Every day we hear about people doing shit like this and we love to see it and it fills us with joy and momentarily restores our faith in humanity, but at the same time we hate that people HAVE to do shit like this, which once again makes us wonder if the world wouldn’t be better off getting hit with another dinosaur-extinction-level asteroid.
I guess this is just the world we live in now. Happy Thanksgiving Eve, y’all.
Good morning and Happy Friday, everyone!
I’d like to share a fundraising campaign with you all, which started today and runs through next Monday (the 20th).
We’ve often talked about fundraisers here, usually in the form of compilation albums. Like this one that specifically benefited birds, several (here, here, and here) intended to support people of Palestine, and even this one that sounded bird-related but was also for Palestinian people. And I fully encourage you to check out all of those if you haven’t already.
But today I’ve got one that’s a bit different: supporting Palestine AND bird-related, but surprisingly NOT music-related.
WordPress has reminded me that this month officially marks 14 years since this website launched. So happy birthday, Valley of Steel. Meanwhile the entire world continues to circle the drain more and more rapidly, but I guess we all need to take comfort in the little things wherever we can.
Like… huge recent news I wanted to make sure to share with you folks — specifically, U.S.-based folks. There are finally new seasons of The Great Pottery Throw Down available for us to watch! If you aren’t familiar with this former BBC, now Channel 4, competition show, you need to catch up! While the rest of the world was spending the 2020 pandemic obsessing over the Tiger King documentary, HBO MAX quietly released the first few seasons of a delightful series set in a pottery factory in Stoke-on-Trent, central England — essentially the clay and porcelain sibling to the more widely-known Great British Bake Off.
I was immediately hooked on these amateur potters’ magical creations, and especially on the show’s endearingly gentle and positive vibes: the judges have been known to tear up, even more than the contestants, with pride over some of the final products. I absolutely couldn’t get enough through five whole seasons, until suddenly the well dried up. Announcements for a sixth edition came in 2023, followed by a seventh the next year, but HBO was too busy flip-flopping on what to call their streaming app to bother adding any new content. So for the past few years I’ve had a sad, pottery-shaped void in my life — that is, until just a few weeks ago when I discovered that the whole run (so far) of the Throw Down, all the episodes that were on HBO but also the two newer missing seasons, are now streaming for free on Roku Channel!
I would’ve told you all sooner, but I was too excited about bingeing my way through the new episodes to find time to write anything. But now that I’ve completed the sixth and seventh finals, I didn’t want to wait any longer to spread the news. Go check it out ASAP! We have one of these doodads plugged into our tv, but you can access Roku Channel content through other devices like Firestick or Google TV or just stream through their website.
I realize this is starting to sound like a paid advertisement for Roku, but I promise it isn’t (although if they wanted to throw me some $$ I would not turn my nose up at it!) — I’m just a really big fan of this particular competition show and I think more people need to know about it. Which is pretty much my whole shtick here, although it’s usually music I’m sharing with you. OH! Speaking of which…
And just like that — we’ve reached the halfway point of 2025. When did that happen?
Where did the time go?
For me, I know I’ve been completely draining all of my mental energy with work crap every day, and at the end of it I can barely manage to drag myself downstairs to just zone out to some mindless nonsense on the tv until it’s time to go to bed, rinse and repeat the next day and every day ad nauseam.
But never mind all that, here’s a new (well, it came out earlier this month) compilation absolutely jam-packed with music you can insert into your ear-holes and fight off the encroaching ennui…
Good morning and HAPPY MONDAY, everyone!
I did promise recently that my Top 24 of 2024 list was nearing its completion, and I’m pleased to announce that it has finally been published.
We’re going to dive head-first into writing about some of those top releases from last year and from years past, as well as trying to catch up on some of the hits of today, as I am determined to put an end to the lengthy semi-hiatus I’ve been stuck in for roughly the past two years (and intermittently over the past dozen or so years?)…
The world is such a fucked-up place these days, and it seems it’s only getting worse, and like most of you I have no idea what the hell to do about it. But at the very least we can try to cope, and if listening to music helps in any way, then I will try to do my small part in getting the word out there.
One quick housekeeping note, and while we’re on the subject of how fucked-up the world is: as I was finally putting 2024 to rest I came across one more charity benefit compilation from last year that I had forgotten to share here at the time…
ICYMI: at some point in the latter half of 2024, Syrup Moose Records officially announced that they were taking a well-deserved break during 2025. After averaging at least one release (digital and/or cassette, sometimes CD and/or vinyl too) for their first 2-1/4 years in existence, they have hit the pause button on anything new over the course of this whole year.
Honestly, I think this is a brilliant idea and more people should follow suit. It might give me a slight fighting chance to eventually one day dig myself out of the pile of stuff on my to-do list I have been compiling over the past dozen or so years, stuff I’ve heard and enjoyed enough to write something about to share with the folks who come here to read these words, but which I’ve failed to find the time and energy to do so (yet).
Anyway, because they’ve never half-assed anything, Syrup Moose closed out last year with one hell of a bang: their latest and greatest compilation V — the fifth in a series (not including their first anniversary Year of the Moose) — which tips the scales at a whopping 108 tracks (yes, you read that right, one hundred eight), totaling roughly EIGHT HOURS of material as varied as the label’s first two years of releases have been.
Dear gentlepersons of the internet: once more I bid you hello and good day. Things have been pretty quiet around here for a bit, which has been (as per usual) the result of extensive craziness happening BTS IRL. So much, in fact, that I’ve missed the year-end deadline for compiling my year-end list by a couple of weeks now. I’ve got it narrowed down to a manageable collection of contenders, just need to revisit them to cut that number in half and then put them in order — which I’ll hopefully accomplish in the near future, now that I’ve finally emptied my inbox of everything from 2024.
Speaking of which, over the past two months we’ve been dormant here, Food Desert Recordings put out another of their esteemed fundraising compilations, which I’ll take a rare minute of downtime to bring to your attention. Welcome to the Spectrum benefits The Autistic Self Advocacy Network, a very worthy cause, since unlike some other well-known organizations, it does not view Autism as a disease to be cured or eradicated…
Good afternoon // happy Friday, everyone!
It’s been an eventful month here at Valley of Steel HQ. After a full year of inactivity on the bird site, earlier this week I finally pulled the plug and deactivated my dozen-year-old Twitter account, which was pretty much the last remnant of my “social media” presence outside of lurking around a handful of Discords.
And on the subject of housekeeping-type news, the renewal for this website’s domain (valleyofsteel.net) is coming up later this month — and with the limited amount of activity I’ve had here in the past few years, I’ve been seriously considering discontinuing that registration. The website would remain, but it would revert back to its original address of https://valleyofsteel.wordpress.com. So you might want to update those bookmarks, just in case. I guess if anyone felt very strongly about the dot-net address sticking around, you could always go buy some shit through this Amazon affiliate link. I just don’t know if my heart is still in it enough, to keep dumping money just to keep a personalized domain name anymore.
But two things I can say for sure my heart IS still in — sharing good music with you folks who come here to read these words, and especially sharing things that are supposed to help other people. In a two birds / one stone situation, here’s a benefit compilation that came out last month, but which I just discovered yesterday (and which I just had to buy before I had even gotten halfway through listening)…
It is Bandcamp Friday. It’ll be the last one until after summer vacation, so make it count!
One item I’d like to share with you was just released today by Dutch label Rope or Guillotine: a cassette compilation of exclusive tracks to benefit people of Gaza.
It feels like we just did this — but the goodly folks at Food Desert Recordings are at it yet again.
Released TODAY, Know Justice, Know Peace is a brand new compilation benefitting National Bail Out.
Valley of Steel 