The Language of the On-Again Off-Again Future

  https://medium.com/the-awl/the-rise-and-fall-of-the-obscure-music-download-blog-a-roundtable-51fff4025b49 The first installment of my posts on the Virgin Ambient Series is still coming along (we're talking a few hours worth of music just for the first three volumes, dozens of artists, pages of liner notes, etc.) so in the meantime I wanted to draw attention to my MixCloud account which has a half a dozen or so mixes I've made over the last couple of years. I just uploaded a new one compiled of tracks from a series of CDs I made of Mp3s I downloaded from music blogs in the 2000s. I don't have any of the information for the individual tracks so I haven't posted a track list. I like posting untracked mixes and discovering them like you would something on a terrestrial radio broadcast (one of my mixes, No Commercial Potential, is an approximation of one such radio show from my teenage years).  While making this mix I thought about the proliferation of music blogs in the 2...

This summer, I'm publishing a series on the Virgin Records Ambient Series : a sub-label of Virgin Records which released 24 CDs between 1993 and 1997. Of those 24 CDs, 15 were compilations. The compilations followed the same format: someone (Kevin Martin and David Toop are the most frequently thought of with regard to this series) compiles and mixes two CDs worth of tracks based around a genre or, as with the case of Toop's Ocean of Sound  CDs, a more abstract concept. There have been some good blog posts through the years that have looked at this stuff (I'll make reference to some of them once I get into writing these) but none of them went long into the specific sub-series within the Virgin Ambient imprint. Here's how I imagine these posts breaking down:  Week 1: A Brief History of Ambient Vols. 1-4 Week 2: Macro Dub Infection Vols. 1&2 Week 3: Ocean of Sound Vols. 1-4 Week 4: Jazz Satellites Vol. 1 and the planned but never released Vol. 2 Week 5: Monsters, Robot...

Brian Eno, Taking Tiger Mountain By Strategy (Island Records, 1974) ---. "Seven Deadly Finns/Further On" (Island Records, 1974) ---. "The Lion Sleeps Tonight (Wimoweh)/I'll Come Running (To Tie Your Shoes)" ---. My Squelchy Life (Opal, 1991) ---. Another Day On Earth  (Hannibal, 2005) Brian Eno and John Cale, Wrong Way Up  (Opal 1990) Doug Hilsinger With Caroleen Beatty,  Brian Eno's Taking Tiger Mountain By Strategy (A Modern              Revolutionary Peking Opera)  (DBK Works, 2004) I started this blog back in 2020 during COVID when it seemed like all of the media we would eventually consume would have no physical counterparts. For example, the last film I went to see in theaters before everything shut down was The Rise of Skywalker , a terrible film made worse by the fact I went to see it to honor my late brother Cory, who had entered the hospital just as the film was coming out and passed before he had a chance to see it. ...

  The Beach Boys, Wake the World: the Friend Sessions   The Beach Boys, I Can Hear Music: the 20/20 Sessions   1. I’m packing up my records. Yes I am. And I currently have an imposing tower of oversized CD and vinyl box sets sitting on my living room chair. I have three of these canon producing/affirming objects for the Beatles alone. Lest one think such things are only produced for the biggest of artists, I also have equally, if not more so, imposing boxes devoted to John Fahey, Lee Hazlewood and International Harvester. Physical media—as most media is now consumed streaming online—represents permanence by the very nature of the fact it takes up space in the world, and in my house specifically. These box sets are meant to represent the longevity of the music within, beyond your average used record or current repress. To have one of these things devoted to cataloging your work means that someone, somewhere was willing to invest enough money, time and materials to create ...

I've decided to start a new music blog dedicated to music only available digitally. The name is a nod to Laurie Anderson's spoken word piece "The Language of the Future" which has the following lyrics:  Always two things switching Current runs through bodies and then it doesn't It was a language of sounds, of noise, of switching, of signals It was the language of the rabbit, the caribou, the penguin, the beaver A language of the past Current runs through bodies and then it doesn't On again Off again Always two things switching One thing instantly replaces another It was the language of the Future [...] This is the language of the on-again off-again future And it is Digital   This blog is about music that may or may not exist in the future just by virtue of its medium: digital only. These releases can be downloaded,  streamed or YouTubed but these are releases for which there is no physical copy.

      A lifetime ago when I was in grad school pursuing a degree in German studies, I had a conversation with an older friend (I was in my late 20s and he was pushing 40…this was the late 90s) and we started talking about Sonic Youth. He responded by saying “I’m too old to listen to them” (he was a big Zappa fan and had his musical tastes shaped by the 1970s). I pointed out that the members of Sonic Youth were older than he was by this point, to which he responded “well, you know what I mean.” And, indeed, I did. For a good part of their existence, Sonic Youth was a band that seemed to both shape and embody a version of whatever was the avant-garde in American indie rock. The out sound of the already peripheral sound. While by indie rock I do mean “rock” music released on independent labels, by independent labels, however, I don’t just mean the catch-all phrase for whatever is not a “major” label (whatever that means today). Rather, I mean a certain aesthetic born in 1980...