Without You I’m Nothing.

As is customary, as well as habit, during dry spells between employment engagements, portions of The Concrete Standard are tossed overboard as ballast in order to keep the lifestyle that Your Humble Narrator has grown accustomed to at Monkworks afloat. For years, my record collection has served a dual purpose as a semi-obsessional focus of interest to stave off post-postmodern schizophrenia, and a nest egg of potential incremental revenue, chunks of which can be broken off and auctioned for liquid capital as needed. In the past, the process of determining the selection of the collection to cull and take to trade has been dependent mostly on the level of attachment I felt towards a certain recording. If the sentiment was of a low enough level, the item could be safely removed and sold, leaving an acceptable remainder behind to satiate my self-imposed bragging rights and library status.

The last time I did something like that was only a few years ago. I just completed the most recent cull, and just in that length of time, my intent has changed dramatically. My intention is no longer to retain an acceptable number of items in The Concrete Standard; my goal now is to deplete it as much as practically possible and bring it as close to zero mass as physical limits allow.

As mildly shocking this decision is to my system, both physically and especially emotionally, there is a concrete justification for it: I’m simply not a part of this world any more; this world of music collecting. Obviously, it’s not because I don’t love music, but rather than the act of record hunting and hoarding no longer gives me the joy or the thrill or the satisfaction it once did.

At Alma Mater, thanks to being surrounded by music all day, collecting grew from a hobby into a lifestyle, and then, because eventually you heard about everyone else’s collection and what they had in it, a competition to build, if not the biggest, but the most diverse, the richest, the most eclectic collection in comparison to your co-workers. My associate Bil, who became a kind of music mentor to me, once stated in his ‘zine that:

“Record buying is not a frivolous luxury, it’s a way of life! These records will keep you sane; don’t get them at your own risk!”

What I fear now is as The Concrete Standard slowly atrophies, making way for the imminent dominance of La Norme Concrète, whither my own sanity, my own mental health, my own emotional integrity? My hope is that the nigh-obsession I fostered for years over the size and shape and content of The Concrete Standard won’t turn into an appendage with nothing to grasp onto; that without something like the security the sheer mass that The Concrete Standard provided, my resulting drive and impetus and passion just firehoses out of an empty end into a vacuum, leaving me an empty shell.

At the shop to-day, patiently waiting for the drone behind the counter to finish tallying up the takes and passes, I busied myself in the vinyl section, browsing through the jazz and reggae and twelve-inch vinyl. Unlike compact discs, which are safely ensconced in their plastic sarcophagi, vinyl records are more often than not housed in cardboard dust jackets, which, ironically, gather all manner of dust and dirt and grime and adhesive residue and pulverized insects and dead skin cells and mold and mildew and just a general layer of yuck as they sit and age. If you’ve ever gone rooting around in the cardboard boxes stored in every American attic, garage, and crawl space, you know the scent this combination of controlled decay can give off; and if you’ve spent any amount of time flipping through stacks in search of something in particular, or perhaps nothing in particular, it can be a kind of ambrosia, a bouquet, a nose.

For the first time, I got the first tiny inklings of that smell starting to affect me in a less that positive manner. It was by no means offensive, but it also had a noticeably diminished effect on my own zeal. That’s when I first thought that I was starting to separate from this microcosm of music nerds, of casual obsession, of post-postmodern hunting and gathering.

This world will carry on, in one way or another, without the presence of a single membership, like mine. The question is, what do I do to fill in the void?

⎋

Vinyl Flunky.

Matching up the contents of La Norme Concrète with the real-world copies of The Concrete Standard is the easy part. The advantage to maintaining a record collection that only exists virtually is that the sentimental factor is greatly reduced in some instances, because one of the greatest dealbreakers when it comes to deciding whether to hang on to something (in addition to the psychic imprint it leaves on the mind and the memory bookmark it inserts into the brain) is, ironically, the packaging, which is often some of the more fleeting and superficial elements of any material object.

Example #1: I still have the box that Jones, my old iPod, came in. It serves no further purpose, because Jones has moved on to better things, but it still sits on my shelf because of the moment in time it’s attached to in my memory; plus the iconic silhouette graphics are still pretty stirring. On the other hand, five fingers: it’s just a cardboard matryoshka that also exists on thousands of other peoples’ shelves (plus landfills and recycling centers) and has been featured in countless of unboxing photoessays on any number of tech-fetish blogs. I’m only a casual design groupie, so there’s no point in hanging on to packaging, no matter how distinctive, that’s already been documented in other, more anal archives. The only practical reason to keep the box that anything comes in is for future transport, and the only other box that I still have that fits that criteria, and gets semi-regular use, is Proteus’ original packaging.

Example #2: At Alma Mater my associates and I were regularly showered with promotional copies of newly-released or soon-to-be-released records. (“Showered” is perhaps an overly optimistic descriptor; more often than not, “begging for” was the operative term) Most of these “promos” came in the requisite jewel cases; identical, plastic, and utterly soul-sucking, but some of the records from specialty labels were a little fancier, most notably the late 90s re-releases from Impulse Records that attempted to recreate the distinctive style of the original vinyl pressings. These often featured gatefold artwork, expanded liner notes, and a paperstock composition that mimicked the feel of an old record jacket. Having items like these in The Concrete Standard made me want to listen to more jazz.

On the other hand, five fingers: as pretty as the packaging is, it’s still just a surface detail; especially if the old adage that says the music is the only thing that really matters turns out to be true.

Dealing with packaging and its influence on minimizing however, takes on a whole new set of issues when coupled with something that is hopelessly obsolete and fatally nostalgic, but at the same time infinitely collectable and an organic foil against the digital artifacts of our post-postmodern world: vinyl.

Saddled with the Generation X stigma, I naturally grew up in a world where the audio hierarchy was dominated by the compact cassette, followed closely behind by an already-fading vinyl culture. When the compact disc premiered in 1982, I was presented with a choice of paths; embrace the burgeoning technology or cling to the already-perceived-as-obsolete format. A combination of personal economics and throwback nostalgia pushed me towards the vinyl end, even going so far as to start scrawling “SAVE THE LP” on any available flat surface with a Sharpie. And since every radio station in the country, including the ones run by my high school and community college, still employed massive vinyl libraries to provide their playlists, it was a given that anywhere I went to host a program was guaranteed to have at least two working turntables, allowing me to pick and choose from my own collection and customize the shows I hosted.

In this sense, so-called “obsolete” technology was actually an advantage, because the playback gear had already been grandfathered into the structure, while new technology like CD players either weren’t the rage or hadn’t been installed yet. As far as the current situation is concerned, I no longer have a turntable, I don’t currently host a radio show, and I don’t have the skills to be a DJ. Still, the vinyl contingent of The Concrete Standard is proving to be the most tenacious faction of the three primary formats to rid myself of. For whatever strange reason, the smaller, slicker, more futuristic compact disc seems to have less value than the bulky, fragile, and fusty phonograph record; similar, but not the same as the heightened value the incorporeal mp3 file has over it’s digital hard copy brethren.

Maybe it’s because vinyl is slightly more difficult to replicate digitally that it has more staying power. Or, like everything else, it reminds us of where our collections started, as well as the potential breadth of our collections. In a post-postmodern world that is rapidly duplicating everything from more fragile formats to digital archives, very little is being left behind, but for efficiency’s sake, the most relevant and popular items are being processed first. That leaves several hundred thousand worlds that are still hiding in record shop understock, used bookstore warehouses, and countless other backrooms.

The past has always been the future before the future was new.

Related: Negativland’s “Shiny, Aluminum, Plastic and Digital” essay.

⎋

Cassette Culture Is Crap Culture.

If Your Humble Narrator’s physical record collection is called “The Concrete Standard,” and the filesystem of digital copies is “La Norme Concrète,” then what, pray tell, should the parallel collection of compact cassette tapes be dubbed? The very nature of the previous two titles are indicative of the quasi-permanency of each respective format; compact discs and vinyl albums exist in a concrete, hard-copy form, and music files, while not exactly corporeal, still take up space on a hard drive. Cassettes, on the other hand, are inherently temporary; their very structure betrays flimsiness, fragility, and vulnerabilities to the elements.

How did we ever get so latched onto such a crap format?

The past day and night have been spent elbows-deep in The Concrete Standard’s magnetic evil twin, the Ferrous Oxide Pit Of Despair, or whatever it eventually gets called. The label is a moot point, as these latest action have started a campaign to relegate most of the contents of these shelf-saggers to the local landfill, sooner or later. It’s been a decision a long time coming, and not one without a certain amount of heartache and sentimentality attached to it, but the bottom line is that as much influence these little shells of plastic and papers had on my formative years, they are also keeping me from moving on in a certain sense.

Ironically, getting rid of the Magnetic Black Hole is more problematic than excising items from The Concrete Standard. While compact discs and vinyl are like master tapes, (pardon the mixed metaphors) cassettes are just copies, and their contents are not always readily reproducible if a tape gets eaten or melted or unstrung. The worst and most problematic example at Monkworks is the 500+ airchecks from the Negativland and SubGenius radio shows that air at inconvenient hours of the night here in California. Not only are a majority of these programs unavailable in any other format, (aside from certain niche fans who make them available online) but the sheer volume precludes any possibility of cataloging and organizing them by content, let alone listening to any of them ever again. Currently, there is a selection of shows that have been converted to mp3s, and another selection that have been hacked up and re-edited into “best-of” mixes, (ironically, dubbed onto more cassettes) but for the most part, this is an archive of absurdity that belongs in a museum, never to be touched or heard from again.

And I don’t want to live in a museum.

To-day I removed at least a hundred extraneous cassettes from the premises; mostly just junk mixes made from bits and pieces of disparate records, straight-from-CD DJ jams, and one-off bootlegs that benefited from onesy-and-twosey listens. Even with such a sizable chunk gone, there still remains an unmanageable amount of items in the Type II Library Of Doom, but at least other minimizing projects have cleared out sufficient closet space to hide some of them away, if only to pretend that they don’t exist for a little while longer.

Of course, I’m never going to get rid of them all, even with my best efforts at minimization and consolidation. There are some things that are too far embedded in my psyche to extricate easily, even when I know that I’ve safely and successfully duplicated and saved them. I’ll hang on to my crumbling collection of WDGC airchecks, now over twenty years old, until they finally snap and disintegrate. Some of my early theme mixes and ad hoc mixes from raiding the various radio stations I’ve done time at will stay for as long as there’s a possibility of an extended road trip in the future with a friendly passenger I want to impress/freak out. And more than one Norelco case with cleverly-cut J-card art will have a spot saved, even if it’s empty.

Old tapeworms die hard.

⎋

As The Tapeworm Turns.

“This tape collection gets bigger every minute. I find it very hard to fit music to the mood, and there’s nothing worse than to make the wrong choice; except to sort right through and find nothing suitable. But then I find just the right thing…”

It’s a forgone conclusion that Your Humble Narrator will most likely never make another mixtape.

That is, an actual mix tape, a tape that contains a mix, a blank cassette overwritten with a pastiche of audio input, a collection of magnetic copies placed in an aurally aesthetically pleasing order. There was a relatively brief period in my life where the central activity of my waking hours (and those hours were not always banker’s hours) was devoted to gathering, arranging, compiling, timing, and recording one mixtape after another.

Readers of Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity (or viewers of the passable film adaptation) are well aware that a well-crafted mixtape can be more than the sum of its parts; it can serve as a love letter, a fuck-you letter, a sympathy card, a guessing game, a one-up competition, and of course, a running soundtrack for one’s everyday life. In the right hands, disparate music sources can come together and coalesce into a new art form completely original every time on the compositional level.

Similar to yesterday’s cache of paper journals, there is a small accumulation of mixtape “ledgers” in the Monkworks archives. Initially used to simply record tracklistings for later transcribing to a J-card insert, this paper trail quickly became a living timeline of what went down on which tape and when. This not only served as a rudimentary fact-checking system (to reduce duplicating the same song on different mixtapes to the same person) but also demonstrated the evolution of mix styles and the influence that the rotating contents of a record collection can have on mixes.

Example: one of the earliest mixes lists songs by Heaven 17, Candy Dulfer, Civ, Xymox, and Fatima Mansions; bands whose albums or singles no longer exist in the Concrete Standard. I can also glean that the Heaven 17 song (“Contenders”) came from a seven-inch vinyl single, the Xymox song (“Love Thy Neighbor”) is a B-side from the “Phoenix Of My Heart” twelve-inch single, and the Fatima Mansions song (“Only Losers Take The Bus”) was taken from the soundtrack to a movie called Post Cards From America. None of these records survived subsequent changes in taste or sell-offs. Comparatively, one of the last mixes to be documented about five years later (I also got into the slightly OCD habit of dating mixes) has tracks from Bis, DJ Sasha, Cibo Matto, Oasis, and Squarepusher. These records still exist, partially or in whole; the difference being that they’re now in digital form.

Another discovery were some rudimentary lists of songs chosen for Earth Noise, the proto-freeform radio show I produced and hosted about a hundred thousand years ago; as well as ad hoc listings for “on the go” tapes I created specifically for the move from Illinois to California. With the yoke of the technology at the time limiting what and where I could listen to items from the embryonic Concrete Standard, copying songs onto cassettes was not just the most viable and flexible option, but also the format I had been indoctrinated with from my formative years. This is not to say that I don’t love the warm analog depth of vinyl, or the tight digital replication of compact discs, or even the weightless bodilessness of mp3 files; it’s just that I was brought up on cassettes, they’re what I know and what I’m used to, I grew a skillset of manipulating them.

All this history with cassettes makes it very difficult to let them go and move on. There are still hundreds of tapes moldering in Monkworks’ limited on-site storage space, some haven’t been touched in years, and due to my queer appreciation of popular and corporate design, lot of them are even still blank. I’ve started to give some of the “premiere” mixes away as gifts, sight unseen, but still going to be a while before the place is ferrous-oxide free. Case in point: even my vernacular is affected by this obsolete technology; I still call any handmade compilation a “mixtape,” even it it’s burned to a CD or saved as a playlist. Not only does “mix CD” just not sound right, creating a digital mix simply lacks the hallmarks of dubbing a old-school cassette; previewing the outtro and intro of segueing songs, finding a song just long or short enough to fill in the few seconds of dead space at the end of a side, the ever-present spectre of the tape-eating cassette deck, etc.

Like books, cassettes don’t suffer from DRM, you can stuff them in your pocket or toss them in your bag with negligible side effects, and they provide a modicum of harmless nostalgia. But they still take up space, they can amount to a library of possessions, and they follow you wherever you go over the years. Weight appears to be the price we pay for retaining bits of our personal history.

⎋

Record Scratchin’ Can Lead To Head Bashin’.

Inside CD Alley, a new and used record store in downtown Wilmington, North Carolina.

It’s literally a hole in the wall; if you walk too quickly along Market Street by the Cape Fear waterfront, you can breeze right past it.

Inside, it becomes gradually but obviously apparent that the building space was not originally a record store. Open doorways are shuttered by mildewy curtains, an annexed room in the rear of the shop opens into starkly contrasting flooring, and everywhere are fixtures left over from whatever proprietor evacuated previously. A jerry-rigged speaker system plays a piece of lo-fi no-wave from the right-hand side of the store, while a creaky spoken-word monologue drones out of the other. The walls are papered with promotional posters, postcards, and hand-lettered signs; which is all garnished with graffiti from patrons, smart-ass commentary from floor staff, and missing corners. The single available bench is repaired with a tactfully-placed portion of duct tape. The t-shirts only come in black. Everything is covered with a thin molecular layer of invisible but tactile dirt.

It’s everything a proper record shop should be.

Thanks to peer-to-peer file sharing networks, a retroactive interest in niche musical subgenres, and a general glut of Other Shit to do; Your Humble Narrator hasn’t bought an honest-to-Dog piece of physical media since the final fire sale at Alma Mater. Which is not to say that I’ve been deprived of a world of music, just that the little part I occupy is a mite isolated. I know who T-Pain and Fall Out Boy and Lady Gaga are, I just choose to listen to Dolly Mixture and U-Roy and People Like Us instead.

It was once that radio was truly the voice of a young America, or at least the guiding star for young Americans, an aural road map to show the way to the Cool, the Hip, the Current; all the states of belonging that we crave as impressionable clay figures. Radio tells us what’s Number One, radio tells us what’s going to be Number One next, radio is our GPS through the jungle of Pop/Rock/Soul.

But what now? Now where do we go? What Ranger do we follow?

⎋

Ignition Keys For Tiny Time Machines.

A mix tape without a playlist is a series of pleasurable mysteries, but a playlist that lacks an accompanying soundtrack cannot support itself for long.

It’s a long drive up Montebello Road, up to the summit where midnight is kept at bay by the perpetual sodium glow of the sprawl below; made longer by the ribbon candy logic of Montebello Road itself, replete with hairpins, dropoffs, and blind single lanes. But you still risk the climb, you still say yes to a hazardous excess, you weigh the potential return against your initial investment, and in the end you pack a lunch for two.

Not that there’ll be any time to eat. Or that anything will come of it. Return trips are always different from the fumbling first dates.

For years your museum enjoyed infusions of randomosity, contributions from the fringes of cultures popular and unpopular, bits and pieces from collections far and farther; and later or sooner they all smuggled elements into your aural telegrams, your mixed greeting cards, your magnetic hula dances. New wave kissed avant-garde, new jack swing swung with fusion, modern film scores made time with IDM, faux-jazz brushed up against folk rock, alt.country bought post-punk a beer, etc.

It was a time of new horizons in music appreciation.

It’s a long drive from San Jose to Seattle, threading the Gordian knot of Bay Area freeways, braving the ennui afforded by Highways 5′s length, and girding yourself for the near-instantaneous transition from spring to winter as you crest the Sierras. But you finalized your final exit, you tied up all your loose strings, you took only what you needed plus a little back of what was deserved you. Second only to cutting across all lanes of Pacific Northwest traffic to reach a fleeting exit, the most dangerous element on a road trip of such magnitude is an accompanying popcorn necklace of incongruous, disparate, and inappropriate selections from a library built upon a cooler head and more porous nerves, no matter how telling the message is.

But, as acrimony softens into amicability, so do middle fingers mature into peace signs.

This documentation is inexorably linked to the chemical nostalgia that is inexorably linked to the magnetic record of that one day, that one moment, that one mile, that one sunset, that one night stand. The day she left, the moment he kissed you, the last mile before the city limits, the last sunset before school, the one night punctuated with honey sweat and threatening eyes.

Memory is chemical. Existence is magnetic. Love is write-protected.

Life is Memorex.

⎋