Tuesday 29 November 2011

The Purpose Of This Blog

What is this blog? Why is it here? What does it do? On one level, I cannot answer these questions. They throw me into an existential quandry, a fundamental contemplation of whether the word "Why" exists at all.

On another, more prosaic level, I started this blog for three main reasons:

1. Like most of the people who read music blogs, I listen to a lot of music. Too much, it sometimes seems. Albums go by in a blur, dozens of them added and deleted from Spotify every week. I need some way of remembering all this music, even if it is only initial impressions for future reference. I've found writing down impressions is the best way of doing that. So this blog, at its most simple, is just a log of the music I've listened to.

2. I often happen across great albums and think "Wow, this is a really great album. Why didn't I hear of this before now?" Like many people, I will search for reviews or opinions on music I've already heard. And increasingly I've found that nobody has been writing about these great records. So I thought I'd do it myself. It's getting to the point now where there's such an oppressive ambient pressure of music-music-music at all times that many people just won't check out an album if it doesn't come with some kind of recommendation, because there just isn't time to give everything a chance.

3. Most real music journalists are, frankly, shit. Too diplomatic, too burned out, too forcefully eclectic. Pretending to be objective and impartial and professional when you're an unpaid web hack is no way to be. I'm fed up of reading reviews of middling ambient techno records that feel obliged to use phrases like "Unfamiliarly alien and unsettlingly absorbing". I'm also fed up of blatantly disingenuous promo copy and of reading people who clearly don't dance and who don't DJ writing about "Detroit and Chicago". Most of these problems are unavoidable side-effects of being a music journalist. That's why I'm not.

A couple of notes: No, I'm not posting Youtube embeds or download links. Many of the people who come here will be looking for written opinions on things they've already heard, and I've got no interest in crashing your browser or giving away someone else's art for free.

There isn't much of a standard format to my posts, they're just ramblings. However, I will try and end every one with the genre of the record in question and a stupid arbitrary score. This is partly so I can quickly remember the background of a record and roughly how much I liked it, and partly because I know we all love genres and absurd numerical estimations of artistic expressions.

You may be wondering why, if I'm not a music journalist, I still label my blather as "reviews". The simple answer to this is SEO. I want people to read my blather, and sadly nobody types "Echospace Coldest Season unobjective unprofessional impression" into Google. They type "Echospace Coldest Season review".

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