Drowning in Digital Dross - The Introduction

Once upon a time, many years ago, I actually spent my hard-earned cash on the music I listened to. Since I had a tight budget, every CD I purchased had an opportunity cost. Act like a necrotroll by buying and listening to De Mysteriis dom Sathanas, or go out on a date? Dead Heart in a Dead World, or a tank of gas? And so it went.

My budget forced me in a roundabout fashion to cherish and really listen to the music that I had. As an example, a year after I bought my first black metal CD, I had accumulated a total of five to 10 black metal CDs. Not surprisingly, all the time spent with those albums, Pure Holocaust, De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas, and Nattens Madrigal for example, means that they are still some of my favorite black metal albums, unlikely to be dethroned. The tattered booklets and cracked cases added to the aura of obscurity and mystery that so befits black metal. I really listened to those albums. I’d read them cover to cover a few dozen times each, and I could recite the plots from memory.

Also, I still don’t like Dimmu Borgir very much, so at least I got that right back in the day.

Then I got broadband internet service. Russian mp3 download sites, Demonoid and Scrapetorrent radically changed my listening habits. The changeover from dial-up and dodgy Verizon wireless to cable was shocking; the first thing I did was start Enslaved, Marduk, Gorgoroth, and Satyricon discography torrents. The second was to send an email to a metalhead buddy, which verbatim said “I am downloading the internet”. Between those four bands, there were 29 albums I hadn’t heard yet. I couldn’t afford them.

And then came the rapidshare blogspots, which utterly destroyed my ability to focus on an album. Blogspots combined with huge capacity hard drives meant that I could horde music to a disturbing degree. There’s simply too much music for me handle. Bands sometimes get one listen and then an album is deleted. Totally unfair, I know, but that’s the way it is. In just a day, I turned into a little child, window shopping and shrieking with delight, grabbing every shiny bauble and piece of candy within reach. The damage to my ability to really comprehend an album is potentially irreparable, but there is hope, as I’ll explain later.

For our readers, my inability to focus for long on a record is both good and bad. If I’d written a review for Nattens Madrigal six years ago, it would’ve been 12 pages long, a reflection of how much I’d come to know it. These days, I have a hard and fast rule: when I agree to review an album for Invisible Oranges, I will not write a single word before I’ve listened to it at least 10 times. Yes, it seems an arbitrary, but in my experience, it’s enough for me to form an opinion that I’ll still agree with five years down the road.

There are exceptions though to my 10 listens rule, and that’s what really worries me. It took me at least a dozen listens to appreciate Prometheus: the Discipline of Fire and Demise, which is still my favorite album. Death’s Human took over 15 attempts before it clicked. I live in fear that I’ll listen to an album and form an opinion about it too hastily. I still don’t know if I like Ulcerate’s The Destroyers of All after 16 listens, nor do I know if I understand it. At what price is all this choice I have? I could miss the next Prometheus and never know it. I could also miss the next Prometheus because it was buried and forgotten in the enormous line of albums I intend too listen to . . . one of these days. Perhaps ignorance is bliss, but my fear of my ignorance’s consequences perpetually haunts me.

Reviewing for IO has forced me to start concentrating again, to really listen to an album. It’s the only way I can meet our standards for writing and reviewing. I can’t spend a year on an album, but I can’t flit from album to album, either.

Now that my listening habits are changing back, it’s time to see just how fat I’ve grown from gorging at the digital buffet. Every night that I can, I visit a series of blogspots and Demonoid, and download albums. I have a catalogue stretching years long that needs to be sorted for genius and garbage alike. As with any buffet, there are a few winners and a lot of losers.

Starting the week of this post, I’m going to catalogue every single album that I download, and I’m going to note whether or not I’ve listened to it. It will quantify something that we already know but do not fully comprehend, which is that a staggering amount of new music is released every month. It may help people decide which approach they want to take when listening to music: wide and shallow or narrow and deep.

As for me, it might finally break the habit of endlessly downloading things I don’t need. It might stop me from continuing to drown in digital dross. For the next six months, on or around the first of the month, I will post what I’ve downloaded and what I’ve listened to. I’m putting my personal life, professional life, and probably my sanity on the line to figure this out. Check back and see what happens.

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