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For starters, this is the resurrection of a long-defunct piece of internet property left to gather dust somewhere deep in the woods off a lonely exit on an information super highway to nowhere. But to take our gaze off the rearview mirror and focus on the road ahead, it is a repurposing of this space with an eye toward talking about and sharing music.
I like music.
Granted, merely liking music does not necessarily qualify someone to write knowledgeably about it, and one more dude rambling on about it certainly doesn't fill any significant void out there. Plenty of people like music. Plenty of people do music criticism (or whatever you want to call it). But folks, music is a fucking firehose these days. On the supply side, the barriers to making it -- and especially sharing it -- are to some degree minimal (or comparatively minimal anyway). And on the demand side, man, it is all mostly right there at your finger tips. All of it.
All of it.
And that's a lot. That's a lot if your quest is, like mine, to find not only good music but challenging music as well. We're not lacking in either of those either. So in the end, one is faced with the task of finding and building trust in curators, curators who take that torrent of tunes and turn it into something more manageable.
So what, Putnam, you think you're one of those curators? Honestly, I don't know. Take a look to the right and see for yourself. If you're looking for examples of what I'm typically listening to, then the near-daily Musical interludes -- snippets of which you can find in our Instagram stories or full versions on our Twitter feed (or right here in the sidebar!) -- are right there for the taking.
That series of musical interludes started as a distraction, a coping mechanism in the early covid days. Then, it was a series with the aim of cobbling together music with some tenuous link to the feelings and realities of the times. On the one hand, that produced songs like "Panic" by Annie Hamilton, but on the other, something like, The Temptations' "I Can't Get Next to You." But that wasn't really sustainable long term, and the mission morphed into something broader, something akin to the "playlists" I build across any given year on Spotify. Those are less playlists than they are a home for the music that crosses my path in the course of a year. Often, but not always, it is new music. But occasionally it is something older that has popped onto or back onto my radar in some meaningful way.
And more or less, that is a microcosm for what I envision populating this space: part talk of music centered mainly on short form pieces (250 words or less) about new albums, EPs or singles that are worth a listen, part longer pieces (500 plus words) on past records that got me to where I am listening to the music that I listen to now and maybe throw in a dash of chatter about shows that come to town if the spirit moves me.
Philosophically, I don't see much appetite out there for super long write ups on new stuff (and definitely at a time when most folks are gravitating to podcasts over the written word). If you are trying to be efficient about how you listen, then you want a keyword here or there to provide some clue about what you might be getting yourself into. If you're like me, you scroll through the new releases on Friday over coffee looking not for favorites -- there will always be some -- but for some nugget of information that makes you want to take a flyer on an album. Give me any small signal, any excuse to listen. That's part of what I'm trying to do here.
So personally, although "-wave" is to music sub-genres what "-gate" is to political scandals, I'll usually fall prey to a -wave whether it is new or vapor or whatever. Nothing quite gets me on those Fridays like an album having the shoegaze moniker hung on it in a blurb. I'm almost as much of a sucker for that as am for cryptic social media messages from Autolux promising new material. [Yes, it is coming soon, but not as soon as you think. And for the record, Autolux only releases new albums in years when Republicans do well at the ballot box. True story. No, that isn't their intention.]
That isn't an exhaustive list of keywords that I look for; just examples. While I gravitate toward music that falls under the broad banner of indie rock, my tastes are more eclectic than that. I'm not above spending an afternoon on the beach listening to Americana/country/bluegrass in honor of Merlefest. I like my rap wonky and envelope pushing like Shabazz Palaces. I'm quick to spin McCoy Tyner's "African Village," but can and do gamble on jazz picks. And the pandemic has pushed me more and more toward ambient stuff. [I don't know that I'd call that new Tim Hecker score, The North Water, ambient, but I don't know that I wouldn't either. Regardless, it is a solid escape.]
Ultimately, what I'm looking for and what I'm likely to share in this space is, well, grant me an aside of sorts in closing.
Time-Life once, a long time ago, had a multi-part series on the history of rock 'n' roll. Boy did I eat that up. It was a nice but certainly not comprehensive chronological look at the evolution of rock music in the 20th century. David Bowie -- it's always Bowie! -- popped up periodically in interview segments from the episodes covering the 60s forward. But it was in the installment focusing on the in-studio production aesthetics of the 70s where he said something that both struck me and has stuck with me, serving as a kind of guiding light with respect to the sort of music I often find myself listening to, no, searching out. Talking about the introduction of synths to the music-making process Bowie said (and I'm paraphrasing here):
We (he and Brian Eno because this was during the recording of the Berlin trilogy) had these things and they could bring all these interesting sounds into what we were doing. But we found ourselves breaking the machines down and escaping the presets. We were more interested in the snaps and farts they could produce.And that's what this exercise is about to me: the snaps and farts in music. That is where the real fun is anyway. Those quirks that continuously push music forward. Here's to the snaps and farts!
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