Platonic Polyamory (fka Undressing Underground)

Today on the show we've got our buddy Tripp Nasty's friend, Trond Jervell!

Trond lives on a remote island in Norway and had to wake up at 4am to talk to us, which also required us postponing 2-3 times over the past few months, so I think he's earned your time.

Trond does a mix of "Radical Ambient" music (read his manifesto on his old bandcamp... or just listen to the episode here), sound art, and what I'll maybe offensively refer to as "normal" ambient music. He utilizes synths, tape loops, field recordings, and whatever else he's got around. At his day job he poisons the mind of rural Norwegian tweens teaching them how to make noise music. It's a long, lovely talk and I enjoyed listening back to it over a variety of tracks I got from his current bandcamp.

And while you're here... Do you like Edgar Allan Poe? Are you able to tolerate recording your own voice? Do you make music (or, "music")? We've still got a few weeks to accept submissions for this year's Edgar Allan Poecast. The poems and stories I can remember offhand were taken are Black Cat, Masque of the Red Death, and Fall of the House of Ushers. That still leaves most of his poems (including The Raven!). Reach out to me, Jennifer, or Brandon or email me at rob AT undressingunderground DOT com (do we still need to do that? does that still help prevent spam?)

Don't want to submit but want to hear what this is all about? You can listen to or purchase the first Poecast here and the third one here. There is no second one cause I lost it.

After this we'll start releasing episodes all at once. I don't fully remember why I was breaking them into two and I'm tired of doing it.

Also, we think a lot of the best stuff actually came up in this part. Lots of talk about America's Sweetheart, James Duvall, Gregg Araki/Sundance stories, and a bit more personal as Jon talks about showing his mom his latest film right before she passed.

We had a lot of fun with this.

Know anyone else we should talk to? Reach out. Our information is around in past descriptions and if you're listening there's like an 85% chance you already know us.

We're also still taking submissions for the Edgar Allan Poecast. Deadline is mid/late October. Do what you can and as long as it's audio, we'll play it and send you a professionally dubbed cassette next year.

Check out Jon Moritsugu's website for everything you hear him talk about here.

Hi,

We talked to Jon Moritsugu, the Godfather of Punk Cinema. Director of My Degeneration, Mod Fuck Explosion, PBS's Terminal USA, and most recently, Numbskull Revolution... what more should I say? He rocks.

In this first half we talked about his roots in Hawaii, Asian punk/cinema, semiotics, PBS, meat, jumping on a table in the middle of a dinner party and taking a shit, and some other broad strokes of his career.

The second half will go up next week when I have time to edit it. You can currently buy his films through his website and catch screenings of Numbskull Revolution at cinemas, museums, and DIY spaces around the world. Check if it's playing near you on his site.

Next week things get weirder and sadder.

In the meantime, wanna contribute to the 2026 Edgar Allan Poecast? Reach out to me via email or catch me, Brandon, or Jennifer on social media. Or if you or someone you know wants to come on the show and talk art, weird hobbies, or whatever other bullshit. We've been bad at recruiting guests, so we're always happy to have suggestions.

Hello again. Our guest made it this time, but we had some technical difficulties so this runs long and I dunno, we talk about most of it in the episode. Though I also had a bunch of issues with my mic, which will sound distorted and weird and then suddenly fine. So it goes.

But today, at long last, is my friend the Brazilian photographer. I wanted to ask her what is a photograph/camera because I'm a poststructuralist at heart, but I settled for a series of questions about approach and the stuff you'd generally want to know about a person. Brandon's got some funny jokes, Jennifer's got some upsetting stories, and our guest is enchanting and bemused. That's the way we like it, right, folks?

Check out Lorena's work on her Instagram. You can also DM her if you're heading to Belem and want some photographs or you want to encourage her to read for the Edgar Allen Poecast.

Which, we're doing again. Why don't you read, too? Anything in an audio format is welcome, or if you just want to send me a file of you reading something that's between 1-5 minutes we can add it to our medley scored by our good friend Willie. Just let us know beforehand because we encourage repeats between years, but prefer more variety in each episode. Reach out to Brandon, Jennifer, or me on social media or shoot me an email at [email protected] and look around your podcast feed for this show, YouTube, or Bandcamp for past Poecasts.

Thanks. I love you.

Nothing's working today, so I'll keep this brief.

For one, the page I write this in keeps kicking me out, so I'm rewriting this for the fourth time. I also lost my hard drive with our episodes, so I don't have our normal audio cues, and I lost my DVD drive, so I wasn't able to include the new tracks Tripp Nasty sent me on a CD.

But, the opening music is Tripp's "Flashback City," which I don't think is available anywhere. The rest of the music with the very not very NPR-like tone that podcasts love to utilize, is from the latest by VODE (Arvo Zylo/Leslie Keffer), "Guignol au sommet." It's a subscriber exclusive from No Part Of It, but you can try to grab it here:

https://nopartofit.bandcamp.com/album/guignol-au-sommet

We were waiting on my photographer friend, but she couldn't make it. Instead we talked job growing up online, getting offline, AI, job hunting, and a handful of other things.

We'll be back next week with my friend. After that, who knows. We've got a list of people from Tripp we gotta reach out to and a couple other people slated or we want to reach out to, but we're always open to suggestions. Especially anyone that can be personally introduced to us.

Hi, hello, we're back. We're exploring a new movie-focused series we're calling "Hey That's Me!" (after the Deerhoof song). We're trying to get people with important facets of their identity, mental health, or beliefs they've found reflected in films in deeply personal ways.

We're kicking it off by bringing back our favorite polymath, Tripp Nasty. Initially he told me he wanted to talk about the Buddhism of the 1983 Jon Landis comedy, Trading Places. That didn't really happen, but we did talk some about the movie and a lot about Zen Buddhism, so, there we go.

We've got three deep cuts of Tripp's that he emailed to me the other day. I don't know that they're currently available anywhere, so, enjoy what of them you can.

Also, hey! Brandon wrote a graphic novel with his old friend AJ Dungo. It's available now through Flying Eye Books. AJ'll be back eventually.

I'm very tired. It's been a very long year capped off with a very long month. Capped off further with some weird issues with Zoom where the audio didn't record right and it created a constant buzzing noise. So it goes.

Also, Jill couldn't join us this year due to personal issues. We're hopeful she'll be back next month.

But, in the meantime, Josh and I still had a good time trading our picks this year. Josh has his usual blend of sincerely touching, weird, and funny. I sorta get the whole Wendy's thing.

I used my spot this year for a new creative pursuit. I used my binaural mics to record the sound of Christmas music around Philadelphia. Until they broke. Then I used the internal mics on my Zoom H5 and my phone. They're not quite the same, and the phone is not very good at all, but I do enjoy the texture of it all and I'm fairly happy with how it turned out. You can hear the whole piece without commentary on my bandcamp.

I've gotta clean up more cat pee. We'll be back next year and Platonic Polyamory will be back in January. Merry Christmas and happy holidays. I sincerely wish the best to whoever finds this and enjoy these weird little things we do.

We're home for the holidays, joined again by the soft iconoclast, early podcast innovator, Doug Tilley of Cinema Smorgasbord. This time he's here to talk about a few Christmas movies we forced upon him and to teach us how exactly one formats a movie podcast. He in turn holds us hostage, refusing to let us end the episode for another hour as we mostly start talking about Muncie, IN.

You can see a couple of the movies we discussed, but good luck with the third one. They're discussed more or less in the following order:

It's Beginning to Look a lot Like Brain Death (2023) - a feature length failed experiment Brandon and Rob half-assed a couple years ago based on a dumb idea Brandon had. Find out just how much your friends and family love you by throwing this file on the TV while opening presents.

Next up is Psalty's Christmas Calamity, a low quality YouTube upload of a bizarre pre-Veggie Tales, children's Christmas play that a lot of home school kids have very weird feelings about.

And last up is Blue Christmas (1978), an equally bizarre, but very good gritty political thriller/alien invasion/Christmas movie from Japan's esteemed Toho Studio. You can find the DVD on Japanese Amazon, if you can navigate it, but otherwise it's only really available on the furthest flung torrent sites. Godspeed, but it's worth seeking out.

Happy Holidays and I, Rob, will be back next week for a scaled back edition of the annual Xmas Music Exchange.

At long last, Jennifer and Brandon convinced me to organize a new Edgar Allan Poecast, our third (not second). If you don't know the deal, we take submissions from whoever (mostly noise musicians and those adjacent) to do readings of Edgar Allan Poe stories however they like, with whatever music or noise they can come up with, in whatever language they like.

There's not much else to say except a huge thank you to my cohosts for encouraging this and to everyone that submitted or even considered submitting. We'll do this again, so you have an entire year to consider your submission.

The line up goes like this:

Sara Century - Annabel Lee

Jennifer C. Martin w/ VODE (Arvo Zylo & Leslie Keffer) - The Conqueror Worm

The Gray Romantics - Buried Alive

Laura Squirrel - Alone

Just Josh - The Haunted Palace & Doomed City

T. Volpone - The Sleeper

Dame Smile Highlin' with HB(MB) - The Raven

Ileana - Berenice (in Spanish)

It's a great bunch of readings. We hope you enjoy. And if you want more, check out our feed for the previous two volumes or reach out to Brandon, Jennifer, or me on social media to acquire a copy of the tenth anniversary cassette of the Edgar Allan Poecast Vol. 1. You can also order a copy from my bandcamp, https://grayromantics.bandcamp.com/album/edgar-allan-poecast

Keep an eye out for cassettes or CDs of Vol. 2 and this year's episode.

See y'all next year. Or next month. Whenever we have another episode.

We've got PART 2 of our talk with now Philly, formerly Harrisburg, noise musician and... I guess he probably doesn't want me to say horrorcore rapper, but I've never heard him rap and I don't actually know what horrorcore means, so I guess I have no reason to say it anyway.

We talk more about noise, rap, touring, and Richmond, VA. I forgot to check out their other releases, so we open with a different track from Professor A's Kill Your Colonizers Volume 1 and close with a different track from Bison Squad's Death of Desire. But you still have time to go to http://woodroomcollective.bandcamp.com and check out some more (and purchase some on Bandcamp Friday).

We don't have another guest lined up, though we've got a few people we're reaching out to. So if you or someone you know wants to talk, send them our way.

OR!!!! Contribute to our NEW Edgar Allan Poecast! Any story/poem, any way you want to do it. We just wanna hear what people do. We also just put in an order for cassettes of the first one from 2015 and we'll be sending that out to its participants and anyone else who wants a copy until we run out. Also seeing about some bootleg t-shirts for participants in the new one. Email me: [email protected]

Oh yeah, and Brandon and I made a short film about seeing Dead & Co in Vegas.

K thx bye