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...