Blog Tracks Vols. 1 & 2

 

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 2000s and how, generally, being a music fan on the internet really feels like the golden age compared to now. Most importantly, of course, is that the 2000s were the last decade in which streaming music wasn't a factor in music consumption. Again, people have written about this much better than I ever could, it seems almost quaint that the big bad villains of music consumption then were big corporations like Apple who seemed to own the music download and listening apparatus for a great number of people, the FBI who claimed to encode the CDs we purchased with anti-piracy technology and the artists and labels who sued music downloaders for enjoying and disseminating their music and product respectively. 

During that time a number of music blogs appeared which worked in some shadowy nether-region of the blogosphere (as we used to call it) who uploaded dubiously sourced Mp3s to the internet. Their files would be hosted by sites with names like like Fyreware and Maxxsharing and no one had any idea how long the files would remain available. So if you saw something that sounded interesting you snatched it as soon as you could. Some sites would offer entire LPs, others would offer a track or two. All of the sites I visited and downloaded from specialized in obscure or generally out of print music. I generally stayed away from blogs that would simply host popular albums or dubious Russian sites that would promise entire artist catalogues for $2.99. 

I'm attaching a link to a really interesting conversation I found while doing a little research on this mix: a roundtable conversation among the most prolific blogs of obscure music at that time which was conducted in 2012. I would highlight the concluding exchange between the author and Eric Lumbleau, one of the people who ran the excellent Mutant Sounds blog back in the day:  

"In the 21st century, do you think something exists if it doesn't exist somewhere on the internet? 

Eric Lumbleau: If something can be said to meaningfully exist if said existence occurs amid such endless proliferation that it's forgotten sooner than it's absorbed. A better question is whether the cultural relativity induced by having all musical histories on tap 24/7 renders the act of attempting to correct historical threads a fool's errand. Being inside this cyclotron of atomized information from my own vantage point produces a palpable sense of vertigo. A feeling that it could be anything in any order by anyone any time for any reason. Everything pointing in all directions but arriving at no destination. And its effect is a cancellation of affect. A feeling like Baudrillard's screen stage of blank fascination has reached its terminal phase and all previous depths are collapsing into an endless vista of dazzling surface play. In my case, it's caused me to recoil and retreat to engaging with music in the way that I did when I was in my early teens, which is to say with no concern at all for what else I might be missing at the same time or what else 'I need to know about' since there's no sense any longer of a beginning, end or causation in the spaces between, so I just tine into a select few things that I then revisit with depth and intensity and block out the rest of the hubbub." 

For the people who ran the music blogs in the early 2000s it wasn't just uploading music they liked for free, nor was it just making people aware of music that might have fallen through the cracks. It was a rewriting of music history with often methodically researched back histories of obscure bands that barely released anything more than a 7" or a cassette. To me, this was the best of what the internet could offer: the deep dive into something you might have never known, or heard or seen before presented to you by a person who now, because of the information superhighway of the internet, has all the information regarding the most obscure band researched by dozens before them at their preverbal fingertips. 

Now, most music streaming services can't be bothered to post the most basic correct information about artists and albums, with a grim possible future offering up anonymous A.I. bands trained on the very same ghost blogs and broken links posted by these music blogs so long ago.