay just a little bit for it, that'd be cool. we are not metallica. we are not rich lol'. To advocate to going back to those dark days is ill-advised at best and actual, cultural vandalism at worst. 

Streaming pays nothing, and now it pays less than nothing, and we'd only just started making in-roads to getting people to understand that - buying something off me on Bandcamp is 99.9999999% better than streaming anything, and getting that swedish berk to pay me less than a fraction of a penny for the privilege.

Look, it's a shit sandwich, there's no denying that. But for now at least, we're just gonna have to dance with this devil, because your DIY favourites are still DIY. Sure, shoot them a few quid on ko-fi or whatever - make an extra effort to go see them live, or pick up a shirt, but just know that, for now at least, Bandcamp is still the main source of income for a lot of us. 

Don't lose your head and start preaching for some mad techno-dysopia, because it's a road that leads nowhere. If someone comes out with Bandcamp 2 tomorrow, fucking great -sign me up, but that's not here just yet. These things invariably take time to grow too, which is something not a lot of us have either, so it's this or bust. The system's fucked, but we're still here.