Oh, sharity blogs! Your generosity and neighborly cheer are abundant, and your auditory offerings are most appreciated. Don't get me wrong. I love you, but you've really got to cut it out! I can't handle the digging anymore. It's time-consuming and just plain overwhelming to boot.
Back in my vinyl-collecting days, I sometimes spent more time digging through dusty thrift store and flea market record bins than listening to the plentiful jewels that I began to accumulate. Searching for new and used CDs added to the time and expense of my collecting hobby, and I eventually halted the digging for a while. Eventually I farmed out my vinyl to dear friends and fellow like-minded obsessives and worked to ephemeralize my collection, using my iPod as a sort of pocket-sized warehouse of eclectic sounds. I could abandon the shelves of dusty physical media and embrace 21st century virtuality. Moving from apartment to apartment never looked so easy!
The idea: to make it convenient to finally dive into the sizable library of music I had gathered over the years. Good enough, until I rediscovered file-sharing at Soulseek and, later, the sharity/album-share blogscene. It was finally possible to explore the vast cosmos of recorded music -- spanning decades and thousands of genres and subgenres -- at very little expense (a modest monthly bill for web access and some required computer software and hardware) and with very little effort.
Unfortunately, one man can never access all of this wealth, or even enjoy more than a fraction of it, in a single lifetime. I try to remind myself of this on a daily basis. I do. I tell myself that every minute spent digging through the blogs is a minute I could spend sketching, or reading, or playing with Tenzin. But I continue to rationalize, and wait until the little one falls asleep before rechecking Totally Fuzzy and MP3 Index for any final nightly updates.
I think I need help. Some sort of blog rehab to kick the fix.
But how would I live without Chocoreve and 8 Days In April, which specialize in delivering obscure prog, krautrock, and psychedelic music of every possible synaesthetic shade? (Finding vinyl copies of Future Days and Ege Bamyasi at a KUWR record sale in Laramie back in the early 90s has damaged me for life, and now I have to sample every single morsel of metronomic German freakout space rock I can find. Dang. Thanks a lot, Can.)
If you magnify the amount of records shared on these two sites by the hundreds of other shareblogs out there, you can start to understand the problem. HansZUNblog recently posted a straight-from-vinyl eight record collection of nearly everything Hank Williams ever recorded. Modern Music just posted the Coltrane complete Impulse box set, and the Johnny Cash Unearthed box set as well. Charivarious brings the classic and future-classic hip-hop. Regnyouth shares indie rock and punk classics. I'm not even mentioning all the single-song mp3-blogs that drop aural awesomeness in concentrated form every single day. Or the electronic, jazz, pop, metal, experimental, world music, folk, turntablism, and reggae blogs that I like to check out at least occasionally.
And how could I forget to mention the ever-expanding Big Bang universe of netlabels, the overflowing online collections of (mainly experimental and electronic) records which are generously given away by their creators. Yes, given away -- for free! Cover art and liner notes are usually included in each ZIP download, and while plenty of boring copycat releases exist, much of this music is surprising and amazing. You can check out the netlabel scene at Archive.org, which is also a great place to find tons of cool text, audio and video.
Never mind that the potential ethical issues of album-sharing (a topic for a future post, perhaps?) loom over every download; it's readily apparent that the abundant wealth of audio sharity is irresistible to us hardcore music freaks. We wouldn't have it any other way, but I'll be damned if I can see an escape from the madness.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
3 comments:
Once addicted - addicted forever?
for me it´s not a must but a strong desire. there´s a lot of good music out there - especially beneath the mainstream. sometimes i have this being a victiom of some self dynamic processes too. but making a distinction between reading, listening to music or walking or something else is always a question of one´s own values and goals.
greetz
herr k. from *totally fuzzy*
We have come a long way since the 1990s with the sharing of audio online, haven't we? At this point, one doesn't even need to host the files. Free services will host the large files for you. This coupled with free blog services has created a remarkable glut in the last year, and you are not alone in your addiction.
It is difficult to come to terms with the reality that one cannot experience all the music there is in a human lifespan. I've thinned collections by asking myself how many more times I would listen to a recording in my life. Sheesh, that's depressing!
Ever see the film BRAINSTORM? It proposed that with technology one could accelerate experiences - like finishing the fourth grade in a matter of minutes. [The MATRIX and others have dealt with virtual experiences via software, but have they been real time or accelerated?]
Some argue that the overwhelming amount of music available to users today leads to musical apathy. I've been thinking about that issue lately, and keep coming back to the idea that it is opening new avenues for people. Seems like it is giving listeners entire new genres about which to become excited. Without the web, I'm not sure how much I would know about electronica, grime, baile funk, glitch or subgenres of space age pop, for instance.
With this glut, I'm hearing a great deal about people stockpiling downloaded music without spending much time with it. Remember the days when we played recordings over and over learning every sound? That's how they became so beloved. When books began to be available in mass production, was there a similar reaction? We don't treat them today as the beloved treasures they once were, passed through generations, read and reread, but we still love our books.
I do wonder what the future holds for the information age. Will all music be at our fingertips? For that matter, what about films, books, lectures, works of art, any experiences? Information availability is astounding already, isn't it?
Your post opens with a link to a page on my Oddio Overplay site that lists some sharity sources. They are multiplying so quickly now that updating that page could be a daily activity! I try not to link to those who post items that are currently in print, such as Chocoreve. You don't have to be invloved in this online music scene for long before you get to know personally just from whom you are stealing.
The sharity sites I link to predominanly host out-of-print material. In fact, some sharity folks are champions for breathing new life into recordings that might otherwise be lost forever, such as BasicHip.com. No ethical worries there.
Thanks so much for your thought provoking post. It is interesting to see others' perspectives on these issues. Happy Listening!
The biggest joy of old records is crate digging so when someone puts it on the web it loses its charm. You want to pull it up out of the dust and hold it and drop the needle on it.
New music is more appealing to me online. These bedroom composers and these electro superstars make me surf and find the best of the new. That is something you won't find in any crates anywhere.
Post a Comment