Actually listening to music again, pt 1
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I sat down to write this phlog post after having the plan for it
rolling around in my head for at least a week or so, with a vague
recollection that I'd laid the groundwork for it with an earlier post
a while back. I just found and re-read that old post and to my
surprise it went into a lot more detail than I remembered and more or
less did all of the stage-setting I was imagining doing at the start
of this post. So, for full context, read last August's "Musical
milestone ponderings"[1]. The TL;DR of it is that I started to get
seriously burnt out on the narrow slice of the musical world I happily
inhabited for man, many years at around about the same time I gave up
on physical media like CDs (on account of moving overseas) and started
to consume music only digitally. Since that time I've felt kind of
disconnected from music, treating it largely as a generic kind of
background thing that I stream when I want it there without paying
attention to who is playing what or being able to place any of that in
a wider context, of the artist's history, or the genre's history or
subgenres, or whatever. Obviously this is generalisation - I *did*
run an aNONradio show for over a year and that involved some degree of
deliberateness. But on the whole I've felt like I've never been
"into" music in the same way I was when I was a regular CD-buying
metal head.
Not much has changed since that post. My standard recipe, especially
when working, is to throw on SomaFM, either the Classic Groove Salad
channel or sometimes Drone Zone. This works, it's great background
music to work to and it's just there, on any computer I happen to be
on. I don't have to worry about synchronising an actual music
collection between personal machines and work machines (yes, yes, I'm
sure you have some kind of synchy-cloudy-boxy thing that does this for
you and I should to, but I just can't bring myself to care enough to
set a non-evil version of anything like that up).
But recently I've been reading more and more about the surprising
environmental toll of streaming media. One would think that replacing
physical plastic incarnations of music in the form of CDs or tapes or
records with ephemeral bitstreams would be a huge win in this
department, and obviously it *can* be, but lazy, casual streaming
streaming habits can actually make things worse. This issue was first
brought to my attention by the great Low Tech Magazine[2], but I've
since seen it in many other places. I think perhaps it's become
slightly topical.
Often this discussion in frame in terms of physical media: how many
times do you have to stream an album from the cloud on your phone
before the environmental footprint of all that high speed wireless
data transfer exceeds the footprint of manufacturing and shipping a
CD? I get the impression nobody really knows the answer to this
question, there is so much to consider. But in my case, there's
really not even any room for debate, because the sensible comparison
is not to CDs but to digital music files sitting permanently on my
hard drive, and that's a dirt simple comparison that streaming always
loses.
In casually switching on SomaFM for hours a day, five days a week,
means that over the course of a year I am literally downloading
exactly the same relatively small set of songs over and over again,
playing them out of a RAM buffer and then discarding the data. This
is undeniably an extremely wasteful thing to do. It's totally
incompatible with the off-grid kind of lifestyle I lazily aspire to,
and/or think that there's a non-trivial chance we may one day all be
forced to lead during some kind of slow collapse timeline.
Downloading the same songs once - even as high quality FLACs - and
listening to them over and over again on random shuffle mode would
provide exactly the same kind of low-effort, background chill music
conducive to concentration, at a fraction of the energy usage, but
without adverts and without as much reliance on big infrastructure.
(note that this analysis does not hold at all for, say, aNONradio
shows which I typically only ever listen to once anyway. Not *all*
streaming is wasteful, but repeated streaming of the same content is.)
So, I got inspired to kick my lazy streaming habit and actually curate
a collection of music to recreate the SomaFM experience. I figured
this would also be a great opportunity to finally actually *learn* the
genre, develop more concerete tastes, acquire favourite artists, etc.,
etc.
I figured I would use SomaFM as a starting point because, helpfully,
they provide a big list[3] of recently played artists, with the font
size scaled by frequency. And here I ran into problems. Surprisingly
(to me, at least), a lot of these artists are quite major / successful
artists on mainstream record labels. Which is not a problem in and of
itself - I am absolutely *not* too cool to listen to mainstream music
if I actually enjoy it. The problem comes in when one wants to
*acquire* this music in digital form, legitimately.
I don't want to sidetrack this post into a big discussion of the
ethics of music piracy, that's a huge and complicated topic on which
it's very hard to adopt anything other than a nuanced and
multi-faceted set of opinions. Another time, perhaps. But certainly
I believe it's a good thing to support artists and my intention in
this endeavour was *not* to just download everything for free.
But I insist on being able to download and play my music without any
weird, pointless, proprietary and platform-limited software - just let
me use my damn web browser to download files, that's *what it's for* -
and I would really prefer not to do business with companies like
Amazon, Apple or Google who are all strenuously doing their parts to
make the world a worse place. And it turns out that if you want to
avoid these companies and use Linux or *BSD, legitimately acquiring
non-streamed digital copies of music from major, successful artits is
actually incredibly hard. It sometimes happens that the websites of
artists or their record labels will give you this ability, but it
seems to be rare and the bigger the artist the rarer it is.
Maybe this should have been obvious, but it was a bit of a surprise to
me.
I've been a user and fan of Bandcamp, who do music distribution
exactly right, IMHO, for many years now. So I know I have options.
But I was at first disappointed and reluctant to lock myself into
using it as my only source of music for this experiment. It's kind of
like locking oneself into an alternate reality. It's hard to really
connect with and appreciate a musical scene without knowing "the
classics", the touchstones of the genre, things you want to be able to
recognise references to or derivatives of.
I actually thought about returning to physical media. A lot of what
SomaFM plays is not exactly cutting-edge, you can get it on used CDs
dirt cheap. CD players themselves are now dirt cheap because
everybody wants to get rid of their obsolete stereo gear. My local
library rents CDs which actually seems like it would be a great,
no-cost, pefectly legitimate way to widely explore a whole lot of new
artists and learn one's way around new genres without acquiring a
large, bulky, cumbersome collection of things you actually own. It
would force me out of the "random shuffle all the things" paradigm
that I lazily use on my phone and back into listening to whole albums
as discrete musical experiences designed by the artists. I was
actually briefly excited by this idea. To fit in with my need to not
own a lot of physical stuff I thought I'd set myself something like a
10 disc limit, sampling widely via the library and cheap CDs won in
online auctions for a few bucks each or found at thrift stores, but
only permanently keeping what I really loved, forcing myself to make
difficult decisions about which of my precious 10 discs to sell off
to make room for a new favourite. This kind of deliberate limitation
would definitely require close attention to my music, which is exactly
what I've stopped having since becoming a lazy streamer.
But at the same time that I was pondering this, and building up a
frightening pile of browser tabs for local auctions for CDs and nice
old CD players, I was also doing deep dives into Bandcamp, and at some
point I had built up enough of a pile of things I was seriously
digging that I decided maybe I could do the Bandcamp-only thing after
all. Well, and something *else* involving phsyical media happened
too, which I'll write about in another entry soon, and getting into
CDs on top of that felt like it may have been a bit too much. Maybe
I'll change my mind, but for now this 10 CD project idea is abandoned.
I've decided that, starting this month until I stop thinking it's a
good idea, I'm going to buy 3 albums on Bandcamp each month. No more
- in part to keep the cost of this project low, but more so to force
me to actually give the music I buy each month a longer period of
dedicated listening and consideration. I think I'm going to start a
Gemlog at my Gemini capsule[4] dedicated to reviewing the albums I
buy, so keep an eye out for that if you're interested.
Even though I went into this really expecting that I'd finally be
getting a proper handle on electronic music, and started out searching
Bandcamp using the "downtempo" and "ambient" and similar tags looking
to get my chill on, well, lots of long, random wanderings happened and
what actually ended up really hooking me and making me open my wallet
was something pretty different (although I'm still actively exploring
that initial line of interest - variety is good!). I have been
aboslutely loving the heck out of modern takes on the spacerock /
krautrock / kosmische musik / whatever-you-want-to-call-it genre,
something I honestly didn't realise people were still doing but I'm
so glad they are! Long, meandering, psychadelic sessions mixing
heavily sequenced analogue synths with rock-style guitar and drum
work, alternating between slow 'n lazy and powerfully motoring along
in pounding 4/4, feel kind of like they're combining some of my
favourite parts of my metal past and my vintage electronic present,
and are even harkening all the way back to my childhood explorations
of my Dad's collection of half-legit, half-pirated Hawkwind casettes.
This is awesome stuff!
The best discovery I've made so far are the band Sungod. If what I've
described above sounds up your alley, I can't encourage you strongly
enough to check out their album Wave Refraction[5], which I've been
listening to non-stop since I bought it a week or so ago.
Okay, that's all for now, but expect a part 2 in this mini-series of
posts in the near future!
[1]
gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space:70/0/~solderpunk/phlog/musical-milestone-ponderings.txt
[2]
https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2015/10/can-the-internet-run-on-renewable-energy.html
[3]
https://somafm.com/gsclassic/artists.html
[4] gemini://gemini.circumlunar.space/~solderpunk/
[5]
https://ssssssungoddddd.bandcamp.com/album/wave-refraction
