Well, I didn’t think it was ever going to happen, but it did. I ran out of space. After reshuffling and realigning my collection over and over again, every spot is filled up. I’ve reached 45 meters plus. There are plenty of options, but at the end I decided to go for the radical one: Continue Reading →
A Christmas album. Of all the CDs and LPs I have, the grand total certainly having passed the 5000 items mark, it just had to be a Christmas album that has stayed at #1 of my all-time best list, ever since it came out. You have to read this properly, so you get the importance of that statement. I have close to 44 meters of neatly arranged music, I have downright eclectic taste, I’ve been known to switch my listening habits on a whim, radically, and everyone who’s ever been to my place knows how freakishly broad the musical range they’ll be subjected to can be. “It’s Snowing on My Piano” is still in the top spot. After 8 years of its existence.
A Christmas album of all things.
Embarrassing, really.
And, it gets worse. Continue Reading →
I don’t know if I am special in this respect, but these past 10 to 20 years my collecting habits have taken on a cyclical pattern. This basically means that a specific collecting (and listening) streak reaches its saturation point and is replaced by a new one, in my case often by one that diverges sharply from the previous one. Continue Reading →
Years ago we had a runaway bestseller over here in Germany trashing “Nieten in Nadelstreifen“, which translates best as “Losers in Pinstripe Suits“. It was a real hoot and basically gave a detailed account of really bad business decisions instigated by seemingly incapable managers and outlined the full breadth of stupidity rampant in the upper echelons of German companies. Needless to say, nothing has changed since then, the German economy is down the drain, and we are chugging along as if nothing happened.
Enter IKEA, that leaping cheapo and cuddly family-oriented Swedish furniture emporium that likes to pride itself on customer relations which, if my experience is any indication, are simply non-existant. No matter, you think, after all I can get storage systems that cost less than the cardboard they are packaged in and, with a bit of experience, even the most untalented person can get them set up in no time. Who cares about (over here) their outsourced shipping and delivery which is usually so unbelievably inefficient that it hurts. You can’t take a day off? Then don’t buy from us! Who cares about the fact that quality control – at least in my eyes – has dropped significantly these past years. Just don’t think about it. If your order does arrive, and if it does actually contain what you ordered and if, last but not least, what’s inside hasn’t been shredded to bits, it was, err, cheap. We can take all the abuse, the stupid ordering system that let’s you know things are in stock when they aren’t, the friendly ladies that don’t answer the phone until you’ve heard each and every badly-recorded pop song of the last millennium (at full volume), and everything else that can cause a premature exitus. Continue Reading →
I’m beginning to sound like our parents. Mine never really complained about what I was listening to, but it was often apparent that – despite being open-minded about everything I tormented their ears with – they thought I had gone off my rocker when I was blasting Led Zeppelin, Judas Priest, Emerson, Lake & Palmer and other (to their ears) loud and obnoxious music out the speakers (at full volume, naturally).
Because of my upbringing in a family that listened to the broadest musical range possible, I was always willing to give just about everything a chance, and I’ve followed many a fad and have heard the oddest music available at any given time, but these last years, if not this last decade and longer, I noticed that I have basically gotten sick and tired of about 99% of the music being published. You just have to have a look at my collection that seems caught in a time warp, in permanent lock-down, to actually see the effect.
I can’t really pin-point the time when I basically stopped buying new music or keeping new music I had bought, or the day I basically threw my radio out the window, shut the various music video channels down permamently and stopped reading the more widely-circulated music mags, but it did happen, and it happened for a reason. Continue Reading →
Although I’ve ripped a large part of my collection to various internal and external drives, mostly for backup reasons, I don’t listen to it much on my PC. Considering the time I spent tagging the mp3, mpc and flac files and organizing my wave and CD image backups, I think I’m wasting too much of my life away on this PC and digital stuff. The music is just sitting there, staring at me from a trillion folders, neatly tucked away, begging to be heard.
What I do instead is listen to Internet radio. Sounds stupid in light of the money invested into a pretty huge collection, but the reason is really very simple. I can never get enough of the stuff and I’m constantly on the lookout for new and old music I might like, recommendations, and discussions about obscure releases that I then try to uncover.
On top of that, I’m always on the lookout for soul mates who just seem to be on my wavelength when it comes to music, and this is where “Afterglow” comes in. It’s not so much that I’m fed new stuff constantly, but this radio programme is at the very top of my list simply because without fail, it showcases some of my favorite music and sprinkles the various playlists with music that I hadn’t heard before and which is then automatically picked up by my radar as it is flanked by music I already know and like. Continue Reading →
[Disclaimer: If you are easily offended by (mild) graphic violence, tasteless details and a load of swear words, please abstain.]
The other week I wrote the first part of my “Guilty Pleasures” series (more coming soon) and while surfing the Net around that time I also came across a site that showcased a number of comic strips which altogether seemed to add a visual and textual twist to what I had in the back of my mind (but often didn’t say outright).
“BANDS I USETA LIKE” by “Matty Boy” Anderson might already be familiar to many of you, especially if you are a reader of “Stomp & Stammer” magazine, which I’ve never even heard of, but the strips were completely new to me, and after having spattered my screen with coke and other beverages while in fits of laughter, I thought I’d briefly feature the site here. Continue Reading →
It has become far too rare a thing nowadays to be able to study three outstanding, highly-trained and eminently soulful musicians practicing their craft in front of an appreciative (but small) live audience. I treasure these moments, of which I had many these past twenty-five or thirty years, and tonight I was given the opportunity to add a special highlight to these experiences.
I have written about the Tord Gustavsen Trio several times before, although only a shorter piece survived the many reincarnations of this site, but today – and I warned the other musicians of the trio before posting this – I’m not going to write about the wonderful concert experience as a whole, but about Jarle Vespestad. It seemed like the other two didn’t mind. Continue Reading →
