Kudos for AHB’s Goodies
"You are a beacon of originality in a sea of algorithmically-generated pablum." — kind words from a paid subscriber
“A brilliantly curated sonic cloud by a savant.” — Edie Meidav
a 2023 ‘top pick’ in a special year end Substack Reads newsletter — Margaret Atwood
Why subscribe?
Want fresh music on the regular? Want eclectic music discovery without resorting to algorithms? Do you think I have good taste?
Well, if you sign up here you will get access to my semi-monthly mixtapes without depending on social media algorithms to inform you. Get them in your email inbox. Hoorah!
Who am I?
I am Alec Hanley Bemis, an American person who manages & curates creative projects, primarily in music. I try to help artists. In 2001, I co-founded the Brassland label. (Here’s our website!)
Simultaneous with founding the label, I had a decade long career as a writer publishing in LA Weekly, The New York Times, and The New Yorker. I don’t do that much anymore. However, a 2020 piece I published in The Creative Independent went sorta viral. That was nice! So I decided I should try sharing things again in a more public forum that was not social media.
Coming soon…
I post new playlists, roughly every 4-8 weeks, to anyone that signs up to get my Substack emails. For free!
Subscribers mostly get the satisfaction of knowing they are supporting this work. But there have been posts paywalled only for paid subscribers—and I plan to share a number of archival playlists as subscriber-only posts.
Huh, what?
This is all about playlists. To kick off my Substack blog thing, I have posted a half-dozen older playlists I made at the request of other people or organizations—or as personal research. Here is a sampling:
The Testaments playlist: something I pulled together inspired by Margaret Atwood’s new(ish) novel for its paperback launch — link
indie coffee shop, yoga studio, weed dispencary, vegan cafe, et. al: catchy songs with earworm production choices and young pop energy that might go great with a local independent business — link
wordless music: a snapshot of what singing might have sounded like before language, in which even foreign languages are enjoyed not for the words but as phonics — link
Sinead O’Connor’s last playlist: a day’s worth of music which she curated for us, in the year of her death — mostly reggae - link
Find more over yonder. These are Spotify-only, but new playlists will be simulcast (simulposted?) to Apple Music and (usually) YouTube.
Follow me…
Instagram • Threads • Twitter • Spotify • Apple Music • YouTube
Or don’t!
The playlists I’m publishing here are better expressions of the world I want to live in than anything I post to social media sites. Starting this Substack is, in many ways, an experiment in connecting with people more directly while using the diffuse tools of social media a little bit less.
A closing thought:
In 1996, David Foster Wallace described the Internet as a place where “there are four trillion bits coming at you, 99 percent of them are shit, and it’s too much work to do triage to decide. So it’s very clear, very soon there’s gonna be an economic niche opening up for gatekeepers… . Because otherwise we’re gonna spend 95 percent of our time body-surfing through shit.“
– from Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace by David Lipsky
