This month's playlist consists of various textures I've been creating to try and finish a song called Cowboys On Strike. It's the last song I have work to do for the next JD & Cicadas record, which is similar to the El Pulpo album from 2017. This song evolved out of a loop played by Robert Chamberlain during a recording session we did way back in 2017 for a different song on this same album called Cold. I heard a bass line in some weird resonance to the kick drum as recorded by Scott Solter and decided to make a song out of it. The other shard the song started from was a track of processed Oud that I had recorded with Scott for the song Cold as well. There were a couple of passages in what he did with running the Oud through an Eventide H3000 that matched Robs loop well when I put them together. As you'll hear in the short clips, the oud ended up sounding more like a breathy synthesizer, but you could still hear the attack of the strings, which I played with a dried mango seed that Scott handed me to use. When I resumed working on this song recently, I tried to add some variety to a loop based tune by running these Oud via H3000 passages through different hardware processors I've acquired this year, including the Sherman Filterbank 2 and an Overstayer MCS channel, which has remarkable resonant filters like a synthesizer, while otherwise being a channel strip that is like what you have in a console, with preamp, eq, compression, and saturation. I also used some plugins on it like the OTO Biscuit and Melodyne, which you can use not only to sanitize and sterilize vocals but to bring out even and odd harmonics and other more creative applications.

The first track is a finished arrangement of keyboard tracks and a redone bass line I did in April and early May to try and give the song a less repetitive structure, with an added chord change in the chorus.

It's funny how some things come together quickly and others take patience. But I hope you can hear I'm having fun with this one.

The lyrics to the song aren't in this playlist, but they are based on the book The Great Cowboy Strike Bullets, Ballots and Class Conflicts in the American West by Mark A. Lause which is published by Verso Press. The book turned my understanding of what a cowboy actually was around. They were exploited working class laborers getting screwed over by Eastern US and European capitalist conglomerates, just like the meat packers whose corresponding football team they played in the NFL. There was a lot of multi racial organizing and labor struggles as ownership of land in the midwest became increasingly centralized, and capital was only able to subdue this movement with armed violence. The sad ending of that labor uprising made me think of Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz's great memoir Red Dirt, which traces a legacy of family abuse back to the crushed spirit of a father who had been involved in working class socialist organizing in Oklahoma only to see that movement crushed. Her book is like this one in showing how the horrible conservatism we see in changes such as the loss of reproductive health care and abortion access in places like Texas and Oklahoma is not consistently seen in the earlier history of that region. Behind every fascism, someone once said, is a failed revolution.