hardlyarthardlygarbage

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I know yr getting roasted in the tags for the late game revelation but honestly I'm really stoked you had that reaction. A lot of us *were* just using blaseball lore and terms as metaphors/symbolism for our own life (i.e. "Firewalker With Me" is ostensibly about someone who set people on fire whenever he left them behind but is really about my feelings of alienation and anger when I realized that being very visibly trans meant I could never go back to my home, family, and friends in Texas again) so the fact that that sense of metaphor not only made them more parsible to people outside the fandom but also let them apply it to their own lives and loves means we did something right, and there is something universal at the core of even the most absurdly specific references. That's super cool!

my brain is melting

the band that wrote the number 2 song on my spotify wrapped, the garages,. this year is a fake band from an ARG (??? i think it's some kind of ARG???)

i got recommended them this summer by another baseball tumblr girlie, and based on their lyrical content i just kinda assumed they were former college/high school players who were still big fans.

thought they were like a poppunk band that wrote mostly about baseball. their bandcamp said they were from seattle. like where the mariners are from (to be fair i did think it was weird that none of the players they namedropped were mariners). and i thought that they were a normal band.

like i'm a long time los campesinos fan and they're constantly referencing soccer. and baseball metaphors are a huge thing in USamerican culture, so i kinda assumed that it was like that

anyway according to my friends they're from some ARG called blaseball that happened in 2020? like The Garages are a fake baseball team in the ARG, and the music is part of the ARG? i don't get it. i've been sending my baseball yaoi friends their songs and saying "this is so horii" or "god this is just what it's going to be like when this guy retires" and just. i feel deranged. what the fuck do you mean The Garages aren't a real band?

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anon bcause I feel so stupid asking this

is garages your band?

youre not stupid for asking!!!! yes the garages is a music collective im in!!! its a 50+ person band that largely organized around the now-defunct baseball simulator/horror game Blaseball. our activity has ebbed with the end of blaseball but we were very active in the pandemic and put out over 50 albums in two years!

here’s a good written primer on what blaseball was

here’s a people make games video on blaseball

here’s a bandcamp daily writeup on the garages

here's a seattle met article about the garages

and lastly, here's one of my FAVORITE of our live shows!!!!!!

lots of garagesposting happening rn because we played perhaps our very last “live show” on the charity stream Desert Bus for Hope last wednesday :') the end of an era. we are all love the garages

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Here's a roundup of every live show the garages have played so far.

Just cause.

--

HECKDANG

DESERT BUS FOR HOPE (2020)

BLASEBALLIDAYS

TAKEOVER

CAN'T PLAY LIVE

RIV

THE GARAGES VS DESERT BUS (2021)

UNDERGROUND

COYOTE WALL X THE GARAGES @ DESERT BUS (2022)

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i promised @thwackamabob i'd record a noiseland version of firewalker with me so she'd be able to listen to it but now that we're actually putting it on tape I'm realizing how difficult it is to get the lyrics to make sense without any knowledge of blaseball.

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i didn't realize mitch made it to tumblr, he'll be tickled

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shoot for the moon – even if you miss, you'll achieve a kind of malformed androgyny that invites weird comments from basically everyone you meet

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it's really neat that this weird, messy little song, a big what if experiment that's both massively indebted to its influences (in this case, skinny puppy and pulp—to whoever said they're lifting the chorus theme, make sure jarvis cocker doesn't sue) and one of those things where you jump off a cliff and build your parachute on the way down, still seems to be resonating with people. I look back at it in awe all the time because I still have no idea how we did it—i've never really made industrial music before, neither has riley, and that's why we brought in azure when we previously made music that was adjacent to the genre. we were making it up as we went along. case in point—about half of the noises in the verse are rileys voice chopped up, fed through a bunch of effects, and then rhythmically sampled. The other half is, I believe, a 909 drum machine fed through a distortion that, for whatever reason, gave pitches to most of the samples, almost like a ring mod, making them sound more "musical" (which is to say, more cacophonous than rhythmic). The little bit of quiet before the first chorus is just that pitched drum machine and a bit of riley's sampled voice, to give an idea of what i mean. anyway, I think this is maybe my favorite riley performance on any of our collabs, she really went wild with it. from what i understand it was kind of a happy accident—the vocals i sent her as like, a style guide, she didn't know they were super processed, and tried to mimic them naturally, and the result is the shaky shrieking thin. caterwauling through the track. just incredible work throughout, so visceral, it ends up making the jimmy swaggart stuff feel a bit limp in comparison. the screams on the bridge feel downright animalistic in a way i didn't know riley was capable of—but then at this point I should know better than to think her incapable of anything. i'm rambling now, anyway, the point is i know this is sort of a weird song from a weird ep released at a weird time so it means a lot to me that it hits so hard for people, because it hits really hard for me too. much like DK there wasn't much to yips as a character so it got really messy and personal and that's always where the fun stuff happens.

happy YIPS KANEKO THRUSTS HER BLOODY FIST THROUGH THE UNFEELING EYE OF GOD monday 👍

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i spent time today organizing my demos for a light went out on my local drive and i love getting to see Numbers

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Hello friends, thank you so much for your help last time, unfortunately things haven't gotten much better and I'm still in trouble. If you can share this around it would help a lot. Thank you. https://gofund.me/e773d332

Help

Hey buds, it’s me, mother love blone from the garages., I’ve run into some really rough financial issues lately. If my music has helped you at all and you can do anything to help (be it chipping in a few bucks or just sharing it around) i would be eternally grateful https://gofund.me/d18cadc4

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late to the party but wtf how did i beat lorde. y'all know she did melodrama right?

Ribs (Lorde)

This dream isn't feeling sweet/We're reeling through the midnight streets/And I've never felt more alone/It feels so scary getting old

"It's the nostalgia in real-time its the existential dread that comes with coming of age it's the fleeting memories of friends long since passed it's the desire to return to simpler times its- [sobs]"

Firewalker With Me (The Garages)

They say you can't go home again, it's true/Especially when your home burns down around you/I lit the match with a flick of the cleat/From the league that hexed me/Yeah, I'll see you in hell/'Cause it's hell that sent me...First you do it for the money/Then you do it for the fame/Then you do it for your teammates/Then you do it for the flame

"Oh my god it's so. listen to me. what if you destroyed everything you ever left and could never stop moving. what if time just kept going and you kept leaving the past behind as it goes up in flames and you can't escape the relentless march of time and the destruction and loss of everything you ever tried to love do you get it do you understand me. and also everyone's looking at you"

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Help

Hey buds, it’s me, mother love blone from the garages., I’ve run into some really rough financial issues lately. If my music has helped you at all and you can do anything to help (be it chipping in a few bucks or just sharing it around) i would be eternally grateful https://gofund.me/d18cadc4

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I know in the shuffle of the mourning the fandom is going through this will probably get lost, but I'd like to ask any Blaseball fan take a look at their favorite Garages song(s) on Genius and annotate any lyrics you think are really significant of historical happenings, attitudes, or in-jokes that otherwise get lost. Some songs are still missing lyrics or missing entirely, at that! These songs do so much to encapsulate what happened during these years, and I'd love some help annotating things!

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a last blaseball missive

i’ll probably be processing the end of blaseball and everything the garages was for a while, but in the meantime, i went ahead and published a passion project I’d been working on off and on for the past few months and finally finished in a flurry over the past few days: a guide to getting into the garages. i hope it gives you something to point to when your friends wanna get into the garages, and if not I hope it’s at least an entertaining read https://docs.google.com/document/d/1PS3WIXzIzPa5hPimLWeT9Bsf-40YH2XMUA09OK71ppU/edit?usp=sharing

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i think these kids are really goin’ places

Hi Tumblr, I'm Riley, who may know from The Garages, and I am here to tell you I have a more normal, non-blaseball, non-20+ members band, and we've just released our first single. It's called Watching You, Watching Me about realising you're trans whilst the relationship that defined you ever since you were a stupid kid is falling apart (but don't tell anyone because i like being vague 90% of the time). Please, if you've liked anything I've done in The Garages, or if you just like sad trans shit, take a listen. And if you don't like it, at least one of the next few singles is gonna sound completely different, I promise.

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Hi! I saw your Firewalker post and I wanted to say that The Ballad of the Unremarkable Derrick Kreuger is one of my favorite songs. Like, not favorite Blaseball songs or Garages songs (I mean, it is), but one of my favorite all time songs, full stop. And knowing it comes from a genuine place makes it all the better, to be honest. I get that impulse as a creator, like does anything I do matter? And DK captures all of that beautifully.

I'm gushing, but it's because you make good things. Also, the way Riley hits "Firewalker with me" is really evocative of Against Me! Are they an influence as well, or was that just a happy coincidence?

Thanks, Max!

This is extremely kind, thank you. It’s gratifying and humbling to know the song touched a nerve and could bring some catharsis. When I started writing songs with the garages a lot of the joy for me was writing silly nonsense about something other than me (it’s a nice break from my IRL band where i always end up singing about myself), but i dunno, something about the fanon around derrick kreuger and the meta story of just, disposable people, it’s hard not to make that personal. All of which is to say i appreciate what you’re saying. As for Against Me!, you’d have to ask Riley ( @thwackamabob ). I know a lot *about* Against Me! but I’ve never actually listened to them (yet, they’re on a long list of bands to check out). I know Riley is a fan though. The way our process usually works is I’ll record a scratch vocal to capture the basic melodic idea and then trust Riley to do something cool with it, so a lot of the phrasing and emphasis is their input (they also wrote most of the bridge), and conscious or not we’re all a sum of our influences. My personal influence writing the melody was probably paul banks from interpol, who tends to write simple, one or two note vocal lines and then stuff them with syllables, sort of a machine gun effect, or like an engine kicking over. But what I recorded and what Riley did are pretty different. If I get a chance I’ll ask them and let you know. Thank you so much for listening and caring.

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Since I reactivated my tumblr i wanna finally get in on this. I had no idea this was a thing until I saw i think @squidbroom​ tweeted a little video about it, and i damn near cried. It’s still extremely wild to me. When I wrote ballad of DK that came from an ugly but genuine fear, that fear that you and the art you make will be forgotten, will have made an impact on no one. And then a few months later there’s this wild, magical thing, this memey (but genuine, it seems) tumblr tradition of people, people in this niche but loving community, sharing our music, this song.  I guess it helped me realize something I said a lot but didn’t really believe until recently—that if something I make can mean something to just one person, can help them, make them feel seen, that’s worth it, that’s worth everything. And that art isn’t about remembering creators—it’s about remembering the feelings, the joy, the community that art can bring. It’s silly, but it’s beautiful, a lot like the garages (and the blaseball community) I feel weird just like, reblogging a song I made though, so I’m gonna add this. When the band found out about FWWMF rain asked me to make a spotify playlist of like, the music that inspired me to make the song. It was weirdly hard—most of my garages songs are deliberate genre exercises, but stuff like this and DK are my standard mode of songwriting, so it’s difficult to dig into like, all the layers of one’s personal voice (a couple of the songs are direct inspirations, like the Jakey one and blankenberge, but the rest are just like, my general songwriting DNA). But if nothing else I got to make a little mixtape of my favorite songs, which is always a treat. I hope y’all like it too.  I love this community. Thank you all, for everything. (also sorry if the actual embed isn’t working, i’m old, i haven’t used tumblr in like 8 years, it’s linked above too, <3)

i lit the match with a flick of the cleat from the league that hexed me

yeah i'll see you in hell cuz it's hell that sent me

as i walk out the door singing "next team, next team"

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yeah it’s definitely intended to be kind of a joke so i’m glad it reads. the saying “you can never go home again” always felt a little precious to me so it’s funny to think that in parker’s case it’s extremely literal. of course you can’t bud! you burned it down! originally it was a really tortured metaphor about like, burn that bridge when we come to it. if the garages taught me anything, it’s that, if faced with the choice between bad poetry and a shitpost, choose the shitpost.

firewalker with me is such a wonderful song but the beginning lines are so funny to me. "they say you can't go home again, it's true/especially when your home burns down around you" like yeah. that would certainly make it challenging.