Overdue Mid-Year Update.

Fortunately the silence in the SK camp this year has been for doing rather than ruminating, but it’s past time for an update.

Being WTJU Charlottesville’s DJ Malpaso, host of Limerence Addiction, quickly turned into a robust (but, fortunately, intuitive) commitment. After a few months sharing my wee-hours time slot with a compatible alternate, said alternate (a retired lawyer discontent with her excess of leisure time in this fraught climate) quickly moved onto greater responsibility (head of the rock department). Before the current arrangement (working a 9-5 plus hosting a weekly 1-3 a.m. radio show) became a reality, I’d made feeble social gestures toward declaring the prospect insane – but, as it turned out, when faced with the opportunity to take full ownership of my unadulterated vision, I did not hesitate to accept the obscene schedule.

So, I have been spending the summer trying to “make great radio” (in the words of my station manager). Even if it is only for the 15-22 stragglers and spy signals who show up on the stream monitor every week. My brand is “nostalgic/louche” and “aimed at sad insomniac drunks”, involves the reading of short poems on air (a tribute, as previously stated, to DJ Garver in the film Play Misty for Me), and the description has been shortened to:

“Every Wednesday morning from 1-3 a.m., get shamelessly wistful and a little bit debauched. Join DJ Malpaso for Limerence Addiction, a safe place to indulge in memories best forgotten.”

I play what I fancy, Bobby Vinton to Britney Spears, Duran Duran to Daniel Johnston, Nine Inch Nails to Nina Simone – the only prerequisite being that the song conveys some sort of guttural yearning. Stretches of unrequited love odes take hard turns into sets with more existential preoccupations. The whole project is a public purge of sorts – a structured reclamation of control over life’s more undignified moments.

I also make weekly Instagram promos, which are in essence digital mini-posters with music and special effects. The latest, to provide a frame of reference, uses a photo of the bitterly beautiful actor Ingrid Caven, cigarette on lip, peering languidly into a mirror in Daniel Schmid’s film La Paloma.

I’ve taken part in the rock department’s spring fund drive – a broad daylight exercise in sales and multitasking I would have never thought I could manage so early in my “career” – as well as two “Vinyl Takeover” events at a local stone church turned cidery (the most recent one I am especially proud of because I crafted the set on the fly rather than making a playlist in advance).

Being a volunteer-run station, we are plagued with “ghosts in the machines” – that is, pieces of equipment that are often unreliable. My ADHD-ish brain no doubt benefits from fighting to stay two steps ahead, making contingency plans, stretching itself to anticipate how a technological pitfall might be compensated for, how the dreaded dead air might be averted.

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In addition to my DJ gig, Sold Kingdom’s third LP is in the latter stages of production. Much like my process for Amethyst Deceiver (2022), I am working remotely with an engineer – this time, Quebec-based Mario LaFleur who advertises a “warm, punchy analog” technique – and I have transferred him the first couple of mixes for mastering.

As I wrote last summer, the album is titled Distraction Portraiture, which means several things.

-The phrase, most likely coined by photographer Clayton Cubitt, is a name for the art of capturing people in the midst of being preoccupied.
-I was interested in the many possibilities contained within this phrase. It can be a vehicle for telling stories of unwise decisions that lure one away from an intended path. It can also provide an opportunity to craft vignettes about the banquet of noises inherent to renting: parent/child arguments, barking dogs, the contractor’s buzz saw. It can also refer to anything escapist or diversionary we do to avoid harsh truths – a certain big universal one in particular.
-The art of Felix Vallotton – lyrically beautiful but underpinned by an eerie sinister energy – informed the album, as did my temporary exploration of AI art a couple years ago, the pop culture and advertising detritus that collects in one’s mental corners late at night, a concert I attended where a peripheral scuffle broke out, my various youthful side quests with fellow loners, and a TV show about romance scams.

Unsurprisingly, work on the album has halted my run of live performances, the last show having been in March and finally in the heart of the C’ville goth scene which I had circled since my arrival here in 2008.

That said, there is something exciting in the works involving the October – that’s right, October! – release of this new album, so keep your attention trained here!

Finally, here’s a pic from a few days ago when I was doing my annual pretend inhabitation of The Fan, RVA.