What should a Cindy Lee fan check out in terms of wonky inaccessibility?
March 17, 2025 12:34 AM Subscribe
I'm in love with Cindy Lee's music for the music itself, yes, but I also love how hard it is to get hold of and actually hear. It makes me feel like a teenager. What else should I be checking out?
Cindy Lee's records are incredible other-wordly ghost-pop for people who are into like, I dunno, Brenda Lee and the Crystals and the Velvet Underground maybe. I feel oddly new and alive listening to their music!
Aside from making great music, they make the music hard to find in a way that feels not pretentious but rather semi-principled and extremely dated. Currently you can hear, I think, three of the albums on streaming, but they take their music off streaming once in awhile. You can sometimes catch the albums on YouTube but they seem to come down often. You can set a Google Alert for yourself to see if a cassette tape shows up on ebay for less than $100, and otherwise keep trawling YouTube.
For me, liking their music replicates that pre-Internet-commerce feeling of not being able to find a band's music in your own town but coming across a 7" or an album on a less-desired format somewhere during a family trip to Berkeley or randomly in a suburb of someplace you've never been. Just kind of cobbling things together wherever you can. I just love the mystery and sheer desire attached to this, and obviously in the streaming and YouTube era it's kind of a non-existent way of relating to music.
Or is it? Who else makes great music and is distributing it like a total fucking freak?
So I'm not looking for fellow interesting Canadian artists like US Girls or Dirty Beaches, or just 60s pop throwback music, but rather any shit that is really great and takes some effort to pull together.
What I am saying is I am happy to buy a cassette of some not-streamable music by an artist who won't come to LA but might hit Escondido, in fact nothing would make me happier. Could be pop-rock, could be Swedish d-beat, could be someone who has an NTS radio show and only releases her own CD-Rs, could be a Pavement rip-off of some kind, could literally be Amy Grant if weirdo distribution is what she's up to these days, I don't care. I'm looking to want some great music that isn't easy to find but is ultimately attainable if I try.
Cindy Lee's records are incredible other-wordly ghost-pop for people who are into like, I dunno, Brenda Lee and the Crystals and the Velvet Underground maybe. I feel oddly new and alive listening to their music!
Aside from making great music, they make the music hard to find in a way that feels not pretentious but rather semi-principled and extremely dated. Currently you can hear, I think, three of the albums on streaming, but they take their music off streaming once in awhile. You can sometimes catch the albums on YouTube but they seem to come down often. You can set a Google Alert for yourself to see if a cassette tape shows up on ebay for less than $100, and otherwise keep trawling YouTube.
For me, liking their music replicates that pre-Internet-commerce feeling of not being able to find a band's music in your own town but coming across a 7" or an album on a less-desired format somewhere during a family trip to Berkeley or randomly in a suburb of someplace you've never been. Just kind of cobbling things together wherever you can. I just love the mystery and sheer desire attached to this, and obviously in the streaming and YouTube era it's kind of a non-existent way of relating to music.
Or is it? Who else makes great music and is distributing it like a total fucking freak?
So I'm not looking for fellow interesting Canadian artists like US Girls or Dirty Beaches, or just 60s pop throwback music, but rather any shit that is really great and takes some effort to pull together.
What I am saying is I am happy to buy a cassette of some not-streamable music by an artist who won't come to LA but might hit Escondido, in fact nothing would make me happier. Could be pop-rock, could be Swedish d-beat, could be someone who has an NTS radio show and only releases her own CD-Rs, could be a Pavement rip-off of some kind, could literally be Amy Grant if weirdo distribution is what she's up to these days, I don't care. I'm looking to want some great music that isn't easy to find but is ultimately attainable if I try.
There's plenty of great music that got made in a weird licensing deadzone in the 90s that isn't on streaming, might or might not be on YouTube, and thus is really only attainable if you're holding the compact disc in your hand, same as in 1997. But you're never going to see any of these bands live.
Btw if you, like me, were made anxious by the idea that something might happen and you wouldn't have access to Diamond Jubilee, it's available on CD and vinyl now too.
Thanks for asking this, I've had a very similar question marinating in my head for awhile.
posted by potrzebie at 7:35 AM on March 17
Btw if you, like me, were made anxious by the idea that something might happen and you wouldn't have access to Diamond Jubilee, it's available on CD and vinyl now too.
Thanks for asking this, I've had a very similar question marinating in my head for awhile.
posted by potrzebie at 7:35 AM on March 17
Best answer: Under the heading of unattainable 90s music, I made an FPP recently about a bunch of bands on C'est La Mort, prompted by noticing that you can now get a bunch of very old M-1 Alternative songs on Bandcamp--but their albums were not in print or available to stream. I do see some CDs from them on Discogs.
Under the heading of wonky hard-to-discover stuff released more recently, MeFi Music has yielded things like this Projects post pointing to this neat dungeon synth album released on Bandcamp, but versions of each track and more are on MeFi Music too.
Other random thoughts: 80s music only released in Europe seems to disappear from Youtube pretty regularly, and the city I live in has an organization that posts recordings by local acts to YouTube, which although available for streaming means they're not easy to find without following along over time.
posted by Wobbuffet at 8:25 AM on March 17
Under the heading of wonky hard-to-discover stuff released more recently, MeFi Music has yielded things like this Projects post pointing to this neat dungeon synth album released on Bandcamp, but versions of each track and more are on MeFi Music too.
Other random thoughts: 80s music only released in Europe seems to disappear from Youtube pretty regularly, and the city I live in has an organization that posts recordings by local acts to YouTube, which although available for streaming means they're not easy to find without following along over time.
posted by Wobbuffet at 8:25 AM on March 17
Oh, in the category of just 'obscure, hard-won finds,' I also posted one FPP about Gharamaphone "preserving North Africa's Jewish musical past, one record at a time" which had posted a really beautiful song to Soundcloud and another FPP based on trawling Discogs for electronic music from 1979 that seemed both little-known and very good--streamable but the pre-Internet vibes of mystery and cobbling things together are real.
posted by Wobbuffet at 8:40 AM on March 17
posted by Wobbuffet at 8:40 AM on March 17
You are not logged in, either login or create an account to post comments
college radio
posted by HearHere at 3:29 AM on March 17