Unloading the overload.

About five-and-a-half years ago, when I'd been working at Seattle Weekly a while, I decided to try to go all-digital. I began ripping my CDs and selling them off, sometimes on Half.com, sometimes at local stores, and I made a fair amount of money doing it--to the degree that I stopped keeping track of my bank balance altogether and spending as I liked, a decision that would eventually prove hard to shake and led to more than one money scare. Over time, I got out of the habit of ripping everything, partly because as I acquired more digitally I didn't need to, partly because it was so time-consuming and enervating I couldn't handle doing it anymore. Also, after leaving the Weekly for eMusic, I stopped getting so many promo CDs. When you stop drowning, you feel you can swim. So I kept many of them around, or at least I put them in places where I'd forget about them until I came across them again, and usually just shifted them around some more, a practice I've kept up until a few hours ago, when, restless, I realized the time had come to purge everything again--something I've been planning for about a year now, but have never had the gumption to actually do, for some reason.

Well, sure there's a reason: guilt. It's not just a matter of wanting to try and hear as much music as I can, to have as broad a knowledge as I can stomach; it's a matter of not wanting to look back at the sheer amount of money I've spent (and in the case of some of the promos, the wheedling I've done) and feel like I've wasted it. I'm not sure I'd call it that, but that's probably some stage of denial at work. A lot of the dance music I'm interested in is typically sneered at by people who like music I find equally trivial. (I've always wanted to do a compare-contrast of "good" indie rock that was supposed to "stand the test of time" vs. "bad" dance or pop music that wasn't; in my head it's basically always been a contest between Britney, who's still around, like her or not, and, say, K. McCarty's Dead Dog's Eyeball and its like. But that's a bone for another day's picking.) So it's doubly embarrassing when the stuff I've held onto but never, or almost never, played is the very type of stuff I've been mocked for caring about. Uncomfortable as it is sometimes to admit, pride plays a big role in our tastes; it's why people who really ought to know better still believe in that chimera known as the guilty pleasure.

But that's only a small part of it, if an important one. The other part is that with promos down to a trickle I never really worried about the amount of stuff I was keeping, so over the years it's piled up something precarious--or at least, precarious enough to worry about now that I'm really starting to run out of space, both physically and, more and more, mentally. Several months ago I realized that what I really want from a CD collection are albums I want to play more or less from beginning to end--a shelf full of reliable pleasures. But inertia is a strong beast. It's easy to be overwhelmed by volume--I'd guess I have around 3,000 CDs total, including friends' mixes, MP3 discs, CD-Rs, unsaleable promos, and other assorted junk. Going through everything in my bedroom--where less than a third of this stuff was located--took about two hours, and that was a very light dusting.

Everything went into four piles: keepers (back on the shelf), unsaleables (an unkempt pile, now in a box), saleables (into a box), and the discs I want to rip before selling. Here's where the shame pops up again: the last bunch is bigger than the other three combined. Happy as I am to lighten my burden and make a little cash, I have been sitting here for ten hours now ripping disc after disc. (Disc two of the first Source Lab comp is going at 7.0x as I type.) I'm beginning to remember just how much of a slog this is to do, and why I eventually stopped--it became all I did, every day, for months. I stopped going out, seeing friends, attending concerts, in part because I thought if I kept at it diligently enough, I'd eventually see bottom. Back then it was even foolhardier than now, because the promos weren't about to let up anytime soon; now it's only somewhat less so, but I feel good about it anyway, because my goal is a lot less amorphous.

Of course, I'm kidding myself by saying that. There will always be another record or ten that I have to just give one more chance, and much as I might watch how much music I take in at any given time, once you get the bug it's not something that goes away entirely, or by itself. Today, for example, before I started the trimming process, I splurged on volume six of James Brown's The Singles: 1969-1970, two discs of original A- and B-side mixes of many songs I already own. How many times am I gonna play that one? It's the completist in me, of course: yet I already sold the third volume for reasons Douglas Wolk makes clear in his Pitchfork review. A matched set is one thing, but even I, collector guy, have my limits.

One reason the rip-then-sell pile is so big is that I gave myself a great deal of latitude for it. Specifically, while a lot of the CDs in it are ones I never quite got around to and want to have the chance to even after they're gone, a lot of them are albums I do like to varying degrees but realize I will likely never play again. That includes everything from Clipse's Hell Hath No Fury (I like the Neptunes a lot but some of those tracks are just annoying, however great the wordplay may be; I still prefer, and will always prefer, Lord Willin', by a mile) to Simian Mobile Disco's FabricLive.41 (speaking of matched sets), which I reviewed positively, with reservations, for Resident Advisor

Just as important, psychically anyhow, are the albums I've held onto for years for no especially good reason. Henry Cow's Western Culture is a great example: picked it up used at a record store I forget the name of, on 44th and Nicollet in Minneapolis, when I worked across the street at the Sebastian Joe's ice cream commissary, where I made waffle cones Tuesday through Friday and vanilla ice cream all day Saturday. (Best non-writing job I ever had: I listened to music all day long and got a ton of reading done while waiting for the waffle irons or, on Saturdays, the ice cream maker to do their work, not to mention a ton of great free ice cream, in dozens of flavors.) That was a dozen years ago; I think I've played Western Culture five times total. Same with Prince Jazzbo's Mr. Funny on Pressure Sounds: picked it up on a big buy (something like a dozen CDs at once, my lord), and have probably heard it less than a half-dozen times. Somehow I never got around to ripping them while going digital in '03-'04. Now's the time.

I said this at the outset of this blog, but it's worth repeating: the reason I started watching my consumption of music now, as opposed to, say, when I worked at the Weekly, is because my position as a hoarder is no longer a rarefied one. It used to be that a surfeit of free music was a luxury; now it's widespread, commonplace. Some people think criticism doesn't have the same value it used to because of this. I feel the opposite--good writing is becoming harder to come by since everyone who can type thinks of themselves as a writer because they can publish themselves. (I've pushed this fallacy myself in the past, and I'm sorry, especially after seeing some of what's resulted.) And I think that that width and depth are advantages in criticism and life both; I like the stuff I do even more as a result of sitting through so much of what I don't like, or don't quite connect with.

That hoarding aspect is still with me even as I try to be less frivolous a buyer and/or downloader. (Most of the CDs I'm ripping are from, or were purchased in, 2004 and 2005, the years I made--by a long shot--the most money I ever have in my life.) Still, in some ways I'm getting better. Remember the two email folders I've alluded to where I keep digital promos? I finally waded through them last week. Cutting them down from somewhere around 500 items to about 135 took less than 20 minutes. A couple days after that I cut some more; then I went through the account whose folder was smaller, about 55 items; I wound up with about 35 tracks and/or albums; 14 albums still reside in the "unheard" folder." A lot of really negligible crap--it's not a coincidence that even months after being sent some of this stuff, I'd barely or never heard of the vast majority of it. (That's heard OF, not heard.)

Right now I'm listening to Andrew Weatherall's Hypercity mix of the Force Tracks catalogue. In 2001, when I was enamored of that label, I played this mix a lot. Hearing it again now, it still sounds pretty good. It also sounds like something I'm not likely to ever pull out again except for research. As soon as it's finished, it's getting ripped and put into the sell box. Sentiment can be wonderful, but right now, like way too much of this stuff, even the stuff I know is good, it mostly just gets in the way.

Catch-up, again.

Been busy--with work, even, how about that? Hope it continues. But it's been hell on catching up with my acquisitions, so I'll list them here to (a) help keep track and (b) help keep me honest. That's the reason this blog exists to begin with. I'm not counting purchases of CDs of stuff I had on MP3 (DJ Koze, the Juan Maclean) or downloads of stuff I used to own (the Fever's first EP).

Recently downloaded (most of them are mixtapes I grabbed off old URLs I began picking through a couple weeks ago):
Bangladesh, Passport Music (Hosted by Don Cannon)
Bob Dylan & the Band, Safety Tape (Basement Tapes bootleg, with allegedly astonishing sound quality)
DOOM, Born Like This
Tity Boi, Trap-a-velli

Recently purchased:
The Original Eight Mile--Westbound Records: 40th Anniversary (Westbound/Ace)
Marianne Faithfull, Easy Come Easy Go (Decca)
100% Dynamite! NYC (Soul Jazz)
Amadou & Mariam, Welcome to Mali (Nonesuch)
Dillanthology 1 (Rapster)
Ryan Leslie (Casablanca/Universal Motown)
Keri Hilson, In a Perfect World . . . (Interscope)
DJ /rupture, K-K-Kumbia (negrophonic.com)

Forced Exposure send-outs:
Utopia Daydream: New Rubble Volume 4 (Past & Present)
Liverpool, Por Favor Sucesso (Normal)
Detroit Grand Pubahs, The Detroit Connection Pt. 4 (Matrix)
Gala Drop (Gala Drop)
Monazite (Lantern)
Exercise One, In Cars We Rust (Wordandsound/Mobilee)

That isn't counting promos I want to get to. Finally, the year seems to have some shape.

It's been quiet here.

I've been quiet, period. I spent a week in New York, which was great--it actually helped me find a couple potential work leads, which is great (and unexpected), and seeing Angela after three months was quite a relief. (She visits me again in a month.) My friend Rickey died (more here), the day after I turned 34; it's awful and it comes in waves, probably will for a long time. Before and after, not not many assignments, little money coming in, frugality-a-go-go.

Up until about a week ago, anyway. I have picked up a couple CDs for some research into a project I want to pursue: R.E.M.'s Reckoning and the dB's Like This, neither especially impressive on one play each. (I knew the R.E.M. in parts; I have a fuzzy recollection of having taped Like This off LP, maybe I found it at Cheapo on Lake Street or something, but otherwise nada.) And a week and change before, I'd picked up the Paul's Boutique reissue. (I got the PB Audio Commentary MP3 from BeastieBoys.com as well, got through about eight minutes, and that'll do, thanks.

Four days ago, I idly noticed I had most of my downloads left on eMusic for the month. I decided to see how long I had: till the 24th. (They refreshed today.) My new habits have carried so far that I barely download anything now. I was actually relieved the other day when the Forced Exposure package arrived with six CDs. Finally, I thought, something new to listen to--all the while having something like 300 different blog pages sitting on a Word file, ready to be ticked off one by one, and an equal number of download-ready publicist emails sitting in folders labeled "Digital promos," none of which I've touched, unlike the blog posts, which I've at least cherry-picked at various points since '09 began.

Recently I wondered if I'd lost interest in music. I now realize that what I'm disinterested in new music as an end in itself. That's nothing new, of course--most sensible people start feeling that way long before they turn 34. I do think more and more, though, it's not me, it's music. I could be cute and point out how much of what I like right now that's "current" really isn't: J. Period & Q-Tip's The (Abstract) Best Vol. 1, an old-man-rap catnip free mixtape, or DJ Koze's new remix compilation, or Clipse doing what they've been doing forever, or revisiting my own year-end oldies comp (the best mix I've ever made), or falling head-over-heels again for Franco's "Limbisa Ngai" (please, Ken Braun, include this on Francophonic Vol. 2), not to mention "Lisolo ya Adamo na Nzambe," the next-to-last track from Francophonic Vol. 1, which has some of the most floridly dynamic interplay I've ever heard between voices and instruments, and yet never stops swaying light and nimble. If I'm lucky enough to find the kind of work where I can listen to music, maybe I'll just chuck everything and listen to Franco.

Not yet, though. I've got a mile of music to get through. Thank god! Clearing the path is one thing, but cleaning it up completely has helped, I think, worsen my mood lately. Because one of the pleasures of making new music my livelihood is that it can heighten my alertness to everything else. Letting my list of URLs, not to mention two email addresses' "digital promos" folders, pile up is not working that great either. (I still haven't downloaded that new Thermals single, FFS.)

But when I was looking for something that had charted that I was curious to write about, I Hype Machined it and came across a blog I see a lot through that--one that puts up MP3s that I am consistently curious about. I have never bookmarked or linked it. I can't even remember what it's called, all of a day afterward. I never remember it. OK, fine: I deliberately forget it. Because everytime I'm there I download everything I can get my hands on. And that's what I did yesterday--seven or eight MP3s. Even more so than when dealing with MP3 blogs normally, this felt like grabbing candy and running. Especially because the cop I was running from was myself--this blog's imperative. Very enjoyable feeling--sometimes you don't find music to listen to because you want to approach it responsibly, like homework, you want it to feel hotter, more illicit, even if in experiential terms, it's anything but. That routinized feeling is what I started this blog to combat.

Anyway. eMusic. I had over 200 downloads left for the month and decided to go berserk. I also downloaded some other things from other places because why not? Sometimes not having a logjam in front of you allows you to drive. But if you don't have a direction and could really use one, it can feel like the desert. Here's what I've got to get through. Wish me luck.

Sin Fang Bous, Clangour
Senegal 70 - Musical Effervescence
Prefuse 73, Everything She Touched Turned Ampexian; Savath y Savalas, La Llama; Diamond Watch Wrists, Ice Capped at Both Ends (all new Scott Herren titles)
Lux and Ivy's Favorites - Volume 01 (eleven volumes here--thanks, Douglas; who knows, maybe I should just grab the rest too and put 'em in the pile)
Willie Nelson & Asleep at the Wheel, Willie and the Wheel
U2, No Line on the Horizon
Thomas Mapfumo, two very early albums
The Pains of Being Pure at Heart
Blind Blake, Ragtime Guitar's Foremost Fingerpicker
Big Star, #1 Record/Radio City (not new to me, but I'm curious to hear it again)
The Young Big Bill Broonzy
Bernarda Fink & Roger Vignoles, Brahms Lieder (classical music! weird. thanks, Tom Moon)
Bad Brains, I Against I (re-downloaded, but I don't know this well at all)
Baaba Maal & Mansour Seck, Djam Leelii
Art Pepper Meets the Rhythm Section (another re-download)
50 Cent, I'm Rising to the Top (convinced by Jayson Greene's hilarious eMusic review)
Diego Bernal, For Corners