14 weeks 2 days Play-time
My taste in music vacillates. The underlying problem is that I like things that are catchy and dumb, and things that are catchy and not quite as dumb, but I get bored easily.
Music is one thing that’s really shined in this insane, ADD slurry of the Web two point whatever that we live in. As long as you already have a copy of the white album, it’s become vanishingly rare to want to hear any sort of music that isn’t available within a few dollars and a few minutes. 140 characters, one click, three levels of Frozen Bubble and you have all the smoothest tunes and hottest jams. I love it. I will go broke loving it if I’m not careful.
While getting bored this past weekend I decided to look around for some old avant-garde works, like that one where Alvin Lucier records and plays back and re-records a short explanation of theory and intent until the resonant frequencies of the room he’s sitting in completely engulf his speech in a weird, shimmering mass of sound. It’s kind of neat, and it’s not on Amazon. It is on Emusic, and I have some mixed opinions about that site. Emusic is subscription-based, and I just don’t see a place for that kind of a service in my life. The tracks themselves aren’t expensive, but they’re so inconvenient. A Columbia House subscription would be more flexible. With Emusic, you sign up at a monthly rate that comes with some monthly number of tracks, and that’s it. More tracks requires a pricier subscription, and unused tracks disappear into the æther like cell phone minutes. I want something that fosters impulse and exploration. To think that I could get myself to where I want exactly twenty-five tracks every month from the same place just seems crazy to me.
I signed up for a free trial, and after getting a handful of songs, I started looking through the incoherent notes I sometimes keep for ideas on how to spend the last dozen or so trial credits. One name I found scrawled down was Slaraffenland, a Danish group that gets labeled “experimental” even though that doesn’t mean anything. I remember hearing them on WRAS on the way home from work one day, and the song struck me as interesting enough that I stayed in the car, parked in front of my building and pretending to look for something under the seat so that the lady getting out of the minivan next to me didn’t think I was crazy, trying to find some unique phrase in the distant, muffled yet precisely harmonized lyrics that I could search for and save myself a call to the station or another fifteen minutes waiting for the DJ to read back the track list. It sounded like chamber pop, basically, but there was more to it than simply the “hey you guys, remember Pet Sounds?” message that this style’s current incarnation usually settles into. There were some weird rhythms and a noise wall shifting in and out of the background and I thought it was a pretty neat thing to listen to. I used my Emusic credits to get Slaraffenland’s latest album, released this past September, and then I found out that you can download the album from the band themselves on a system like Radiohead’s idea to pay what you want or not at all, or, more specifically, like the system used for the last Girl Talk album, where a threshold pittance gets you lossless FLACs.
I cancelled my Emusic trial subscription tonight and sent $5 to some people in Denmark. I like music; I don’t understand why I would want to subscribe to music.