MVTANT announce New Tape/US Tour Dates/Gang of Four Cover

Cover of “Damaged Goods” + Tour Date
Listen to MVTANT’s Animalistic Cover of “Damaged Goods” + Tour Dates
(POST-PUNK.COM)


MVTANT 2023 Tour dates:


Tour dates:

4.28 TULSA – THE WHITTIER BAR
5.2 DENVER – GLOB
5.3 SLC – INTERNATIONAL
5.7 RENO – HOLLAND PROJECT
5.8 CHICO – NAKED LOUNGE
5.12 VANCOUVER – VERBODEN
5.15 OLYMPIA – CRYPTOTROPA
5.17 OAKLAND – GOLDEN BULL
5.18 SAN DIEGO – THE MERROW
5.19 TIJUANA – BLACK BOX
5.21 EL PASO – 101
6.8 NASHVILLE – COBRA
6.9 INDIANAPOLIS – BLACK CIRCLE BREWING $#
6.10 DETROIT – LELAND CITY CLUB $#
6.11 TORONTO- SEE SCAPE #
6.13 BOSTON – O’BRIEN’S PUB $#
6.14 NORTHAMPTON – RED KROSS $#
6.15 KINGSTON – BLACKBIRD INFOSHOP $#
6.16 NEW YORK CITY – ST. VITUS $#
6.17 RICHMOND – FALLOUT $#
6.18 WILMINGTON – ANGIE’S RAINBOW ROOM
6.20 ASHEVILLE – STATIC AGE
6.21 ATLANTA – THE EARL
6.22 GAINESVILLE – PORTAL 4 RECORDS
6.23 TAMPA – NEW WORLD
6.24 MIAMI – GRAMPS
6.25 ORLANDO – WILL’S PUB
6.27 NEW ORLEANS – THE GOAT
6.28 HOUSTON – BLACK MAGIC SOCIAL CLUB

     Something I learned in the process of going back and editing this blog is that the posts about my record label stuff are the least popular!   What was most popular is when I was specifically writing about the local music scene in San Diego because the people in that scene were interested in reading about themselves.  During the Dirty Beaches era there was some national interest and very little local San Diego interest and then after that period it's just been random- I assume the traffic is mostly bots at this point- which is fine but I wish bots would buy stuff. I don't see why they shouldn't.  If you wanted to create a real person on the internet having a bot buy stuff would probably do the trick.

    Anyway- Mvtant was the first Dream project I was involved in- the Gore/Mirrorshade EP.   I thought the sales for that record were good, that the streaming numbers- which had hovered at 1/2k monthly listeners on Spotify for years before a recent jump over 3k a month, were bad and that the "work rate" of the Artist- to borrow a term used to evaluate pro soccer players, was fantastic.  He has a decent social media presence and his touring game is great- he is self sufficient which is almost a must these days at the diy level considering the amount of time it take to get going.

    And, no one was trying to steal him away- which at the DIY level you have to realize that even the smallest success is going to mean other people trying to move in and take the artist to "the next level."  It's an easy pitch, and of course every other label can tell if a record/artist combo is doing well.  So like with The Serfs, when we put out Primal Matter I knew it was a good record and furthermore that anyone else who had a copy of that record and saw them live would be like, "Yeah, this would be good for my label."  Basically the goal is to just hang on to the record you've released by keeping it in print and continuing to sell it.

    For MVTANT- the first thing is this 10 song cover/remix tape cassette, which, the idea is to remix and combine with other artists and then to post one song a week on the streaming services to maximize the reach while selling out the cassette and hammering out weeks of social media posts about each new track.  It is...anti-romantic- all this streaming lore, but that is how things work these days.  One observation I've made is that streaming is actually a parallel universe that sometimes overlaps with "real world" measurements like selling physical media and concert tickets but not always.  It is quite frequent to see a disconnect between low streaming numbers and high real world figures and vice versa.   This goes all the way from the bottom to the top in both directions. 

Our Share of Night (2023) by Mariana Enriquez

Book Review

Our Share of Night (2023)

by Mariana Enriquez

  Argentinian author Mariana Enriquez first showed up on my radar back in 2021 when I read her short story collection, The Dangers of Smoking in Bed.  At the time I noted her ability to combine conventional short story themes you find in most literary fiction with what can only be described as "body horror."  Thus, when I saw that her new book, Our Share of Night, an occult fantasia set against the backdrop of the turmoil of mid 20th century Argentina, was the February recommendation of the Good Morning America Book Club (!) I knew I was going to have to check it out.

   I was able to snack the Audiobook- which runs a cool 30 hours- not that I minded, because Our Share of Night is equally riveting as a sprawling occultist horror novel AND as a very specific novel about the life experiences of people in 20th century Argentina (with a side trip to Carnaby street era swinging London).  From my perspective, both sides of the equation worked.  You could pick at either strand from the perspective of genre fiction or literary fiction, but the combination was quite intoxicating.  Enriquez's grasp of the particularity of 20th century occultism- her fictional "The Order"- a British-Argentinian "cult of the shadow" that traces is it's existence to a chance discovery by a pair of amateur folklorists in the wilds of 18th century Scotland could be ready equally as a metaphor for capitalism or for the international culture of literary fiction.  

  It's also familiar to anyone who knows anything about 20th century occultism- the darkness is summoned through the use of a medium, the medium give out garbled but powerful instructions on different subjects that seemingly range from the transcendent (the transmigration of consciousness from one body (older) to another (younger) body is a particular obsession, but it also sounds like the cult was given economic advice which allowed them to prosper on both sides of the Atlantic. 

   The form of the narrative is sequential, with narrative responsibilities for each member of a nuclear family unit of father, wife and son who have their own relationship to "the order" and to 20th century Argentinian history.  Anyway there can be no doubt that Our Share of Night is a banger.  The Audiobook was great I would recommend it.

Book Review: The Invention of Art: A Cultural History(2001) by Larry Shiner

 Book Review: 

The Invention of Art: A Cultural History(2001) 

by Larry Shiner

   If you want to know the true worth of obscure academic titles- this book, published over twenty years ago- cost 30 bucks on Amazon, used, and 35 bucks, new, which shows you basically that people hold on to their copies and not many people donate them/sell them off, etc.  I could see the value before I read the book- since The Invention of Art: A Cultural History is a synthesis both of the history itself, which is semi-obscure AND the development of the theory surrounding that history, which is more obscure and took place largely outside of the United States and the English language.

  The idea of a transcendent and universal art is now going on nearly a century of being attacked from all sides.  Today, the only people left who would argue of the existence of some universal criterion of artistic merit and aesthetic beauty would perhaps be the Catholic Church and people who watch Fox News.   For everyone else, that ship has sailed but it is worth knowing the story of how we got from there to here since one of the consequences of being "here" is that people abandon all criterions of artistic merit and argue that aesthetic beauty doesn't exist, or shouldn't, or is completely subjective in which case, why bother with art at all except as a personal expression of traumatic biography.

   The Invention of Art does such a good job summarizing this history that I took my library book copy to my office, copied large portions of it and scanned in the notes and bibliography.  It's been my experience, running a record label for the past 15 years, that almost everyone in a creative endeavor considers themselves a capital A artist.  Actors, musicians, everyone.  The phenomenon of "everyone an artist" and "the culture of creatives" is intimately tied to the discussion in Shiner's book, starting in the romantic period, where the idea of the transcendent artist took root.  Originally only very specific types of artists could claim this mantle- poets were right there in the beginning.  Painters and sculptors.  Drama.  Beginning in the 18th century poetry began to expand to what we now know as "literature" though the acceptance of novels as literature was a long time coming.   Also in the 18th century music came into its own as an accepted art- this is a particularly interesting discussion, since today music is synonymous with what most people consider art.

   In fact, up until the 18th century music was a functional endeavor with musicians called to compose work for a specific occasion and such work was reused and reformatted without regard to the preservation of a specific "work."  It is the growth of this concept, that of the specific "work" that Shiner singles out as an important inflection point.  In this same sense he points out the importance of the legal significance of the passage of a copyright bill in England after which an author of a work could claim payment for the reproduction of that work by others.

  It is a fascinating topic and if you ever see a copy of this book on the shelf of a used book store for twenty bucks or less you should grab it.