No Flex Zone
regarding the bandcamp zone of commerce and rolling with the punches of occupied territory life
Hey, there’s a whole lot going on, obviously. Here’s a nice photo of our tiny little studio, perhaps as a palette cleanser from whatever you might’ve been scrolling through a minute ago:
Just a lil’ guy, but we love it. There’s a lot of printing going on in there right now, and way more packing & shipping than you’d expect in a weird little garage, but I’ll get to that in a minute.
it’s a bandcamp day right now
I’m only mentioning this first because it’s the most time-sensitive thing…we’re only a few hours from the end of the first Bandcamp Day of 2026, where they waive their fees until midnight. It’s actually a HUGE help for the little guys like us.
I love our tiny record label, and the records we’ve been able to make. Almost ALL of the jackets have been made in that little garage studio up there, from the screenprinting to hand-scoring and folding, and assembling all of it by hand. Someday we’ll make some videos of that to show off the process…it’s weirdly a lot more work than it seems, but it feels like a special thing, and I love that we’re able to do it.
Today is also the OFFICIAL RELEASE DAY for DANIEL DANGER’S “THE CASPER MASK” record that we announced in the last Substack. The whole thing is out now to listen to on Bandcamp…people who’ve heard it so far have said really nice things about it. There’s also a fancy version with an exclusive five-color art print that will only be available TODAY, and then we’re cutting that off (so we can get to work printing everything).
That said, we’re a little late with getting these shipped out. We sorta got blindsided by a lot of things, and there’s just two of us here handling everything, so sometimes we’re a little slow & behind on things. We’ll be shipping them as soon as we can though! It’s the next thing we’re printing, right after a gigposter that we’ll be posting about tomorrow…
more importantly though, we do not like this
As I’m sure most of you know by now, our lovely city of Minneapolis1 has been targeted for hostile siege by the federal government, under the guise of an immigration “problem” that measurably doesn’t exist (and would never warrant the unchecked violence of this barely-trained goon squad knuckledragging through our streets in their Amazon bargain-bin Call of Duty costumes).
Feel however you want about the pros and cons of living in a diverse and vibrant community of people with wildly different backgrounds and life paths—or what it’s like to coexist within a rich tapestry of cultures and traditions—but I can promise you, there’s something for everyone to hate about this invasion on this beautiful city & state.2
A little while ago, Jes made these “Don’t Tread on MN” flag-shaped signs & posters & postcards; her Minnesota take on the ubiquitous Gadsden flag that these days mostly show up in the back windows of F-150s and at the gates of the weird ranches I pass by when I drive through rural Texas. We’re being tread on here, and it sucks. We started printing these in a couple sizes and modest stacks to bring around town and leave in stores and coffee shops for people to grab for free.3
If you’re here in town, I promise there’s a way to get one for free if you want one, but we’ve also put them up in our store to ship them out to anybody else out there who wants one (or ten). There’s also shirts and hoodies now, thanks to our generous friend Andy Schmidt who works at a shirt-printing place here in town.
All of the profits from the prints, postcards, shirts, and hoodies are being donated to resources here in Minnesota who need them.
Thanks to the huge support of everyone who’s ordered these so far, and being included in an ARTnews feature about the situation here, the first chunk of these proceeds have been sent to the good people at the Immigrant Law Center of Minnesota, who have been working in overdrive since this occupation started, giving legal representation to low-income immigrants and refugees here in Minnesota:
Moving forward from this point on, we’ll be figuring out the next place to send the funds from future sales of these items, and I’ll be updating the store listings once we get that vetted and pinned down.
We’d love it if you grabbed these things from us, but if you’d rather contribute directly to services here on the ground in Minnesota, here’s an excellent resource that’s fairly comprehensive and constantly updated:
gonna leave this on a different note
Okay…I invited people to do this a while back, and then completely forgot about it: We made a place to do some sort of Q & A. Here’s a link to that, if you feel like asking us anything under the cover of TOTAL ANONYMITY:
I’m finding out that there’s a feature to that thing that automatically asks a bunch of bot questions4, so I’m going to avoid those (also I guess that’s a heads up that if you ask bot questions, they probably won’t make it through that screening), but here are a couple from that initial Substack that I can answer:
Test prints please?
Yeah, totally…we have some gigantic stacks, but they’re mostly super messy (and not in a good way). I’d love to get back on doing special “Test Print Tuesday” releases to get some well-curated test prints into people’s hands…they’re doing us absolutely no good over here (except when we’re test-printing on them; they’re super useful for that).
In the past I had a really basic screen print setup, a homemade vacuum press for paper prints, homemade light box, and I would wash out screens outside. I haven’t had a setup in about 7 years and am looking to get back into it with a better setup. Would you recommend DIY or purchasing equipment?
I’m incredibly allergic to huge overhead jumps, so my approach to this has always been to just get going on it with what you’ve got, and then always play the game of “what’s our new least good thing?” and then upgrade that when you can, and when funds will allow it. There’ll be some part of the process that starts feeling like it’s holding you back, and that’s the sign that you’re ready to jump to the next best thing.
I think just getting back into it, you’re probably good with a really basic DIY setup until you start getting a real workflow going and start ending up printing larger and larger runs (both in terms of size and quantity). We started out with a bunch of homemade stuff cobbled together from Home Depot amateur carpentry and literal junk we picked up at re-use centers, and then eventually once we outgrew parts of that setup (and had a slightly larger equipment budget to work with) we’d upgrade whatever our crappiest thing was.
One other reason to do it gradually like that is that if you’re getting back into it, you might not totally know what kind of work you’ll end up doing, so this way you can slowly cater your setup to the kind of work that you gravitate toward doing. Initially, I’d always imagined we’d be printing our own t-shirts, before I realized I hate printing shirts and don’t want that kind of equipment, and I also thought that we’d NEVER be printing anyone else’s work but our own, but it turns out I kinda love doing that (within reason, and mostly only for good buddies), so our setup has evolved a bit to make room for being able to do more of that.
When will the surprise boxes from Christmas a few years ago going to be sent out?
This is on my to-do list in a HUGE way. It’ll happen. Here’s the deal…I went a little crazy when we put those up, and I actually ended up buying a ton of bits and bobs to include, along with some weirdo custom stuff made by us, but then I got obsessed with everything having its own packaging, and as soon as I was digging into that stuff and making it cool, we got hit with that surprise studio move and being forced to amass a TON of money really fast to cover months of downtime while we were moving and didn’t have a studio to work in, and then paying for all of the construction of the new space…we just had to focus on taking on any and all work that would pay for all that stuff, and after all that time, we’re just barely getting our heads back above water enough to start making good on some of those long-standing projects that we still owe people. It’s not my proudest spot to be in, and it’s been hanging over my head this whole time, but honestly, the day we get those things sent out is going to mark a real “return to Landland doing all that fun stuff again” that we haven’t really been able to focus on while we’ve been playing catch up at breakneck pace. All of that is to say, sorry to everyone waiting on those, and in true Landland fashion, the patience we’ve been shown will pay off in spades, because that’s how we work.
There’s other questions that are kinda weird that I’m just gonna skip, if that’s cool. Maybe I’ll get into answering the weird ones later, but I just gotta get this sent out before I run out of these waning hours of this Bandcamp fake holiday thing. Here’s that button for asking us questions though, in case you don’t feel like scrolling up:
Okay, that’s it. I’m a little surprised it’s not warning me that I’m running out of room? I’m gonna get back to work, and I guess Jes is coming to town to hang out for a couple days, so I need to quickly get the Jes Seamans Wing of Landland HQ in buddy-hosting shape, so yeah, thanks for being around and being a part of what we’re doing. I’m going to try to broadcast out of this thing a bit more often this year, so hopefully there’ll be more soon.
Take care, stay warm, stay safe,
Dan
Oh yeah…the button they make me do:
and neighboring St. Paul of course, and greater Minnesota at this point
I’d written a whole footnote about how everything that’s happening here flies in the face of “small government conservative” principles and how much all the states rights people who’ve made a perverse hobby out of grumbling about federal government overreach and overspending should be just as up-in-arms about all of this as the people that are literally being grabbed and disappeared by masked goons, oftentimes just for the “crime” of walking around their neighborhood (which nobody here does anymore because everyone’s scared) or just being out to eat at a restaurant (which almost nobody here does anymore because they’re all locked up during the day to keep people safe)…I’d gotten a few points into that, but ended up deleting it. I dunno, I have a LOT to say about this, but I also feel like we’ll be enduring this for a very very long time, so I’m going to pace myself here.
They’re available at a few places around town: Fireroast Coffee, Moon Palace Books, Arbeiter Brewery, and Extreme Noise in South Minneapolis, and at Find/Furnish and Pilllar Forum in Northeast Minneapolis, and we’re working on getting them to any other places that want to have a stack of them up for grabs.
ever kept a secret from your bsf about your dating life? lol, no, what? lowkey love how u dress here’s how you know these are fake