Music

Two Music Thoughts for November:

1:

One of my favorite icebreakers to get someone infodumping at me is "How do you listen to music?"  To clarify what I mean, I'll give you the answer I'd give (full yap mode):

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

With the money from my first ever paycheck, I bought three things: a Sansa Clip Zip, a 32gb microSD card, and a pair of sony MDR-V6's. _{(author's recreation^[1])}

Before that, I was mainly using my 3DS or my PSP (which i also used to watched downloaded youtube videos i thought were cool on the bus..) Basically as long as I can remember I've had a local-listening orientation. My parents both had huge record and CD and cassette collections that I vaguely remember them digitizing back in california. That collection lived on my dad's various computers and was a source of really early listening. Eventually I bought my first CDs (The Gothic Archies' Tragic Treasury (so funny that I would not discover the Magnetic Fields for over a decade) and Green Day's American Idiot (which I should give a relisten some time, definitely did not continue listening past middle school)), which I promptly ripped to my PC to follow in the windows media player-using steps of my father.

Eventually I progressed from limewire and youtube rips to pony music compilations, keygen archives, and Actually Buying things on bandcamp. The Clip Zip was a big turning point for actually organizing all my stuff. Having a discrete device that was just for music listening made the act of putting a file on it feel more deliberate. Trying to conjure memories with it actually brings up a lot more than I was first expecting; Running back through a gate after leaving it on the plane back from a Seattle visit with my first girlfriend, showing Cody RD/RA up in the trees above the resevoir in Blanchard, listening to The Music Lovers when it came out on a cold sunny day by lake Coeur d'Alene, repeating Mom's 2 and 3 in the dark on the beach and Fun Fun Fun on walks to campus through the snow.

That was my main mode of music listening from 2013~2015, up until I got an android phone with a microSD slot and plopped in the one from the Sansa Clip Zip. I had that phone until 2022 (which actually feels insane and amazing now to write^[2].) Having a smartphone meant I was finally open to the world of apps. For local listening I mainly used VLC, but I also had access to not just the bandcamp app (which was and still is "fine"), but ~spotify~. I was on a friend's account for a while before getting my own. It was always the secondary way for me to listen, but it was good for more mainstream stuff and i did discover or deepen my love for some music on there. It's how I first found Jane Remover's frailty! But eventually Olivia and I couldn't stretch the student discount anymore and they just kept being a shitty company, so we closed our accounts in 2022 and switched to tidal, for fun. I could talk more about Olivia's musical life and how we've shared our accounts, but this is maybe already getting too rambly...

So anyway, 2022, we get back to the states from Berlin and I have to get a new phone and am a bit tired of VLC if I'm being honest, so I do a bunch of research and decide to try out the "BlackPlayer" application and wouldn't you know it, I actually like it quite a bit! So I pay the 5 bucks to get rid of the ads and give em a little walkin around money. It's got stats! It's a lot more customizable! It basically does everything I want. Pretty great! Until a fateful moment last week when it autoupdated to a version that completely and utterly broke it. Couldn't play a single song, couldn't read the file library, couldn't do anything.

I was pretty torn up. I had a lot of other stuff going on that made this such a straw-on-the-camel's-back situation, but dang if I wasn't distraught. I mentioned it in my check-in at work! Ridiculous. It did end up getting a patch a few days later and with some serious fiddling and careful backup management, I was able to restore almost all my stats and playlists (and autoupdates are turned off! and planning to backup the apk or something...) And it's interesting, I hadn't realized how important all that was to me until I had it taken away! It's made me realize that knowing a listen contributes to a counter that I can look back on makes me feel motivated to listen and listen deliberately.

And that brings me up the present! The answer to "How I listen to music" is that I have a ton of stuff loaded locally on a microSD in my phone that I listen to with the BlackPlayer EX app! I do a lot of music discovery by diving through links on bandcamp (a process which deserves a post all it's own), so I'll listen through that app when I'm in the mode (or haven't loaded something on my phone yet). I'll use tidal for trying out an album that isn't on bandcamp and for a few playlists olivia has (her xmas one is playing now ^{8^)}.) I grab stuff on soulseek sometimes too, but I keep those files in a holding chamber before they go on my phone because shit like "~180 unsorted "rare" devi mcallion tracks" can get a little.. overwhelming. I wish I had it set up for uploading because wouldn't that be such a perfect wrap up for this, but oh well, it's been a busy month!

2:

For the 2nd music thought, a story in 2 parts:
On the way back from my Palouse trip (just under a month ago), in a rush at the SEATAC airport, I loaded two albums onto my phone for offline full-focus plane listening.

2a_{:for a moment i saw myself as inexorably beautiful - smiling broadly}

Blackplayer has a "most played this month" thing it generates, and this is what it looks like: I am not the kind of person who usually listens to things back to back to back. I have the kind of neurodivergence where I crave novelty and can easily burn myself on a song if I hear it too many times. And yet, these numbers seem to suggest I've listened through this entire album more than 10 times in the last 25 days^[3]. This is insane behavior for me! but I'm also trying to let the soft animals inside my head do what they want, so I haven't been holding myself back from relistening when I have the impulse.

I think part of this is that I'm recognizing I love "sonic density". This is a phrase I've been using lately. It sounds so good to me when there is a lot of different stuff going on in a song, and it makes returning fun for me. Both of these albums are like this, but I'd also cite frailty and never falter hero girl as big examples of what I'm talking about.

There's also something going on here that I talked about in my 2k23 music reflection chost (which i'll hopefully port over here as it's one of ... 4 high-effort posts I ever made? and I was really looking forward to doing another one this year!) with the"smiling broadly" EP that's just me doing the timeline narrative with artists, but it honestly has been really cool watching hazel develop as an artist over the last two years and projecting some of those observations backward with what I've got to look at. I'm always toeing this line with parasociality, but I just love hearing how much this sound has cohered from As Much As I Forget to now. It's incredible! I can see the parallel with her video work of using this big swath of material and bringing it together in a really chaotic way that still has so much elegance. You can see "alucarda lives!" is my favorite track by how it's been played 20+ times, but it's just really a stunning song to hear come together. and that's true of the whole damn thing! She wasn't kidding when she said the self-titled ep was the b-sides. This is a perfect 30 minutes. It captures the feeling I often come away from a hazel video with: bracing hopeful optimism that holds its own in-built misery tender and close. It makes me love the messy parts of myself.

"Yeah I know how life goes on, I've been in the wrong time wrong place about a hundred thousand fucking times so I ask: What's one more?"

2b_{: Constant Companions - Jamie Paige}

Shoutout to cohost for laying an egg inside me that has just recently hatched into a full on vocaloid FIEND. I liked vocaloid a lot in high school, had World is Mine on my PSP, had over a hundred vocaloid osu! tracks, blah blah blah. But because of how album- and artist-centric my music listening has always been, the organizational hurdle of a ton of randoms songs stopped me from keeping up with it.

Enter, Machine Love.

Someone shared this on cohost and when I finally watched it, it sent chills through my entire body. I was completely blown away. All the feelings I'd felt about Hatsune Miku and her gaggle of robot friends came rushing back to me with the full force and weight of the years that had transpired in-between. It was a lot! I bought the bandcamp single (rare behavior for me) and was so hyped when this album was announced.

There's a lot here... I'd really recommend looking at Jamie's blog post series going through each song. Let's just say,, lesbianism, transition, inhuman and more-than-human feeling, plurality, and deep self-compassion. Really listening to it makes me feel kind of embarrassed or something, like, can you really just sing all this so clear and loud and simple? And at the same time, I can't listen to this stuff without dancing around as hard as I can and good feelings course through me. aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!!

I'm already running out of time for this post so I'll leave it at that, but give it a listen! And hey, here's a youtube playlist for vocaloid music I've been liking lately.

So anyway, on the ~3 hour night flight I got in my first two listens for both of these albums. I spent a good part of the later half absorbed in fiddling with what my phone is like disconnected, digging through what files I had locally, tweaking my BlackPlayer settings. It wasn't a full flight, so I was able to hop to an empty set of seats and get myself into a kind of sensory deprivation chamber. I had my P100 mask on tight and coat wrapped around me and my beanie down over my eyes and my 7506's on and was just completely immersed in the music intermingling with the roar of the air outside. I don't know if I have words yet for what that first run through of for a moment i felt inexorably beautiful was like coming at the end of my Palouse trip. Intense, maybe.

As the plane pulled out of the gate, I saw the moon for the first time since before it was new; the trip was held within that whole moment of newness. I didn't see it for the entire flight. We turned and spiralled over strange disorienting arrays of lights and all the while I couldn't see the moon. It felt like I was somewhere else, or like I didn't know where I was, but was more oriented in myself than I had been in a long time, maybe ever. Sapphire picked me up and drove me home, and I could see it from the car, and from the window of the bedroom.