ringing in the new… June

As of today there are 940 albums in my main MP3 library, and I don’t know how many that have been moved off to my “One Star Archive” because I’m not sure I need to listen to them anymore (taking them out of active rotation, not syncing them in the cloud or to my phone).

A while back I decided I would start listening through it methodically — sort of alpha by artist, but allowing myself to jump around within each letter until I decide to move on to the next. (With occasional exceptions for specific works I especially felt like listening to.)

On my drive Tuesday I got through the Rs. On the drive back Sunday, I started into the Ss but there are a lot of those, thanks to it being a particularly common letter for names — there are more Ss than Ts even counting all the “The”s — and especially with Skinny Puppy and… Starthief. 🙂 I’ve been interspersing my own albums between other S-names, mainly starting from my oldest and working forward.

On those older albums I certainly find some things I like, but mostly, I can tell I’ve moved on, developed something a bit different with the structure of the music. I knew that about Nereus (with its tendency toward MIDI-sequenced 0-Coast lines and similar) but it applies to the next few as well. I wish I could put my finger on what changed, but right now I’m listening to Materials, am much more into it, and I feel that shift had taken hold. It wasn’t the stronger emphasis on tactile performance controllers, because the 16n Faderbank was early 2019 and my run with the Lyra-8 was later that year. Hmm.