Exposure Therapy
Posted on June 5th, 2026
Filed under: General,Music News — Karl Olson @ 12:52 am
In response to:
I DIDN'T WANT TO END THIS THREAD BY JUST SAYING "WELL THAT WAS COOL WHAT'S NEXT," SO I OPENED UP NOTEPAD AND WROTE SOME STUFF. I'M A PRETTY TERRIBLE WRITER, AND IT'S PROBABLY RAMBLING AND AWKWARD TO READ, BUT I DO HOPE THE MESSAGE GETS THROUGH.
During the normal course of being an exceedingly niche, indie artist by every reasonable measure (lifetime streams, social media presence, traditional media presence, any kind of revenue, number of listeners, etc.) there’s few excuses to reflect on main without it falling into “Unwarranted Self Importance.” Of the 2000+ followers I have on atProto, the social platform I’ve had the widest audience on of any of them, I know given what posts or lists got them in the door that most aren’t there for my music. It’s the anime mutuals I’ve had for decades, the folks who have found me from the mouthing off I’ve had on various topics du jour on atProto, and old music friends who were there when I was first putting up songs online, so it’s all old hat to them.
So, when BEAT, a long time mutual dating back to the rhymetorrents era, added me to his big discography review to do list, and asked for a reasonably complete accounting of everything that was at least kind of accessible on online, I was already curious to see where it would go, so I gladly made up a whole spreadsheet. Admittedly, it’s still not perfectly exhaustive, but it was better than it had been in years as it at least had all of the albums that I’d posted on mp3.com by date with the cover art and such, something I only recently got around to fixing by getting all of my old CDs out of storage, then uploading clean rips to Bandcamp, in part because I was already kind of thin on new music in 2025 by my standards. Still, I figured it would be fun, but not necessarily anything more important, especially if he took it on genre by genre, not fully chronologically.
At the time he asked, I was already going through a difficult chase which I’ve already posted at length about, but the day before BEAT’s thread started, I was getting therapeutic botox injections from my maxillofacial specialist to try to loosen up the inflamed facial muscles that were causing constant jaw pain, which also correlated at points with the hyperacusis and chronic tinnitus, as I’d already ruled out so many other options. The thread started right as I needed another distraction the most because I was now going to have to be patient and see what was working.
Thus, to get to spend this past month with such a perfect excuse to engage sincerely with my past in the context of my now and possible future, to have an extended dialogue offered up where I get to simultaneously boast, cringe and meditate on my work and how it now impacts me, is an rare and special blessing. It provided a grounding reminder that amidst these tests and difficulties that are beyond my immediate ability resolve instantly, if at all, there will also yet be more chances for me to at least reflect and speak on my old work, and in that, not only better assess how much I actually have lost vs. my catastrophizing, but also to find the will to proceed, even in the worst case scenarios. I couldn’t have tried to force myself to reflect this way and reassess my core beliefs, but I know that a big reason I’m coming out of the past 6 months of chronic illness feeling like I don’t even care even if every day is still this rough until my last one, has been facing my own discography this month, and feeling better about the past 27 years than I had in while, certainly since this hearing and pain stuff kicked off. This all has made me want a lot more than 27 years more, so thanks to BEAT for giving me the exposure therapy I clearly needed. You’re a great guy.
Comments (0)
No Comments »
No comments yet.
RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URL