Heathen Disco Music Reviews #0121 (August 26, 2025)

My timeline in adulthood has been pretty stable; save for annoyances like having to move, or life events to do with the de-coupling and repositioning of long-standing relationships, health issues here and there (ask me about the stone I passed), vectors of attention pointing with purpose elsewhere. For a while now, it’s been going to work, coming back from work, running errands, tending to my excellent child, to a select handful of relationships, and as of last year, to this newsletter.

I started August in a much different place than I ended it. On Friday August 1 I was in the warm fringes of the Atlantic Ocean, talking about life plans with my girlfriend (who was correct in that bobbing in the ocean behind the break is a pretty good place to discuss life and the future). We’d seen all kinds of birds that morning on a chartered boat trip up and down the causeways of Ocean Isle Beach and Sunset Beach, with Myrtle Beach peeking out over the horizon and promises told by people there long before us that the area would never get built up like that.

It's now Tuesday August 26, and like many Americans who once had it goin’ on OK, I am without that job, a “difficult decision” that removed my role from the equation. Sad people I barely worked with in the past are telling me it’s tough out there, but they’re not me. I am a smart, useful person with valuable skills, now in a herd of others experiencing the same thing. Yet I have to worry. Some days I spin out a bit over it, but each day I fire off three to five resumes, with individualized, very impassioned cover letters outlining my career and path and experience, and what it could mean to a potential employer, none of whom have deigned to respond, so either I must not be doing it right, or everybody is doing it at once, or hopefully I’m just impatient because this is August, and there are still people on beaches who will make decisions on all this stuff next week.

Shoes drop. Military occupation is being dangled over my city’s heads for whatever reason, the weather feels completely out of sync with the brand of season we’re in, and today I tripped on some uneven sidewalk while keeping an eye on a parking enforcer and went ass over elbow, banging my left knee (the one that loves to get hurt) really hard, scraping the palms of my hands and completely destroying a carton of eggs. I watched Pet Sematary II and felt like maybe there were enough movies, that I was reaching my lifetime limit for cinema. I know that after eight years I am definitely hitting other thresholds in the number of times I am willing to listen to a growing number of the same old songs on my satellite radio presets. The governments of over 30 countries of the Western world have decided collectively that shipping packages to the United States is not in their best interest, which feels like the shoe is dropping, a despairing but rational response to an irrational force. Shoes drop.

August brings dread, but never really like this. Stuttering in a place between prig and waif, August the month simply does not end, until it does, and we’re flung back down the chute through the holidays and the most desperate time of year. For the first time since 2008, I do not know what’s coming next. For the first time since 2015, I am adrift. People in my life do not need me to be adrift, yet I can offer no promises, no guarantee that the track is in sight, the routine will be picked up on. I could completely fail as an adult with real responsibilities and slide to a place I do not want to be, in a time of year that could easily kill me, and with a sore knee nonetheless.

You might be in the same boat. You might be right at the precipice, where I was, enjoying the salt water and warmth, and you get pushed and you keep on falling. You might be in a far worse place than I am in a lot of ways, and no I’m not blind to the world and realize that even at this inflection point I’m in better shape than most. But it’s that point mid-fall that equalizes things, the objects you see as you head down, that give you pause.

The day before I lost my job, for reasons still not clear beyond the impulse, I chose to blind-purchase a series of thirteen 10” records that were part of the Lactamase series, released by American experimental label Beta-Lactam Ring between 2000 and 2003 in editions of 500 copies apiece. I know nothing of the series and just a bit more about Chris McBeth’s label, but even if these were relatively inexpensive for a big batch of records, I’m having buyer’s remorse all the same because this was definitely something that does not help me in the predicament where I find myself as much as having the money I spent on these would. Also, these are 10”s, and I’m trying to get rid of most of my records anyway, so chalk this one up to the heart over the mind.

That said, is there ever a bad time to discover something potentially great? Aren’t any of you as curious about random cheap heat as I am? As we’re in somewhat of a summer lull for new music, and I am not trying to unearth any additional stones today, what with those broken eggs and all, I’ll be covering these pieces of music, which sit on an axis of + and -, of unobtanium and relative ease of obtainium, something distant to fixate on before everything is of a similar distance, far away. We’re gonna make some soup out of these.

Subscribers can read the work from here on out; the first four releases in the series are covered below. You might get a kick out of this arcana, so consider supporting this work for just $3 a month, and it’s yours to enjoy.