the last album on cassette, featuring an alternate tracklist and a bonus soundscape, 29 minutes in length, recorded in two live takes at midnight on february 22, 2022, moments after the last song on last was released
only 2/3 of the soundscape fit on the cassette, but with purchase, you will receive a download code
not a minute of tape wasted
Includes unlimited streaming of last
via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
ships out within 5 days
edition of 17
Purchasable with gift card
$11.17USDor more
Book/Magazine + Digital Album
last journal
hardbound. no rule
63 handwritten pages. lyrics + stories
limited to 11 copies. sorry, this one's
spoken for
(price includes shipping)
Includes unlimited streaming of last
via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
ships out within 17 days
edition of 11
2 remaining
Purchasable with gift card
$71.11USD
Compact Disc (CD) + Digital Album
the last album on cd. comes in a paper case with a print of the album art on glossy cardstock
Includes unlimited streaming of last
via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
ships out within 3 days
Purchasable with gift card
$7.11USDor more
about
I was back in the U.S. Truly, truly back. After so long I’d repatriated, and I was being pretty dramatic about it. Writing stuff in my journal like THIS SIX YEAR PILGRIMAGE IS NEARLY THROUGH
Please.
It was hard not to feel accomplished though, promising developments were on the horizon, I was starting my Master’s in August, I hoped to buy a home, not a month before I’d been sleeping in a tent I hauled around on my bike and now I planned to sleep, in a bed, in a room that I owned.
Colorado. Could I have dreamt a better return? Land of jagged, snow-lined peaks towering under the sky’s clear, blue dome. Home to hiking trails and untold tracts of untamed wilderness. Refuge to marijuana lovers around the world. Three years before, just after embarking on my second stint in Korea, a colleague asked where I’d want to live if ever I returned to the States. Her auburn eyes glimmered above her wide, smiling mouth. Her words dripped with southern twang. Colorado, I said. I didn’t know how or where I would settle in Colorado but Korea had taught me outdoors, oceans and mountains, kept my mental health alive. Weird I didn’t say California, California had both, my brother was living there to boot, but Colorado was my reply. Where in Colorado would you want to live she asked and I told her South Fork because I couldn’t name any cities other than Denver off the top of my head. They have a wonderful retirement community up there, she said, don't they?
I didn’t mean to retire but I ended up shy of South Fork anyway, a year and a half later, between Korean semesters. I flew the fifteen hours back to Texas, Daniel lent me his car (I hadn’t owned one in four and a half years, I gave mine to Dustin when I moved to Busan) and I drove another thirteen hours to lock myself in, in the remotest place I could imagine, to release…Well. Whatever had been clawing, for the last eleven years, behind my ribs.
I wrote. Music, yes. Music, of course. Electronic music, which surprised, but it shouldn’t have. I’d been listening to the Nine Inch Nails religiously longer than I’d been living overseas. If I really thought back, back to the time when I first heard him on the radio, I’d been dissecting Trent Reznor’s subversive craft since third grade. I was bound to pick up the synth. But I wrote something else, too, something I hadn’t planned, something I created by holding a mirror to my life, tracing the contours and retracing them, again and again, until the process yielded a portrait of the places I’d lived, the people I’d loved there, the ways we’d hurt each other (but mostly how I’d hurt them) and, above all, how we’d changed over time. It was dark, almost too dark to read, in places darker than the actual events—though, given everything I’d seen in Laos, not by much—and I believed it could be darker still.
How much darker could it get?
I planted myself at the desk from morning to night, watching sheets and blankets of snow unravel from the ridge on the horizon, and retraced the story, again and again. An early version of the story, lighter, the autofictive nature of its origins better concealed, became my ticket to Boulder. I arrived, turned down anyone who invited me for a drink, locked myself in my apartment (I should have known all along the prospect of owning a home was a joke) just as I had done in South Fork a year and a half earlier, and dug into my journals. I’d filled so many. Volume upon volume, stretching back to high school, when I started my first band, page after page bleeding with ink. So few entries were concrete. I’d surely been striving for concreteness. Often I’d believed I’d achieved it. But mostly I’d been stuck in my head. As I retraced, starting with the fall after college, moving onto the cube farm, past my breakdown and subsequent retreat overseas, through the end of my stint in Busan, down to my overdose, resurfacing in 연정, I found everything I wanted to re-experience—the raw, sensory input, how things looked, sounded, smelled, names of people, things they said—had been glossed over. I wouldn’t make that mistake again. I would fix it in the retracing, would go to any length necessary to relive the memories behind the words as vividly as I could, whatever couldn’t be remembered I’d reinvent, whatever couldn’t be fixed on one pass I’d fix on the next. With each iteration I modulated the voice, darkened the tone, smoothed and blurred the images, changed names, fictionalized places, found ways to create space wherever…he…made an appearance…
I didn’t like writing about him, but he was part of the story. A fictional one, perhaps. An uncomfortable one, to be sure. The things he thought, the way he treated people…He was an abortion, an embarrassingly American one, but if I was serious about the project, I had to bring him to light. My God, how glad I was I wasn’t
credits
from last,
released February 22, 2022
written recorded programmed performed by alex daniel
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