11 Mar 2021> Exactly 1 year since WHO declared covid a pandemic. Feels like the most significant global trauma of our lifetime.

The inventor of the cassette (Lou Ottens) died today, in honor we're giving out the unheard tapes for free (just "buy" the digital album for $0+ and provide us w/ your address). We watched CASSETTE: A Documentary Mixtape, but it was a bit disappointing, cd of been reely intresting... they din't reely go into wat separated the cassette apart from other mediums, not even sure we reely went into it in our Confessions of a Cassette Head piece, about how tapes formed our thinking about the linearity of time + music. Weave bin thinking about it a lot as we record our new Tributaries album (we halve 12+ songs written, 10 w/ lyrics), how ez it is to compose digitally when u can just splice bits together, u can kind of just write the song as u go linking riffs together. Back w/ cassettes u had to plan out everything in advance + perform the piece in 1 take, for better or worse, wich is sort of what we did w/ our 1st 3 albums cuz our recording mindset was still ingrained in 4-track tape mentality.

We write this as we listen to Loveless by MBV on blue vinyl + start to do our taxes. 2020 will go down as the year where we started giving everything away. The covid pandemic spurred us to give out digital versions of all Calamari books for free + we've given out 100s of dead-tree books in our liebury boox or walking round town (DC) swapping our books for others... sorta like wat we used to do w/ cassettes in the 80s (another thing the aforementioned documentary din't mention, the whole culture of DiY 4-track musicians exchanging cassettes, nor did they go into the bootleg culture wich was only possible cuz of cassette recorders... tho obviously any 1 can record anything now so ain't a big deal). Here's our usual "economy of words" chart for the sake of fool disclosure:

... baysickly we spent $5k to make $2k + as always this don't inkloot indirect expenses, only the direct costs (i.e. bookmobile + USPS)... back to our old ways (2019 was an anomaly in that we din't print any books). $1k of this was for pressing our LP (Herd of Birds) into vinyl in December... an album of wich weave sold exactly 0 copies of, but we also give those away for free for any 1 intrested (if u live in D.C. we left a copy yesterday in the little liebury box in Mt. Pleasant on 18th Street NW between Kilbourne and Lamont). Besides Herd of Birds, last year we put out Textiloma + 4ier X-forms.

13 Mar> In anticipation of summer we shaved the back of our head... w/ our hair down or in a ponytail you can hardly tell. Last year around this time we put our hair back in a ponytail + chopped off a few inches but it din't help much w/ the mass of hair accumulating back there.

Maybe today is the day for spring cleaning? Been spending a lot of time on the roof, these are the best days in D.C... before it gets too hot + the mosquito's invade. Movie-wise we finished season 5 of Better Call Saul + watched Caché (2005) which we only finished cuz Juliette Binoche is nice to look at + we were in a string of bad movies these past few days which we abandoned: Coming to America II (we knew it would be bad, but this isn't even good bad), The Lady Vanishes (boring early Hitchcock), The River (1951 Indian film about boring colonialists) + Boat People (1982 Hong Movie that was really confusing/annoying cuz it seemed to have Chinese actors portraying Vietnamese people)... the latter 2 are cuz we're on a kick to watch river movies to inspire us for our next album.

14 Mar> Hyperallergic contacted us to write something for "Artists Quarantine With Their Art Collections" so we wrote this piece about 1 of our brother's pieces.