How To: Spend Your Bandcamp Dollars This Friday
Recommendations for a particularly important day of Bandcamp profit-share.
Bandcamp is once again waiving its share of music sales on the platform today, passing on the profits directly to artists and labels. In light of this week’s widespread protests over the murder of George Floyd at the hands of the Minneapolis police, many of those artists and labels are in turn waiving their own profits and directing funds to organizations committed to racial justice and progressive causes. The complete list of participants, which you can find at the Bandcamp website, is long, so I thought today would be a good opportunity to highlight both a list of some favorite artists and labels taking part and some of my favorite (relatively) under-the-radar 2020 releases from artists of color who you can support directly.
First off, five 2020 records to scope out today:
Shopping – All Or Nothing
London trio Shopping serve up a particularly buoyant brand of post-punk that undercuts the genre’s typically dour palette with cultural critique wrapped in colorful, adrenalized grooves.
Irreversible Entanglements – Who Sent You?
This Chicago collective deliver a thrilling and poetic avant-jazz missive befitting of their name on their second LP.
Dreamcrusher – Panopticon!
Live shows are really the way to experience the onslaught of Luwayne Glass, whose Dreamcrusher project is as much a disorienting physical happening as a sonic one, but the winding corridors of this dense, 38-minute electro-industrial-noise piece will get you at least some of the way there.
Shabaka and the Ancestors – We Are Sent Here By History / Wisdom of Elders
Shabaka Hutchings’ other two jazz affiliations (Sons of Kemet and The Comet Is Coming) likely garner more name recognition, but the Ancestors’ apocalyptic tidings and cosmic explorations are equally attention-worthy. This year’s We Are Sent by History isn’t on Bandcamp (you can get it here), but its similarly remarkable 2016 predecessor Wisdom of Elders is.
Algiers – There Is No Year
The eerie third album from these gothic Atlanta soul-punks is a stirring and cinematic experience to get lost in.
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Secondly, a (very incomplete) list of some of Noise Floor favorites donating some or all of today’s profits to worthy causes: