On Tuesday, Bandcamp founder and CEO Ethan Diamond announced that the service will donate 100 percent of the money it makes from music sales this Friday, February 3, to the American Civil Liberties Union. Diamond wrote on Bandcamp’s blog that he chose to act in response to Trump’s executive order banning people from seven mostly Muslim countries from entering the U.S. for the next 90 days. But even before Diamond made the announcement, Bandcamp was a magnet for musicians hoping to resist Trump’s toxic policies through their work, donating the proceeds from new cassettes, digital-only EPs, and other releases to nonprofits working to help the new administration’s victims (and its likely future targets).
VALUES (not vaults) by M. Sage Soft Fuck, So Woke (released January 20) If you’re reading this at work, I wouldn’t recommend googling this experimental project. The seven tracks on So Woke aren’t consistently good—the meandering “Refrain,” a collage of field recordings and samples from TV shows, is likely to test your patience. But when they’re good, they’re powerfully good. The post-industrial surge of “The Wall,” which samples Trump’s campaign rants about a border wall with Mexico, captures the sick, sinking feeling of seeing crowds of people cheer for xenophobic lies. So Woke is priced at $9.11 (yep), and all proceeds benefit the ACLU.
Are you a Chicago artist or label planning to release music benefiting an organization that’s fighting the Trump administration? E-mail me at lgalil@chicagoreader.com.
