Author: Chad Matheny

Test.

SA.27.SEP PITTSBURGH, PA: BOTTLEROCKET
https://tinyurl.com/4pwhhkrf

SO.28.SEP CLEVELAND, OH: GROG SHOP
https://tinyurl.com/vzaywp3n

MO.29.SEP MILWAUKEE, WI: X-RAY ARCADE:
https://tinyurl.com/y8chf3sb

TU.30.SEP ST. LOUIS, MO: SINKHOLE
https://tinyurl.com/4bddnn83

WE.01.OCT
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TH.02.OCT DENVER, CO: LOST LAKE
https://tinyurl.com/3d3ntd4t

FR.03.OCT
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SA.04.OCT TUCSON, AZ: GROUNDWORKS
https://tinyurl.com/4yvmpxcr

SU.05.OCT
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MO.06.OCT
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TU.07.OCT BERKELEY, CA: 924 GILMAN
https://tinyurl.com/ykkp6zah

WE.08.OCT SAN JOSE, CA: OPEN SJ
https://tinyurl.com/36ew7ust

TH.09.OCT LOS ANGELES: MOROCCAN LOUNGE
https://tinyurl.com/ypn3zwr3

I made you another radio show.

If the stream above isn’t working, you can also just DOWNLOAD IT AS AN .MP3 MIX HERE.

0. Okay Teniz – “Penguin”

Set 1 – “I dunno, weird wave”

1. Marc Seberg – “Le Eclaircie”
2. The Comsat Angels – “Independenec Day”
3. The Skids – “The Saints Are Coming”
4. Hein und Oss – “In dem Kerker”
5. Esquivel – “Whatchamacallit”

Set 2 – “for some reason all women”

1. The Sixths – “San Diego Zoo”
2. Diane Cluck – “Ribbon-Cutting Ceremony”
3. Dear Nora – “Roller Coaster”
4. Dory Previn – “Yada Yada La Scala”

Set 3 – “cop-skeptic up front, sadcore in the back”

1. Mahjongg – “Tell the Police the Truth”
2. Fugazi – “The Kill”
3. The Sixths – “Aging Spinsters”
4. The Magnetic Fields – “Josephine”
5. Diane Cluck – “Reverly”
6. Bill Callahan – “Too Many Birds”

Set 4 – “contemporary-ish “

1. Dur-Dur Band – “Dooyo”
2. John Maus – “Came & Got”
3. Geologist – “Wit of the Watermen”
4. Fcukers – “Play Me”

If you prefer to skip the radio show format, you can stream all of these on my YouTube channel or download them in this .zip file.

Still didn’t manage to get a better mic setup this week, so it’s a running joke now. Talk to you next week.

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-CRM-

I made you a radio show.

If the stream above isn’t working, you can also just DOWNLOAD IT AS AN .MP3 MIX HERE.

In this inaugural episode of Twenty-Song Tuesday, your DJ (me) walks you through the whole idea. Basically I’m trying to have a WFMU show without being on WFMU, and I think I kind of nailed it. Nothing fancy, I just grabbed twenty pieces of music that I have been intentionally enjoying recently and talked about it a bit.

Set 1 gets us off to a gentle start — mostly solo guitar, and not a word of English.

1. Loituma — “Ievan Polkka”
2. Wolf Biermann — “Ermutigung”
3. Georg Ringswandl — “Radlmare”
4. Bettina Wegner — “Cool Sein”
5. Maria Elena Walsh — “Manuelita la Tortuga”

Set 2 picks up the pace, but in a gentle way.

1. Todd Rundgren — “Healing, Pt. 1”
2. YMO — “Perspective”
3. Virus — “Wadu Wadu”
4. Prefab Sprout — “Ride”
5. Hermeto Pascoal — “Musica da Lagoa”
6. Ata Kak — “Obaam Sima”

Set 3 gets weird, starting at intergalactic gangster funk and arriving at postcolonial Casio pop via dancehall and gabber.

1. Max Rebo (possibly Rick James) — “Lapti Nek”
2. Bald Terror — “Rotterdam”
3. Lovindeer — “Babylon Boobs”
4. Lady G — “Nuff Respect”
5. William Onyeabor — “Atomic Bomb”
6. Francis Bebey — “Black Coffee Cola”

Set 4 is just three newer songs I have been into lately.

1. Ezra Furman — “In America”
2. Laveda — “Cellphone”
3. Anni Rossi — “Deer Hunting Camp 17”

If you prefer to skip the radio show format, you can stream all of these on my YouTube channel or download them in this .zip file.

I’m not loving the way this microphone sounds, so next week I’ll see what I can do to pump that up. Talk to you then.

-030-
-CRM-

Mark Lipsitz died yestereday. You meet a lot of people on the music path. Some of them don’t care. Some of them help you out when they can. Some of them go out of their way to make absolutely sure you have everything you need, and that everyone and their grandma knows about your music. Mark was the third kind. This is an incalculable loss for those of us who knew him that way, and we can only imagine what it’s like for his family. I think we’ll slowly discover in the coming seasons that, simply by being who he was, Mark quietly built a web of sparking connections that would not have existed without him. I’ll be grateful for that web, for Mark’s lifework, and for his impact on mine, forever. Blessings to you and your family and your legacy, Admiral Lipsitz of the mighty tugboat Bar/None. We’ll do our best to make you proud.

20 June: Massapequa, NY – Sunrise Fest
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/golden-hour-booking-presents-sunrise-fest-tickets-1334329929739

26 June: Indianapolis, IN – Healer
https://www.facebook.com/healerindianapolis/

27 June: Davenport, IA – Raccoon Motel
https://dice.fm/event/q2y7ey-emperor-x-wanother-michael-kleenex-girl-wonder-mocktag-27th-jun-raccoon-motel-davenport-tickets?lng=en

28 June: Ferndale, MI – PUG Fest
https://www.noxp.org/event-details/pugfest-iii-presented-by-the-pleasant-underground

29 June: DAY OF REST

30 June: Columbus, OH – Spacebar (EARLY SHOW!)
https://www.spacebarcolumbus.com/event-details/emperor-x-hainted-mery-steel

1 July: Williamsport, PA – Jeremiah’s

2 July: Prospect Park, PA – Marty McGee’s

3 July: Washington, DC – Squirrel Park
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/in-the-park-w-emperor-x-berra-tickets-1422380481309

4 July: INDEPENDENCE DAY SURPRISE
(more info soon)

5 July: _______, NJ – Ask A Punk
(more info never)

6 July: BROOKLYN, NY – The Penthouse
932 Madison St. Apt. C3, 11221

All dates subject to the usual tour chaos. Stay up to date by checking this page occasionally.

Tickets: emperorx.net/tix

The logo of El Salvador’s CECOT prison looks a lot like the ISIS logo.

This proves nothing, of course. But when I’m not wearing sight aids my mind has been trained over a lifetime to match low-info, blurry images to the closest matching sign in my inventory (everyone’s mind does this of course, but because of my low vision I suspect I do it faster and better than most.) Here’s what the two logos look like through a Photoshop filter I made to closely simulate my unaided sight:

Both logos have a white-on-black color scheme. Both feature a white circle with black markings. Both have similar ratios of circle-to-text. If I see one of these logos on a laptop screen and I can’t find my glasses, I have a hard time picking them apart on first glance. Global brand recognition of the ISIS flag is high and is in the Christian and secular west nearly universally associated with fear, and this seemingly-superficial similarity may at minimum count as a visual metaphor (Marlan, 2018) or even trademark dilution via associative cognition (Tushnet, 2007).

I found no evidence that this similarity is intentional. Even if it is, I doubt any such evidence will ever come to light; admitting inspiration came from an organization so universally loathed in the Christian and secular west would create unnecessary political risk for Nayib Bukele’s government and its Trumpist U.S. backers. But CECOT’s logo is part of a project of political branding much as the black-field-white circle banner was for ISIS (Bandopadhyaya, 2019), and the similarity of these projects is more than graphical. CECOT was built not just to incarcerate gangs but also to generate propaganda images that inspire fear among outsiders (Oette, 2024) and encourage public acceptance of violent and supposedly necessary measures towards achieving populist social change (Rosen et al., 2023). These are goals ISIS shared.

Whether CECOT’s logo was meant to subconsciously remind us of ISIS or not, the resemblance should prompt us to examine nominally-Christian western societies like El Salvador and the United States, their flagging commitment to the Christian values of forgiveness and redemption, and their drift towards glorification of violence.

Further Reading

Bandopadhyaya, S. (2019). Branding the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. Global Media and Communication, 15(3), 285–301. https://doi.org/10.1177/1742766519874380

Marlan, D. (2018). Visual metaphor and trademark distinctiveness. Washington Law Review, 93(2), 767–826. https://digitalcommons.law.uw.edu/wlr/vol93/iss2/5/

Oette, L. (2024). Degradation as salvation: Reflections on El Salvador’s punitive prison model. Torture Journal, 34(1), 143–147. https://doi.org/10.7146/torture.v34i1.144071

Rosen, J. D., Cutrona, S., & Lindquist, K. (2023). Gangs, violence, and fear: Punitive Darwinism in El Salvador. Crime, Law and Social Change, 79(2), 175–194. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10611-022-10040-3

Tushnet, R. (2007). Gone in sixty milliseconds: Trademark law and cognitive science. Texas Law Review, 86, 507–534. https://scholarship.law.georgetown.edu/facpub/792/

50 limited-run lathe cuts of “Don’t Change Color, Kitty” are available. They ran out fast last time, so if you want one get it here. Details below.

My friends at Bar/None and dreamsOfField and I produced another limited run of fifty 33.3-RPM lathe cuts for you.

This month’s offering is a weather-resistant, EMP-proof polycarbonate plate containing mono audio of my 2014 contribution to a 99 Percent Invisible episode on nuclear semiotics, “10,000-Year Earworm to Discourage Settlement Near Nuclear Waste Repositories (Don’t Change Color, Kitty.)”

Each copy includes individually paw-printed art featuring the face of one of our family cats in the center of a radiation trefoil. (Her name is Trisha, she is a very proper lady, and I am happy to report that her eyes remain normal-colored and therefore that our current home is not located near a nuclear waste storage facility.)

As with all of these dub plate releases, I personally lathed each copy, signed each label, stamped and hand-numbered each jacket, and paw-printed each jacket back. We will not reprint this edition.

Purchase it here for shipping next week: http://www.bar-none.com/store/kitty
Want to know more about how this song came to be? Have a listen to the 99pi episode about it here: https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/ten-thousand-years/
…or watch a documentary which features it here, including an adorable scene in which Paolo Fabbri, the originator of the folk-song-and-bioengineered-cats idea, listens to my song:
https://vimeo.com/138843064

Emperor X at SXSW 2025

March 11 – 4pm – Speakeasy
European Union Music Mixer

March 12 – 8pm
SECRET LOCATION IN TEXAN SUBSPACE
SIGN UP HERE TO FIND OUT WHERE DAY-OF

March 13 – 6pm – Hilton Austin (2nd Floor Lounge)
SXSW 2025: 2nd Play Stage

March 14 – DJ set (all night) E.X mini-set (11pm)
SECRET LOCATION IN TEXAN SUBSPACE
SIGN UP HERE TO FIND OUT WHERE DAY-OF

March 15 – 11pm – Hotel Vegas (Inside Stage)
Bar/None Trash Casual Showcase