Musical milestone ponderings
----------------------------

Tomasino wrote a really nice phlog entry[1] describing how major
milestones in his life tend to induce shifts in the musical genres he
appreciates.  I can't say a similar things happens for me, but his
post has prompted me to write up some music-related stuff that I've
been meaning to phlog about for a long, long time.

Ignoring an early childhood stage where my musical tastes were
influenced primarily by the music that was available in my house by
virtue of my parents having bought the physical media (and I'm
dismissing this period of my life for the sake of this post, but
that's perhaps not fair because even if nothing else has really stuck,
I still really, really love Hawkwind thanks to my Dad), my life,
musically, has consisted pretty much of two distinct phases.

From highschool until around the time I turned thirty, I was a
metalhead.  Mostly, but not exclusively, power metal.  During most of
this period I dressed predominantly in black, wore a lot of band
tshirts, went to concerts when I could (which was mostly during the
time I lived in the US, because nobody comes to Australia, and when
they do they don't come to Adelaide), and was generally fairly into
it.  I had *very* narrow taste, but wasn't bothered by that at all,
and it took a *long* time for me to start showing signs of getting
bored of it.  But I inevitably did.  Slowly and in fits and starts I
have shifted into mostly listening to electronic music - again, with
very narrow tastes within that genre, skewed heavily toward vintage,
seemingly only able to tolerate modern electronic music in its very
chilled out, ambient, down tempo forms..  I think I'm already getting
tired of it and honestly I've felt like I'm in a bit of a musical rut
for a while now.  I'm ready for something really new, but I just don't
know what.  Feel free to hit me up with random suggestions.

But what I want to talk about is how very different the ways I
appreciated power metal and chilled out electronic music are.  I'm not
sure how much of the difference to ascribe to fundamental differences
in the music itself, how much to the means with which I've listened to
them, and how much to, well, just me.

During my metal phase, the primary means by which music got into my
life was via albums on CD.  I bought them one at a time, accumulating
my collection in discrete chunks.  When I got a new album, I listened
to just that album, over and over again, for a little while at least.
As a result of this approach, I felt like I really *knew* my music
library.  I generally had at least a rough idea of which album any
particular song came from, and I knew at least roughly where that
album stood, chronologically, in relation to the bands other albums.
I was able to track changes in bands' sound over time.

In stark contrast, the primary vehicle for getting electronic music
into my life has been internet streaming radio.  SomaFM's Groove Salad
was the initial hook, with aNONradio eventually helping to cement
things.  As such, I haven't assimilated this music in individual
chunks of related tracks, consciously chosen from other candidate
chunks.  The entire genre is just a thing that I turn on when I want
it, and there it is.  Streaming, undifferentiated, like water from a
tap.  When talented DJs like cev (check out his excellent Movement
Through Thought show on aNONradio, Fridays at 0600 UTC) mix a set
together the transitions between tracks are *seamless*.  I'm not even
consciously aware that what I'm listening to *has* discrete units like
tracks.  I've listened to Groove Salad for many years now, and their
playlist is *not* large.  It's rare for me to hear something on there
that I don't remember having heard before.  And yet, if you asked me
to name three artists or three track titles from the entire station, I
couldn't do it to save my life.  No matter how much I enjoy the music,
I don't really feel like I can identify as a serious fan when I have
essentially no context for any of it.

I think I'm ready to have the first kind of relationship to a musical
genre again.  I *could* try to get back into metal again - I have no
doubt that I've missed a lot of good new stuff by old favourite
artists in recent years - but, well, it's hard to get excited about
that because it's not new.  And I *could* try to *actually* get into
my electronic music "properly".  But, at the risk of upsetting some
folk, I do actually think that even if I stopped streaming and started
listening in an album-oriented fashion, I'd struggle with this because
at some level, well, it kind of *does* all sound more or less the
same, doesn't it?

[1] gopher://gopher.black:70/1/phlog/20190816-music-as-milestone