Total Discography

[Heberto Calderon]

Areyou a Patreon member? If so, you may already have access to all of this!

(look in "Collections -> Discography" or tags).

Not a Patreon member? It's as cheap as $1/mo and is an excellent deal for a variety of reasons, primarily the Discord community and songwriting challenges.

Last Friday (Feb 10th, 2024), I randomly pulled out my phone in the studio to reference one of my soundtracks for a composing collaboration. "Huh. My phone is bugging out", I complained.

Then I noticed dozens of notifications: various listeners letting me know their feelings regarding my removal of all of my music. "What....the...fu????"

And just like that, poof. I was erased from Spotify, Apple Music, iTunes, Deezer, YouTube Music, and virtually everywhere music is sold or streamed. I logged into Tunecore (my primary digital distributor since 2007), and without warning or any communication, they removed a total of 23 albums.

You've heard these stories before. It's usually something that happens to newer artists with distros like Distrokid or CDBaby, and naturally there is very little support to deal with making things right again. But this is different:

I've had over $500,000 in sales on Tunecore over a nearly 17 year relationship. Music is my source of personal income, as my YouTube channel and other projects operate as a non-profit organization (that does not pay me a salary). That's gone all of a sudden.

And aside from my relationships and records, think of my listeners. "The Flashbulb" has about 1.9 million individual listeners on Spotify in the last year alone. There are over 300,000 playlists made in 2023 that now have unplayable tracks in them. The scope of this is actually insane.

So why? What happened? WHY can't you listen to my music anymore?

Spotify has accused me of "streaming fraud" and reported it to Tunecore.

Tunecore, whom I've paid thousands and thousands of dollars to represent my best interests, conducted an "internal investigation" and found "evidence" (none that they could show or explain to me, or anyone, naturally).

So instead of contacting me, withholding funds until things are sorted out, or suspending a suspected Spotify release, they chose a different option:

PERMANENTLY REMOVING MY ENTIRE DISCOGRAPHY FROM EVERY SINGLE PLATFORM I PAID THEM TO PUBLISH ON SINCE 2007.

All of this took place:

- 1 day after giving a tip to short $SPOT

- 12 days after giving NAMM speech about Spotify's effect on music

- 3 months after exposing Spotify's involvement in money laundering

- 1 year after a video about Spotify's unsustainability

I have no idea if this was malicious or not, but the argument can certainly be made. It's not like it's good news if it isn't malicious, as that would make this the most incompetent series of events in the modern music industry.

I know, this sounds hyperbolic! Don't take my word for it.

The CEO reached out too, albeit not being particularly helpful or bothering to apologize, at least she didn't accuse me of fraud.

So, as of midnight on Feb 12th, 2024, that's where we're at, and that's why I've uploaded my entire discography here. Listen up!

Pay what you want. Seriously.

If you're broke, pay the minimum and enjoy the music.

If you're generous, this will certainly help me out as I've just had a significant portion of my income cut off and may be entering an expensive legal battle.

But the primary reason this is here is so you can access my music for as little expense as possible. After all, you likely already pay a subscription service for it, and Spotify/Tunecore intentionally removed your access to it.

i know i can go to their profile and individually add all the songs and the albums, but i cant find a way to add the whole discography in one click. I've looked online and the best answer i can find is to go to they're songs and press "select all" but it doesn't work. Its weird because "select all" is the only one in white, but it's STILL not working

Hardcore ended with a question mark, not a period. By the mid-1980s, innovators like Black Flag and Die Kreuzen had outgrown the style's nasty, brutish, and short imperative and were looking ahead to something wider and more resonant. The result was what's often called post-hardcore, a fragmented movement that dominated American underground rock from the late 80s through the 90s. This is where your Fugazis and Slints come in, bands that made a clear break with the first wave's unfiltered vitriol, but held on to its core mission: Be yourself, and don't worry about whether anyone else gets it.

There are all kinds of transitional documents, mid-80s works by bands like Ian MacKaye's Embrace, Glenn Danzig's Samhain, and Daniel Higgs' Reptile House, that map out the shadowy middle ground between these two territories. But there are few clearer illustrations of how hardcore birthed its "post-" than the Moss Icon discography, reissued here in a spare yet elegant package (heavy on artwork and light on annotation) in time for the band's upcoming reunion.

Moss Icon sprung from no well-known scene. Originating in 1986 in Annapolis, Maryland, about an hour east of D.C., they played shows in the capital but didn't make records for Dischord, and that's a key distinction-- one reason why mentions of bands like Lungfish and Hoover still meet with nods of recognition while Moss Icon might elicit a quizzical shrug. You'll hear some of what would later come to be known as the Louisville sound in Moss Icon, the weird precociousness and insularity that marks Squirrel Bait and Slint, as well as later exponents like Rodan. But in a way, Moss Icon were even further out there. If Spiderland is a controlled masterpiece, Moss Icon's definitive statement, Lyburnum Wit's End Liberation Fly, which was recorded in 1988 but not issued until 1994, and which leads off Complete Discography, is a feral one, still fueled by a seething adolescent heart. Here and in their later work, the band extends and abstracts hardcore forms until they sound more like rituals than punk songs. There's a strong political message to Moss Icon's work as well-- a sweeping indictment of American inhumanity, from the Trail of Tears to modern warfare-- but it doesn't come packaged in catchy slogans you can pump your fist to. This is modernistic punk, matching fury with obliqueness; it whispers so you have to lean in close, and then screams your ear off.

At the center of it all is frontman Jonathan Vance. One minute he might remind you of a D.C. hardcore shouter, an angry young man hollering himself hoarse; the next, he's muttering cryptic poetry in an archaic tongue. In the Complete Discography booklet, there's a photo of Vance kneeling on a stage, grimacing and clutching his head, as though the demons won't leave him alone. His performances harness the same energy; they sound like exorcisms. Hardcore had seen would-be poet types before, but Vance was the real deal, more Rimbaud than Rollins.

Lyburnum demonstrates how effective Vance can be when combined with his bandmates' minimalist art-punk savvy. "I'm Back Sleeping, or Fucking, or Something" sums up in three minutes everything that makes Moss Icon great. Bassist Monica DiGialleonardo sets up a gothy bass vamp, and drummer Mark Laurence adds sparse punctuation. Vance stumbles in, sounding like a sleeptalker, worrying over weird phrases: "Your gardens and bridges green/ With shit came running." Suddenly, Laurence and guitarist Tonie Joy lock in like a vise around DiGialleonardo's riff, and Vance unleashes his full-throated scream. There's little more to the song than this repeated slack-to-tense progression, with the quiet sections growing ever noisier and more unhinged. But the band owns its minimal materials completely, embracing chaos while breathing in unison like a set of lungs.

There's a similar alchemy at work on "Lyburnum-Wit's End (Liberation Fly)", which steadily accrues weight over 11 sprawling minutes. Slint would attempt something similar a few years later with the exquisite "Good Morning, Captain", but Moss Icon's vision of an epic is shaggier and more earthy. Vance unspools a fractured narrative as the band trances out on a series of riffs-- one ploddy, another sparkly and uplifting-- working its way toward a distant climax. This is not, strictly speaking, eventful music, but however meandering it can seem from moment to moment (it wouldn't be too far-fetched to describe this and several later Complete Discography tracks as jams), it always feels purposeful. The rest of Lyburnum covers a lot of ground-- psychedelic postpunk ("Cricketty Rise"), a borderline metallic diatribe ("Mirror"), a grave anti-patriotic elegy with some of Vance's most evocative lyrics on record ("Happy")-- always maintaining the same level of urgency. It's clear that these are songs that had to come out.

The rest of Complete Discography (disc two of the CD version) features a grab bag of sessions from before, after, and even during the Lyburnum recordings. The context is crucial, as we get to hear what Moss Icon sounded like when they stood on either side of the hardcore and "post-" divide. One of the strongest tracks here is "Gravity", sourced from a 1991 split release, and featuring additional guitarist Alex Badertscher. Almost more than Slint's own work, the song prefigures the post-Spiderland continuum with eerie exactitude: It's hard to hear Vance's opening monologue, accompanied by folkish clean-toned guitar, and not think of June of 44, Dianogah, and all the other bands who borrowed from the Louisville playbook. "Gravity" also illustrates why some have saddled Moss Icon with the proto-emo tag; the track details a refreshing moment of seaside repose, embodying a New Age-y spirituality that seems worlds away from the dire catharsis of conventional hardcore. "We have living respiration/ A breath echo vibration/ Solid sun/ Inspiration," Vance declares in a tumbling blend of chant and speech, sounding like a man who's found his own version of God in nature. The musicians bolster him with rhythms that feel both driving and infinitely expandable; DiGialleonardo's free-range basslines, in particular, are songs unto themselves.

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