Comrades of whodyhwut-now?

We're a musical artist collective

I'm Cassie Candles. I had this idea of making a network of songwriter/producer friends to form a collective. It’s pretty new right now, but I’m hosting a festival for it, and eventually would like to put together a compilation CD with a few songs from each of us :) It's the annual, “Comrades of Cassie Candles Celebration” (CoCCC for short) and the annual, “Comrades of Cassie Candles Collective Compilation CD”

I had a dream awhile back i was managing an artist collective. I'd heard of artist collectives before. There's one in Seattle called 'Enby Party' I was somewhat envious of. It's a bunch of trans and non-binary musicians that have an annual festival and compilation tape, and connect songwriters to producers and the like. I was envious because there weren't enough people where I lived at the time to have something like that, then I had this dream.

I woke up like, "wait, what would I need to do to have an artist collective? And then I realized it's probably a lot easier than it seems. So now I’m in Portland and I’m making it a real thing!!¡! The festival is happening in August, and my goal is not only to connect friends, but also to create a scene X3

I have a lofty vision of cultivating a space that promotes artists selling their music directly so they get paid over streaming CEOs. A culture that welcomes anyone into it, and doesn’t tell people, “you don’t dress the way we do, and even though we have the same values, you can’t be part of our clique.” A scene that subverts big tech, capitalism, and the grasp they have around the neck of small indie musicians today. It’s something that affects me daily, and it’s the reason I fantasize about returning to mp3 players, pirating music, and surfing the web to find interesting personalities. I feel that this is something that’s been taken from modern musicians as we’ve been trained to take up as little space as possible, and pay corporations to let our friends hear our music; not the other way around.

Our attention isn’t meant to be farmed. I want to condition myself not to crave an endless stream of media, and to let the media I have carry more weight. I want to train myself not to feed an endless media machine, but to take time and create beautiful things that few people if any will see. I want to build a space that promotes this.

Anyways, thanks for letting me rant XD To find out more, you should check out the rest of this site!