I'm listening to a mixtape. On cassette. My friend in Akron, OH and I spent many years before, starting in 1991, and we've traded an average of 50 tapes between then and now (I'm a little behind).

It dawns on me that music consumption has changed so much in the time we've been trading tapes that this kind of musical friendship doesn't really exist anymore, or at the very least isn't encouraged. You can't just hand a friend a playlist you made--do they even have the same streaming service? I can tell you that I never would have heard anything from the Dunedin, NZ scene without getting a few tapes in the mid 1990's from a friend there--music wasn't spread across the internet back then, so being able to hear stuff from Europe and NZ was almost a privilege (I guess, depending on your tastes! :)

The sense of crafting something for someone else, from the music down to the unique cover art designs, is missing now. I'm glad my friend and I decided to resurrect the idea, and....well, the infusion of new music is pretty damned good. :)

.....so far.....

Uploading 30+ years of catalogue is, well, tedious. ;)

so, I set my project angel on fire's "the diamond silence" as pay-what-you-want for bandcamp friday--if you want to check out some of what I do, feel free to grab a copy! :) https://angel-on-fire-transnova.bandcamp.com/album/the-diamond-silence

I don't know what it is, but there's just something about an album that sounds like it was recorded live in somebody's basement on a Yamaha MT8X 8-track cassette recorder. Guess I'm just a sucker for dirty-sounding music. :)

Well, it looks like I have a working title for the next angel on fire release, whenever I'm able to record again: "in the absence of roses". :)

So if you want to hear all four corners of my music brain, I put up a couple tracks from each project I've worked on over the years and a smattering of earlier unreleased stuff. It's at

and goes through:

jason m norwood - mostly Berlin-school electronic music with a few guitar-based bits;
angel on fire - weird twisted post-rock shoegazer stuff
code 000 - rhythmic noise/industrial
black chairs - old-school industrial
cyphier - electropunk
minutes after - screwing around with techno

plus an early her violent siren track (precursor to angel on fire).

So Vinnie Vincent apparently has a solution to get "paid fairly" for his work. Ex-guitarist for KISS, so the extreme off-putting arrogance makes perfect sense. $200 per song https://www.syracuse.com/entertainment/2026/01/rock-guitarist-refuses-to-release-greatest-album-of-all-time-unless-fans-pay-200-per-song.html

So, it's 2026. After a difficult Christmas season we slide into the new year. Thing is, I don't have anything fancy to state or announce. I only managed to release one album by jason m norwood in 2025, which is an unusual situation for me as I'm usually prolific across three or four projects. I've been experiencing a disconnection from music--listening to it or making it. Although I can still dig through old playlists and listen to stuff I haven't heard in a while. It's confusing, and I'm working it out--I'm _hoping_ to have a new angel on fire EP this year. Sometimes the music neurons still fire....

While cleaning out a side-room/walk-in closet to turn into a small sleeping space for me, we found some of my old reel tapes. If I can find a reel-to-reel machine, I might find some lost music recorded in the early 1990's.

Been slowly transferring important files off the PC and onto this iMac, which I've christened the iHoover for its loud fan. And drinking coffee.