Yes, it’s come to that. I’ve finally admitted to myself that perhaps I should cull some of my digital music library, as it’s become unwieldy. As I’d recently mentioned to my friends on our Discord channel: I might keep the backups on the secondary external (which itself is getting a bit full), but I can definitely see where I have some tracks and albums that I haven’t listened to in way too long. I most likely downloaded some of this stuff because I’m a completist that’s obsessed with full discographies. Or I may have acquired it out of curiosity and it just never resonated with me. Or I heard a track on KEXP or elsewhere and thought I’d give the rest of the album a try.
Part of this was my lingering worry that the music on our Plex server is nigh on impossible to navigate because I have so much on there. But more importantly, I’ve long been at the point where music has stopped resonating so closely with me because I haven’t allowed it to get close. If I’m not listening to it more than a few times by next Friday when the new releases come out, some of it falls by the wayside to be forgotten. And that’s been happening for the last couple of years.
Mind you, it’s weird getting rid of things you no longer listen to when your music library is 100% digital. It’s not as if you can bring them to the local record store for cash or store credit. You just simply…select and delete. Like I said — I’m not completely deleting it, I’m just taking it off my main music external, so I’m not wasting money or anything. Just that I need to give myself time to become attached to the things I like and what resonates with me.
This is most likely going to be a long term culling project that I’ll do in increments over a long stretch of time. And hopefully out of all of this, I’ll reacquire that love for music that’s been eluding me for far too long.
I did have part of a year-end review post in the making yesterday that I was going to post today, but about halfway through writing it my PC suddenly decided that it no longer wanted to read the externals, including my music library which I’d been using to reference said blog post.
Concerned but not overly so, I tried all sorts of things to get them readable again — as well as checking them against my laptop to make sure that it wasn’t the externals that got borked (they aren’t, and I AM VERY THANKFUL ABOUT THAT RIGHT NOW.). After completely wasting time that could have been used for a writing session, turned the PC off and hoped that letting it rest might help.
Aaaaand lo and behold, after restarting the PC after work today, I got a bluescreen.
As I said: well, shit.
I kept my old Lenovo PC for just this sort of thing, to be honest. [I like to joke that my family members are natural EMPs as our computer problems are rarely ever ‘oh you forgot to install this thingie’ and more ‘…good gravy, what the hell did you do to this?’ even though we hadn’t done a thing other than, y’know, use it as intended.] I just excavated it from Spare Oom closet, in hopes that it still works okay, considering it was behaving for the most part (it was just four years old and retired). We shall see where this leads.
[EDIT: Yay, it works! Boo, the USB hub I’d been using refuses to read anything! Yay, the externals work on their own! Boo, for some reason it won’t read the music library external and the film/tv external at the same time! And finally, shrug-emoji, now to wait for Lenovo to contact me about getting the new one fixed/replaced.]
In the meantime, I’d started thinking about what would happen if I had lost my music library. It is indeed ridiculously huge. But at the same time, I thought…well, this would be the end of an era, wouldn’t it? I’d be bummed, sure, but would it affect me as deeply as, say, losing my longhand writing forever? Hard to say, but maybe not? It got me thinking that maybe it’s time to pare it down and clean it up a bit. I’ve been contemplating having two versions of the collection: one that’s full and complete, and one that’s much smaller and for everyday use.
Something else to think about at the end of the year, at any rate.
The first Walk in Silence mixtape, made October 1988 at the start of my senior year, and the Sony CFS-300 boombox (aka the Jonzbox) it was made with.
Walk in Silence, the mixtape series I’d started in 1988, was not the first mix I’d created (that goes to an unnamed multi-cassette collection from late 1982, taping songs off the radio and MTV), nor is it the first of the thematic mixes (that would be the noisy Stentorian Music from May 1988), but it’s the first one I’d made specifically to fit the mood I’d found myself in at the time. It was sort of a sibling thematic mix to the Listen in Silence mix I’d made in August, which was essentially “my favorite college radio tunes of the moment”. Walk in Silence, named of course after the first line in Joy Division’s “Atmosphere”, was meant to be more about dealing with my darker side. I was still feeling the sting of nearly all my closest friends having escaped our small town for college and the bigger world out there, and I’d made this to deal with that.
College radio was indeed my oasis during my senior year, alongside those Sunday episodes of 120 Minutes. I was doing my damnedest to deal with the frustration of still being stuck in a small town. The sources of these mixtapes were equally from the records I’d bought from Main Street Music and Al Bum’s, vinyl borrowed from the local radio station I’d worked at, taped off WAMH 89.3 (Amherst College), or second-hand dubs of albums I’d borrowed from that same group of friends. I wanted to start making more of these mixtapes, now that I understood how to create a smooth mix, and more importantly, fit as many songs onto each side of a 90-minute tape with minimal leftover blank space.
I still remember opening up a new cassette from its wrapper and smelling that fresh slightly plastic scent. I was super careful with the boxes they came in and would buy empties whenever I found them. I treated these tapes just like I treated my purchased albums: I made sure they were wound correctly, had a readable label, and didn’t get worn out or erased. I rarely bought the fancy expensive hi-def brands — I usually stuck with the affordable and reliable Memorex dBS 90s — because I didn’t care so much about the quality as much as I just wanted the music itself as part of my growing library.
I cataloged these mixes in notebooks primarily so my friends could see what was on them if they wanted to borrow them. It’s only because of this that I was able to successfully recreate nearly 99% of my mixtape library digitally, missing maybe only four or five lost and unavailable songs total. I used the Walk in Silence theme off and on, and currently I make at least two of them a year alongside two Listen in Silence and end-of-year mixes.
I bring this up to personally thank Lou Ottens, who helped invent the compact cassette tape, who recently passed away at age 94. I used so many blank tapes over the years for so many things: mixtapes, recordings of jam sessions for jeb! and The Flying Bohemians, live shows, soundtracks for my novels, dubbed albums, and maybe even a few class lectures now and again. I completed then hard-to-find discographies of favorite bands. I will totally admit to spending food and lunch money on blank tapes. I’ve put scotch tape over those holes on the top to use actual albums nobody wanted as fresh blanks. I came across a blank or two recently while cleaning out and rearranging things here in Spare Oom. I have a storage box full of my mixtapes, a few I’d remade around 2000 but many of them still the originals.
And now I see that cassettes are making a comeback, believe it or not. Indie bands are selling them on Bandcamp. And Amoeba Records has a nifty little corner full of cassettes new and old.
Thanks, Lou. Your invention was a huge and important part of my life.
Walk In Silence 