Swim Select #100: The Smooth Sounds of the Swim Team, Vol. 1
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Hello, and welcome to Swim Select No. 100! I started this little corner of the site in January of last year when I was freshly unemployed and searching for any kind of structure that I could base my weeks around. Publishing a weekly new music column isn’t a world-shattering idea, but it turned out to be exactly what I needed, allowing me to write freely more often and with less pressure. More than anything, Swim Selects became like exercise to me as I sat down every Tuesday to ask myself what music I had been gravitating most toward over the last few days. It allowed me to talk about obsessions as they were budding, and then later became a cool way to look back and mark time through a long, winding, listless year.
This year, the great Logan Archer Mounts has taken the reins, keeping things running and the good music flowing. While Logan’s taste tends to be far more heavy metal-oriented than my own, I’m often enamored with the picks that he surfaces from the depths of Bandcamp and his own library of interests – groups like Frog Mallet, Thousandaire, and Sex Prisoner that I never would have been aware of if it weren’t for him. I guess what I’m saying is that now that I’m on the other side, it’s really cool to see how something like this works. Discovering new music is one of the most exhilarating parts of being a music fan, and I’m overjoyed to be facilitating that every Tuesday.
What we have today in celebration of the 100th post in the Swim Select feed is not a new music recommendation, but a smattering of music made by Swim Into The Sound writers. That’s right, their talent and creativity aren’t just relegated to the page; they’re also brilliant musicians in their own right. Excuse us as we do a victory lap and brag about the bitchin’ festival lineup that our team’s projects make up.
— Taylor Grimes
Aly Eleanor
Dive deep and get lost into the vast world of purity olympics, the beautifully undefinable sounds of our own Aly Eleanor. She’s basically living my dream of being a multiple-outlet music writer, podcaster, and free-form drone superstar. Her catalogue centerpiece impossible february in d minor (which I think actually begins in a warbly key of G minor) was conceived as part of the RPM Challenge, a commune for independent artists to produce one track per month for a year, and it really feels like a sonic document of all of twists, turns, harsh realties and symphonic highs that one can experience in a trip around the Sun. Aly’s hard work in the Midwest is well-documented through Swim, her music, and everything else she’s juggling, and we’re lucky to have her force of talent in our squad.
– Logan
Alex Couts
Alex is a man of many talents: web developer, musician, and my fellow compadre in Sufjan Christmas adventures. This wide range of skills and passions is also reflected in the number of projects he’s involved with: .zipbomb (an explosive metalcore outfit), Drive Like I Do (homemade Wisconsin guitar music™), and a couple others like luvrcode and Rottú Kúreki that are fully offline and you’ll have to catch live if you want to experience them. I’m constantly impressed by the number of entities Alex is attached to, whether he’s behind the keyboard, slung into a guitar, or working on one of his own multimedia projects. This dude cannot be stopped, and I thank god every day for that.
– Taylor
Britta Joseph
Yesterday, we got to publish Britta Joseph’s excellent interview with AP Lewis of American Sacred Music and Fig On Wrist Records, a project we’d been working on for some time in which the two talked a lot about the creative process. Whatever Britta’s approach is must be an otherworldly, galaxy-brained master plan that she exudes on her two solo piano tracks “february 16, 8:42 pm” and “we haven’t located us yet,” serene ambient compositions that could soothe any heart rate. But you know what really goes hard (as hard as neoclassical music goes anyway)? Giving that same treatment to songs from your favorite artists, which Britta ate ferociously with “Come Heroine” by Touché Amoré and “Don’t Dance” by Anthony Green. Grateful to be in her orbit despite her choice to live in California.
– Logan
Joe Wasserman
You down with the LVP? Yeah, you know me. Joe is one of Swim’s most tenured writers, with the site for almost half of its existence. His band, the LVP, is the kind of hearty, artsy indie rock I was absolutely devouring in high school. There are horns, bombastic guest spots, and big-ass basslines courtesy of Mr. Wasserman. One of my favorite songs is “Car Speaker Test,” a five-minute epic with a spacy build in the middle that feels far more epic than the title suggests. If you want something more searching and existential, there’s “Year in Review.” On the opposite end, there’s “Mom v. Dad: Dawn of Justice,” which is as groovy as it is goofy. And if you want something even more crowd-pleasing, there’s a fun cover of Chappell Roan’s “Pink Pony Club,” complete with a heavy metal breakdown and high-flying guitar solo. That’s what rock music is all about.
– Taylor
Josh Ejnes
God, I hope that 2026 is the year of the Cutaway Car reunion, which really just means my fellow Chicago alternative enthusiast Josh Ejnes getting back in the bedroom lab. Josh put out three great tracks in 2024: “Aux Cord,” which sounds like Post Malone doing a Fountains Of Wayne cover, “With You,” that gets a little more emo twang with it, and “In My Head,” a full-force fuzz-rocker that still works in the pop hooks. You can also find him writing about his cassette collection for the Tape Study blog, which at this point should just be sponsored by Laurie’s Planet Of Sound.
– Logan
Logan Archer Mounts
The Man. The Myth. The Lo-gang. Aside from being the reason for the season, Logan has an awesome collection of solo songs on Bandcamp, whether we’re talking Songs I Probably Owe People Money For or The Will County Demo. The former is a 15-track collection where each song is inspired by a different act (ranging from Against Me! and Modest Mouse to The Smiths and Red House Painters) while the latter is a more condensed batch of songs with a hearty Americana bent, all topped off by a rousing cover of “Let's Kill Saturday Night” by Robbie Fulks. Even as he shifts genres and recording styles, I get whiffs of reverence for The Mountain Goats' scrappy early days in how simply this is recorded and presented—one man and a guitar; real rocker shit.
– Taylor
