Actually listening to music again, pt 1

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