His name was Emmett. It was spring 2021, everybody was getting COVID shots, and a very young-sounding person asked me if he had reached Discos Mariscos. I said yes, sort of? Discos Mariscos was a small record label I ran with Chad Matheny of Emperor X in the 2000s. Maybe this was a young-sounding corporate franchise tax collector from Florida hunting us down for a 15-year-old missed filing? He then asked if I was Applied Communications. Since everybody I knew understood that I'd spent years hiding from that identity, I assumed a friend was pranking me, but I said yes to that too. Then he asked if I knew people were looking for me and he sent me a link to TikTok.
In the TikTok video, Madeline Pendleton talked to her audience about my music, but couldn't remember key details and was struggling to find anything online. She had over a million followers who seemed very young, very queer, and very excited for her thoughts on thrifting and the political philosophy of labor. They were also apparently very down to help her find some CDs a teenager put out in the mid-2000s. Somebody found the Discos Mariscos site on archive.org, which had my phone number on it. Somebody found my CDs on eBay and put them on YouTube. Somebody built a fan site with a discography that was more detailed than my own memory. Somebody got hold of deeply embarrassing unreleased songs through a Soulseek connection with an old friend's former roommate who almost certainly had no idea these files were still on his computer.
Shortly after releasing my third record, Heavenly Gospel, I started working in politics. As my work became a more meaningful part of my life, I realized all the freaky stuff those kids would later find might be a problem. In addition to my music being very off-putting to most people, there were numerous whacked-out or even disturbing recordings of performances (including kiddie pools full of milk, flour bombs, and a lot of unhinged screams), music videos (one involving a simulated water birth), and images (including photos from Vice Magazine in which I wore skin-colored bike shorts adorned with a fabric vulva). It was not good! So I spent a couple of weeks sending out takedown notices and emailing bloggers/editors. It mostly worked! For about a decade, this major part of my life felt fully buried… until a small number of highly motivated weirdos (complimentary) speedily unearthed it. And when those same people seemed to actually care about this work and derive value from it, I started to question why I hid it in the first place.
As a kid, I had a bunch of weird little projects — a public access TV show, comics, homemade records I'd hand out via CD-R and cassette — that were basically all efforts to impress my extremely cool mom. She died in 2002, when I was 15. A couple months later, I started making Africa Baby, Yeah Yeah Yeah, the first Applied Communications album. It was corny, nasally, uber-nerdy pop rap. The record after that, Uhhh Sort Of, was noisy and bratty and harsh and more directly "about" her death. Pitchfork named it one of the 15 worst releases of 2005 alongside "My Humps" and R. Kelly's "Sex Weed."
My next LP was Heavenly Gospel, a more earnest record mostly composed of four-track recordings of musically immature keyboard anti-pop. I was trying to recalibrate after being embarrassed by the reaction to Uhhh Sort Of and my excessive promotion of it. This time, I made copies of the CD by hand, sent the record to reviewers and radio stations on my own, and played a number of low-key house shows. But very few people clicked with it (among the already limited number of people who heard it in the first place). The project then dissolved with a lingering footprint dominated by all the absurd — and occasionally upsetting! — images described above. It was embarrassing. I had been trying to earn the approval of 30-something indie rock guys who lumped me in with "My Humps" and "Sex Weed." In trying to embody my mom's idea of coolness, I threw a sprawling teenage mess at the wall, and none of it stuck. There's something to be said for "difficult works," but ostentatious art without anybody to appreciate it generally comes off as narcissistic and obnoxious. If a coworker found this, it wouldn't be an exciting art project I did outside of the office; it'd be a deranged tryhard public implosion of ego.
Maybe that's why all this hoopla in 2021 hit me so hard. That anybody would care to find my phone number, buy a record of mine off eBay, or put together a fan site felt like a kind of absolution. But also they weren't just anybody (and they certainly weren't indie rock guys in their 30s): they overwhelmingly seemed to be young, queer, alienated, a little weird, and extremely online — uncannily similar to the type of person I had been. Even if I was just making music for five or six people like this, that now felt so meaningful to me. And also liberating, like a permission slip to be myself. It still took me a while to make anything. I put out a couple of EPs where I flailed around trying to remember how I do this. But my new LP, Applied Communications Bites the Big One, feels like the kind of record I wanted to make all along — going back to when my mom was alive and I was making CD-Rs for her and anybody who would listen. Making something for this small group of listeners allowed me to make something for myself. Incidentally, almost all the lyrics ended up being meditations on childhood memories through my creaky middle-aged lens.
You might think that it would have been obvious to me that a project I started a couple months after my mom's death might have been… a response to my mom's death. You would be wrong! But now I can see the whole journey as a way of processing that teenage shock and piecing together who I want to be in the world without my mom as my anchor. Thanks, Madeline Pendleton! (And Emmett!!) The record comes out September 25. :)
