JANUARY GUNK

your 2024 show list, updated playlist, and the listening games..

it is a new year, we are two days late (your editors were sick in body and mind)

but we are always coming back. at least for a long, long while. promise.

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Listening Games 

by Jane Lai

My Favorite Question

A few months ago, Enne showed me this game. You draw a playing card from 1 to 10, pick a category, and the group describes said category so the cardholder can guess. A popular one to start with is ‘first date.’ What makes a first date a solid 7? Perhaps it’s comfortable clothing, ambiance, balanced pulp-to-water orange juice, a draft here and there, a needy rock in the shoe heel. But what makes it a 9? We try again with feeling. Fresh cinnamon in a latte and dessert fruit as a childhood memory. In summer heat heavy rain spills for a minute wetting both your hairs just enough, sequenced now into perfect messes. Your date wipes an eyelash off your temple and you think for a while about how it got there.

Everyday I Find a Few

I’m recording on Dena’s album next week and as prep, I’m listening closer to how everything drops and spins. I’m curious about ways a piano exists as a rhythmic warm body. A speed-walking stranger’s pants scuffle in the winter wind and a barista taps espresso grinds on their palm. Then they lock it in. Sound searching is inherently solitary. It happens without much preliminary thought. But no one cares that you watched them yawn and thought about it. It’s a gentle reminder that good listening isn’t curtailed in conversation. It’s a practice of being interested and thinking about how to think about people more.

It’s Easy and Obvious You Are On my Mind

Do most people not think about others that much? Are we constantly thinking of others? Amongst my close friends, it’s split. These are both true. To me, the first is a way to cope with the heaviness of the world. The latter, however, I reserve for every hard but important conversation I ever plan to have.

Later in My Dreams

I didn’t grow up religious but I cemented an understanding of what spirituality is to me. There’s a beautiful line in a new Babehoven song that goes “You’re my brother you’re my family you are everything to me” that the band sings as an outro chorus. I wish I could describe how it absolutely broke me. Later in my dreams, I rest my head on the shoulder of the person I love in a moving train car. There are greens and blues and oranges swimming through the window like car wash tentacles. Nothing arrives distinguishable except a feeling of comfort and safety.

You Are My Brother

I’m used to telling people my only brother and I have nothing in common. But in a conversation with a new friend recently was the first time I admitted that we do. He retains memories of our childhood no one else understands. We recall them differently. What hurts him hurts me less. What hurts me hurts him less. It’s a tacit acknowledgement. He likes fancy cars, masculinity, and most red meats, and he’s also an excellent conversationalist. He’s not as hermetic as I draw him out to be. He doesn’t play much but gets my childhood piano tuned every year for maintenance. And without a doubt, my birthday and holiday gifts light up (disco balls, lava lamps, sparklers) because I mentioned once I’d love to go dancing with my friends more. He asks, “Why don’t you buy an apartment where you can?” We misunderstand each other but he always knows how to soften the heat.

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your january shows… maybe in 2024 you want to listen to more music off of a silly little app and instead in the flesh. ~*~*let us help you~*~*

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your january GUNK playlist, courtesy of ceci & i. featuring some old and many new: some you will recognize from december’s q&a (BSM), some from january’s (stars…), our friends, the ones we love, dorée who i am newly adoring, a song felix wanted you to hear, and more…

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thank u for listening and reading. thank u for our first 6 issues, (it’s our half birthday <3!) get ready for a lot of exciting things in the new year.

remember that you’re obsessed with wanting to help us with distro (maybe you can meet us at the ridgewood tenants union march for palestine on saturday and grab some gunkie)

xx Hannah and Ceci