Feature

Everybody Knows You're Not from Here

0 Hiram Lucke

I started reading Musicophilia when I found out about it sometime late last year and it quickly became a favorite place to stop and check out music on a regular basis, along with it's companion site Musicophilia Daily . After a comment I left on the daily site about a Zapp song led Ian and I to realize we both live in Portland, we got together to talk about the blogs, music, the internet, and life in our city. This interview originally appeared in two parts and is now here in all its long and rambling glory.

A little bit about the blog (from Ian): Musicophilia is a music blog with a growing catalog of over forty carefully-crafted downloadable mixes and several ongoing series spanning proto-punk to post-punk, funk and jazz, sound library and global folk music, psychedelic pop and singer-songwriter tunes, avant garde and early electronic music, and anything else that fits. It is best known for the '1981' Box Set, a deep exploration of post-punk music during the titular year. Musicophilia Daily covers these sounds one track at a time, on a near-daily basis.

HL: So tell me about your blog.

Ian: It's called Musicophilia, which is an unintentional homage to the book
[Musicophilia, Oliver Sacks].

HL: I was gonna ask.

Ian: It's a faux Latinate you can easily come up with and I wanted something very broad that wouldn't paint me into a niche and "love of music" seemed simple enough.

HL: Did you come up with it before the book?

Ian: I did, but I didn't start it before the book. When I saw it I thought,
"Alright, I gotta go ahead and use that." Hopefully, so far...

HL: No one cares.

Ian: ... he hasn't sued me.

HL: He can't sue you over Latin. There's no way. Plus he seems like too nice
of a guy.

Ian: Well, reading the book it's pretty clear he wouldn't consider the vast
majority of the stuff on the blogs music.

HL: Yeah, he seems...

Ian: He's pretty classically oriented. It's cute when he describes rock music
and you almost get the sense of him wanting to call it "beat music" or "drug
music".

HL: Right. One of the things I did want to ask about is the '1981' series . So you finished that, right?

Ian: A long time ago, yeah. The actual box was in process in 2004 and I made them in the spring of 2005. You know, it started as one mix, and that turned into three mixes and I decided, screw it, I'll go ahead and go full on, and it ended up being ten discs, hundreds of songs.

HL: So did you put it out? Gave it to friends?

Ian: Physically, yeah. Originally it was something I thought I'd make it and I'll hoist onto a few friends, but then it got to a couple of people and it ended up on the ILM board, then I went ahead and made a thread about it because people were talking about it anyway. I don't even check anymore, but I made an e-mail account for it and I used to get a request every week. People asking if I was still making them, even recently. I think I ended up making at least 300, maybe 400 copies, physically, distributing them at cost of materials.

HL: Wow.

Ian: I would come home from work after 10 hours and I would be a factory. I bought three CD burners so I could at least burn three at a time, because it's 10 discs times however many. It was really time consuming. It was really nerdy.

HL: That's awesome.

Ian: I wanted to make it a physical artifact, to make it feel different than
something you could just get--back in those days--off of Soulseek or
whatever. And I went to the trouble of either owning already or acquiring all that I could of what I used. There were some tracks that ended up not on the main mixes, but on the sort of companion disc (the 'Briefcase') that just aren't reasonably ownable, that I downloaded or got from Hyped2Death, that sort of thing. So I put those in there for reference, but I figured that if I'm going to be this ridiculous and spending this much money, then I'm going to make something physical out of it.

HL: Cool. I'd never heard the entire story behind the whole thing. I knew
about it from Metafilter.

Ian: Oh, you saw that? I'd never heard of that and then that sent, like, 3,000 or 4,000 hits or something one day.

HL: One of those was me.

Ian: Nice. I just finished putting up all the '1981' mixes, funnily enough. I put up the last one earlier this week, and made a post announcing it was all there. It's funny--I've had something like 600 hits because of that this morning. Not even new material going up, but just something saying, "the whole thing is there," and people sort of respond to, even though now it's a digital box set, the idea that they can get it all at once. So maybe I should have just done it all at once; I just used it as sort of backup material so if one week I didn't feel like making a mix, I could just put one up there.

HL: I liked the way you split it up. What about some of the other series you've got going on Musicophilia?

Ian: There ended up being, again, a thing that was a one-mix idea that grew and I thought, "This is a really easy way to make mixes without having to come up with a real theme." And also it worked just to put on most of the stuff that I had been listening to the most the last three or four years, which is mostly early 70s strange Euro funk and that sort of stuff. So, yeah, there's the "Musique du Monde" series. I don't
speak a word of French so all the liner notes, they're all Google-translated.
I've been waiting for French people to write to me and ask what is wrong with me, did I not go to school or something? That's been a fun way to make "groovy" kinds of mixes; and it's an excuse to do more fake-vintage LP art.

HL: That's always good. That's why my wife and I created a band, partially.

Ian: Right, I'm not a real musician. I used to record music solely to have
something to produce. Not actually having something to express, but just to have sounds to play with--so the mixes are just that same feeling but without having the actual talent to do it myself. And I can expose other people to the music. The main one that's sort of to that end is the "Sensory Replicaton" series which is the most pretentiously named one, but...

HL: I don't know that I've caught any of those yet.

Ian: Those are my sort of secret favorites, but nobody listens to them.
They're kind of weird. They started pretty simple, it was like a 30 minute mix, sort of abstract. They tend to be somewhat instrumental, but they sort of developed into this method. We'd mentioned earlier [before I hit record] field recording, but I don't have the equipment. So I wanted to sort of take music, some of it song form and then some of it abstract and try to create something about as immersive as a binaural field recording. And then, also, hopefully a linear experience sort of like a film. I mean, any music is linear and has that advantage, but literally something that had no end points and not just because of clever segues between tracks. So it ends up sometimes where there's five or six tracks, not mashup style necessarily because most of this is not beat oriented music, but really trying to find sort of surprising moments. Like any mix, I'll just pick the tracks, pick 200 tracks instead of 20 or whatever, and then start laying them over each other. And really interesting things come out of that to me. So those are the ones that are really sort of my favorite thing to do because it's really just intense listening. It's not what is going to catch the most downloads.

HL: I think that I just haven't spent enough time on the site.

Ian: Hopefully, no one has.

HL: I say that because I sometimes like to do that and I have friends that
would do stuff like that; put two versions of a song together just slightly off.

Ian: Right.

HL: I think that's a beautiful idea. What do you use to mix it?

Ian: For that I'm really just using pretty basic stuff. I just use SoundForge for individual track editing and Acid or just basic stuff to do the mixes. Some of them have "remixes" or "dub versions"--I'm doing air quotes that don't translate to the recorder--but they're very... I took a Specials AKA track and isolated a beat and messed with it just using probably the software that came with my old soundcard. Basic stuff. Or there's one that's remixing "Vitamin C," the Can track, with Steve Reich. Anything I've ever done is just trying to get something going, maximum results given minimum means.

HL: And since you probably aren't getting paid for this.

Ian: Getting unpaid. Legally speaking, I'm definitely not getting paid. I hope I'm getting other people paid, musicians and shop owners.

HL: Have you heard from any artists that you stuck on, say, the '81 box set?

Ian: Not about sudden skyrocketing sales unfortunately, but from a lot of
people, actually. Both through the original run, more through that; then also as it's been up on the blog. And it's all been positive, which is a relief. That's the good thing about focusing mainly on artists who aren't in the world of cutthroat, RIAA stuff.

HL: So no Metallica stuff?

Ian: Right, there hasn't been a lot of Metallica on Musicophilia.

HL: Backwards bass solos?

Ian: No, that was Megadeth.

HL: You put a Megadeth song up?

Ian: No, just kidding. I attributed something once to...

HL: Dave Mustaine?

Ian: ... the original bassist of Metallica, I think, as a joke.

HL: Cliff Burton.

Ian: Yeah.

HL: Sorry, old school metalhead kid. To just take a step back, when did you
start Musicophilia? Was it recently?

Ian: Yeah, October of last year.

HL: OK.

Ian: I kind of think I did too much too fast and kind of wished I'd slowed down so I could have things now in reserve when I haven't had as much time to do new mixes. So it's been on the doledrums a bit lately.

HL: But there's quite a bit of stuff.

Ian: Yeah, that's heartening that people do seem to be not just disappearing. They keep coming back and checking the blog, going to the archives. I did a poll thing once, which is really nerdy. Mainly I was trying to see if I could get out of trying to write anything; if people would still listen to mixes if I would just put up the cover and track listing. And basically, it was like 50 to 0 votes that they wanted me to do the hype and that sucks kind of because I'm not good at it, but...

HL: Now you have to.

Ian: Yeah, now I have to. I started the Musicophilia Daily one, I guess that was 3 or 4 months ago. That one is fun because it's more spontaneous and it's not mixes but individual tracks, but it takes a lot. Even when I'm writing three sentences I have to find the cover art and, you know, write the thing. So now I kind of wish I could really just get people to trust that it doesn't suck, but I guess they like the blurb stuff.

HL: I think it's better with a little blurb. Whenever I go to whatever blog and they say, "Watch this," I automatically think, "I'm not gonna watch that."

Ian: Yeah, there's too much. Hopefully the idea is that by putting the music up, you're being an arbiter or curator or some other pretentious word, but you still have to say something.

HL: You have to have an explanation.

Ian: Make a pitch.

HL: You have to have some finding aid or something.

Ian: I read some of them where they're like clever and hip enough or
whatever to get away with being coy about it, but mine end up sounding kind of over-earnest... I think that's why the "Music du Monde" ones I like because I can write the really hyperbolic hype talk. The stuff that puts Dusty Groove or Forced Exposure to shame and as a means to satirize what I feel like I accidentally end up sounding like. I mean, I'm not trying to be talking hype speak, but it just ends up sounding that way. You're gonna compare it to two or three other artists and you're going to say something about the effect it has on you. You write it sincerely, but you read it later and even though you were being sincere, it sounds like hype talk.

HL: Right.

Ian: That may be unavoidable.

HL: I've written music reviews a bit, but it's hard. Especially if you don't like something.

Ian: That's a definite advantage of this, I never have to write about those.

HL: Yeah, at least with a blog if you hate it...

Ian: It's not on there.

HL: Yeah.

Ian: You know, if you're verbose and you love music, especially if you... like
we come from smaller towns and there's maybe 20 of you in your town who
are as hardcore losers.

HL: Right.

Ian: And everybody was like, "Well, you should write. You should do
something with your love of music." I had to avoid that entirely, you can't...

HL: Because there's no money in it.

Ian: Well, there's no money, but you have to say negative things.

HL: I've never quite figured out the whole music writer idea. It's kind of a
weird, nebulous thing to me. It's gotta be really hard.

Ian: The blog thing is good because I don't think anyone is even pretending
there's money in it. It's an avocation now, so people do it from passion, not
for any concepts of being the next Greil Marcus or something.

HL: Writing Bob Dylan's liner notes or something. I'm guessing you started
the blog so you could share music with more than just the 400 people that
got the CDs or was there a special reason? Was there a blog that inspired
yours?

Ian: I didn't really read blogs before I started doing my own. I didn't
understand what a wealth there was out there. I thought it was posting a
track that you could download, which--those are cool, too. I didn't realize
there were so many focusing on out of print stuff. I didn't know there was a
Mutant Sounds or the curated or just-throw-it-all-out-there type Sound Library ones. I didn't know those even existed. I kind of discovered them that month as I started doing it. So, all the excitement grew. I wasn't even super-aware of the concept. I just did it because I was going to be making mixes anyway. Not maybe with the regularity that I was doing them. Really, the purpose is, with the '81 thing or whatever, my my role has always just been to hoist new music on friends. And that was all it ever really was. The fact that other people could get into it was a bonus. Even still, the Musicophilia ones had 40,000 views or whatever, but I get excited when my friends who are music makers say they listened to it or got a new idea from hearing some Ennio Morricone or something that they might not have heard. I just always wanted to be their, like--if that were a role in a band, the sixth member...

HL: Librarian muse.

Ian: Yeah, librarian of music. The professor.

HL: Exactly. Like an archivist. They're like, "Man, I'm so stuck," and you whip out a record, "Try this!"

Ian: And you don't have to pretend to be authoritative, it's just friends.
Especially, if you know they have passion, but they've put it into making as
opposed to listening. They've heard a decent amount, but they haven't
done what you've done, which is being a pathetic record geek for too many
years. It's always been that way since high school, just making whatever
Radiohead b-side compilations in '96 for my friends in bands or whatever.
That was the only impetus, really. Just sharing music that hopefully my
friends would listen to. I mean, the '81 thing was an eye opener because it was a lot of fun to meet so many people. My intended audience for that one was really, when I realized I'm not just going to give it to my friends--it became, OK, I'm gonna give it to the 20-year-old kids or the 18-year-old kids, 16-year-old, who--this is 2003--that are talking Gang of Four and they're talking Joy Division.

HL: Right.

Ian: ... and that's it. These few huge--great--bands that overshadow the rest. Going on that inspiration, which is cool, and making music inspired by that. And that's fine. Maybe it made some interesting stuff. Maybe it's better than Pavement #5,ooo or whatever, but that was my intended audience. Just get all this music... because to me the interesting thing about it was the massive fecundity of it. Not necessarily that there were these amazing shining lights, but that the overall level of quality was raised so high by just the shared enthusiasm that was going on between people. Because it kind of amazed me as I'm getting to the 300th band or something on the set and it doesn't suck. In fact, it's really good. You know, years later you're still discovering something from this one ridiculous year, or that scene in general. But that audience never really panned out. I neverdid get any 15-year-olds who... I mean I've met a few. I've made a couple of friends who said, "Oh man, it changed my life," and that's cool. That's amazing.

HL: That's really nice, yeah.

Ian: 'Cause then you've got this 19-year-old who just has absorbed all of thi--and what music are they going to be making?

HL: Right.

Ian: There are geniuses who are going to make whatever they're going to
make and some of my friends like that I don't try to play music for them.
They already have the cracked minds that are going to make this stuff. They don't need to hear Syd Barrett, they're going to make Syd Barrett. But the rest of 'em maybe--the rest of us--benefit from knowing where we've all been before. But in the end I mostly got 40-year-olds who had been there or their older brothers were there--but that was exciting, too.

HL: I was going to say that I'm getting close to that age, so in 2003 when bands were coming out that sounded like Gang of Four, all I could think about was pulling out my Gang of Four albums. Or Talking Heads or whatever. Did you do the '81 stuff before Simon Reynolds book ['Rip It Up And Start Again'] came out?

Ian: Basically, I think he was writing it at the same time I was making the set. We would e-mail at that time, occassionally.

HL: Oh, really?

Ian: Yeah. He was one of the reasons I sort of decided to go full bore with it
because he was really positive.

HL: Cool.

Ian: You know, hearing from him or people older than him like the musicians in some of the bands who would. . . because it went through several revisions. The original one there was 20 copies of and the track list for that went online before I actually made all of it and I think that's sort of how it got out. These guys who had been there... I was in diapers in '81.

HL: I was going to ask. I was eight and lived in the middle of Kansas.

Ian: Right, so neither of us was in a position to have been there.

HL: No.

Ian: And I, maybe you were lucky, but I didn't have the cool older sibling or a college town.

HL: I had a high school teacher who saw The Sex Pistols in Tulsa and had tons of vinyl. So that's how I heard Pere Ubu when I was 14.

Ian: Nice.

HL: So, I lucked out and had this one guy [oh, and Night Flight--I wouldn't
want to forget that].

Ian: That's all it takes.

HL: I was kinda cracking up that you were talking about that because I had
that one guy in high school and I used to push music on people all the time
until I thought they were getting tired of it.

Ian: Something I would sit and think about was. . . I felt glad I came from
nowhere and kind of didn't have help only in the sense that it meant I wasn't going to take things for granted once I did find them.

HL: Right.

Ian: In life or in music or whatever. But it didn't make me scorn the idea of
having a mentor. If there had been some geek to help me not have to listen to Sunny Day Real Estate when I was 18, just to get me ahead, you know. . .

HL: Well, and i think I was already doing lots of trying to find as many books and magazines as possible.

Ian: Right.

HL: But the problem was I was a high school kid in the middle of nowhere with no money so I had no way to buy the first X-Ray Spex album. Knowing this person who actually had an original copy of it was great and allowed me to hear it.

Ian: Some people can get cynical about the internet and say it's diluted the
value of discovering music, but I think those are the people who know the
thrill of crate digging. They know the thrill of finding that "thing" and that's great, we've done it the old-fashioned way, too, still do. Maybe we're at the tail end of where anyone will ever experience that so maybe my perspective is being too optimistic about kids 10 years or 5 years younger than us who the first time they heard about something, they just went to the internet. It's gotten to that point for us too, obviously.

HL: Yeah. If I can't find an album or if I find something and it's over $50, I
usually check to see if someone's put it up.

Ian: Right. Or you can test drive it first.

HL: Right.

Ian: I mean, we're the losers who will still buy the stuff.

HL: Yeah, definitely. There's that.

Ian: The internet now is kind of the cool older brother or something, for kids who don't have that. I mean, the only limiting factor for a 15-year-old is passion. Nothing else. Money isn't so much a factor. Access, knowing the
right people. None of that. And that's why I can't really... as much as I love
going to cool record shops and I'm sorry to see them dwindle, I can't get too
sad about it because that's what it should be--passion first. What's good is
what should matter, not what you have access to. Not what friends happen to like where you are.

HL: Right.

Ian: You know, you don't really love it because that's what you have to love
because that's all you have. There's something beautiful about that maybe,
but I'd just rather people hear the best thing possible. I just remember
buying a Mogwai CD and putting it in and thinking, "This is the worst shit. I'm done with this," and it was great. Just, indie rock is done. I'm done with that. I took it out of the player and broke it in half. But if I had known better, I wouldn't have wasted my money on it.

HL: I can understand the older stuff being available [for free] on the internet, and this may be a huge can of worms, but what do you think of newer bands trying to sell things and not being able to as much? It's much easier to get free music on the internet and that's why the band I'm in releases a lot of stuff for free.

Ian: Right.

HL: Lots of people I know do and lots of people with the same mindset do. I
don't think it's cutting into any millionaire's money.

Ian: Well, I'm kind of so out of the loop. I can admit that. I can name ten
albums I've heard that I liked released since 2001, so I'm kinda out. But I
think the ethics of it, I mean, there's the Gillian Welch song, "Everything is
Free," and I've heard that people make money from shows. Does that pan
out? Have you ever had a kid admit to bootlegging your music and then show up at your show?

HL: No, because no one ever comes to our shows. I've seen both things
happen. I think Wilco's streaming their new album or something. I think they always do that.

Ian: Well, they leaked that one album, right? Yankee Hotel Foxtrot.

HL: Yeah, I think so. But now they stream their new ones. And now
Radiohead's...

Ian: Right, that model.

HL: Which has been a model forever...

Ian: The fetish object.

HL: ... it's just that now larger corporations are doing it. So, I kind of
wonder... and I don't even know if this is a question anymore. I just kind of
wonder how that will have an effect on things. Will things like limited edition singles exist anymore? Or is it just going to become forgotten on a hard drive somewhere?

Ian: You mean for eventual rediscovery?

HL: Yeah.

Ian: I guess that's an argument for people trying--if it's not going to be
legitimately released, even on a small press--to make something like the 1981 compilations now. I don't know. I guess it's an issue that I slightly sidestep. I make the mixes, new ones especially, continuous as one lump track, which probably turns away listeners because it's 50 minutes long so they listen once and delete it...

HL: I love that.

Ian: Then at least it's sort of like a mixtape, and you can still scroll forward
and I give cue sheets, but hopefully that's not quite replacing the original.
You have it on something, but you still get the original if you just want the
song. But I do mostly older music so it's an easy thing to sidestep. You know, the people who have contacted me, I'm not necessarily featuring the music they're doing now, but they are still making music. They're 47 or 53 and those guys didn't go softly into the night so they're still doing cool stuff. They've all been supportive. The other day a really obscure band, Chemicals Made from Dirt, the bassist from that band said, "The more viral the better." He was embracing it. It's 28 years or whatever since he made his weirdo little music that sold 100 cassettes or copies, so all he cares about at this point is if people like it and hear it, maybe that makes 'em happy. I don't know anyone who really has the rock star ideal anymore. The means of production are affordable and attainable enough now, as well, that the idea of going into a studio and going into debt just to create this thing like before seems silly, or at least unneccessary. I think that people are just happy to have it out there. Maybe?

HL: Yeah. I was just thinking about that. Your site, though, seems like it's in a time of its own. You don't seem to have a lot of contemporary stuff. I think it would be nice if people supported their favorite musicians, but the cat's already out of the bag.

Ian: That might be where the microgenerational difference exists. I know the people I came up with, and you're just a little bit older, when all that started happening--1998 was my freshman year in college and they had a T1 connection for the whole school and a few people had computers--you could sort of download stuff already or at least from each other over the network. So, I know that a new Built to Spill record, or whatever, I would hear that way--we're the beginning of try-before-you-buy. But we still do buy. For me, I can't even claim it was a big ethical thing necessarily--it was that I don't trust mp3s. I don't know if that's ingrained from remembering mp3s as something that took two hours to download some 64 kbps piece of junk with a modem. It would sound horrible and it took forever. So in your mind it was never going to replace the actual object. Compressors have gotten better and things can actually sound decent now. I just didn't trust it. Your harddrive disappears. I just needed the physical articfact. Not that CDs are some beautiful thing, but they exist. At this point I treat them like the archive. I rip it and put it away. That's what everybody probably does, but we still buy the thing. That might be the difference, that we can't grasp not having a physical object and instead just having some songs from iTunes or something. Maybe it is a much darker thing than I've realized, maybe almost nobody just "previews". I try to put a positive spin on it.

HL: Stop trying to be so hopeful about everything. Around that time, I
stopped listening to indie rock for a long time. I really only listened to dub
and early delta blues records for about three years. Oh, and Captain
Beefheart and Led Zeppelin, the staple music. Then when I got back into indie rock, it sounded pretty much like where I left off. Actually, it was the early 2000s, so things were starting to sound like the late 80s/early 90s again. I'm back to the point where I'm starting to hate a lot of new music and I don't know if that's a good way to be, but it helps me at least stay sane.

Ian: The strange thing about talking to the "old guys," the post-punk people, is that for them it was very much about being there. Being in a now that is very future minded. Secretly, they're all aping Can and Roxy Music, but in the broader sense, those don't represent the major foundation that they pulled from. For the most part they were expansion oriented. That's the major part I can't relate to, having invested my youthful enthusiasm in music that didn't really reward it. I don't regret the ethics of it. The social aspect of it. What I came up through was very positive, a do-good-things whatever scene, and I like that. But the music, honestly, at this point would probably bore the hell out of me. Even then it did, I just couldn't admit it. You're putting so much of yourself into this feeling, and that's beautiful in a way, but at some point it's just not enough without good music. I will check back in with independent "youth oriented music" now and then, to sound like I'm 72. I just feel like rock has treaded water from Beat Happening on. But to experience something visceral and musically rewarding like post-punk as one's youthful zeitgeist, I can't imagine it.

HL: Even things like hip hop now. You know, the thing that scares the hell out of me half the time is I don't know if I'm sounding like some old geezer. Is it because I'm old or because things suck? In high school, though, It Takes a
Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back and the first couple of De La Soul albums
blew my mind. Commercial, underground, whatever hip hop gets stuck in
some pre-existing compartment. Or jazz. Or, god forbid, blues.

Ian: Wait, blues has existed since 1946? Except for when they'd pull out the old guys in the '60s?

HL: Maybe a Buddy Guy or Junior Kimbrough album, but that might be it.
But you know what I mean.

Ian: Stagnation is natural?

HL: Avant garde musicians still sound like name-whomever from the '70s.

Ian: Man, we're getting downer.

HL: I know.

Ian: But, if that's basically always happened, there's nothing that's just
maintained that fecundity--still, something has come. That's maybe where
the hidden cynicism is in the Musicophilia blog. The weird mixes will use a lot more stuff from the '90s and 2000s. And those weird bits exist and that's good if you're a music geek, but in terms of talking to the post-punks and that concept of something you really believed in, it's weird that it's so good because they really talked that aspect up. Because that's the aspect for kids my age doing post-post-post-post hardcore emo, or some awful bullshit in '96, but that spirit informed it--the enthusiasm if not the quality of sound. The fact that those people had both the art and the energy, I don't know if that can happen again. Maybe you can't believe anymore in an almost religious way, even about the most ecumenical of religions, when you know it's all out there. Even B'hai seems limited. How can we sound less cynical about it, though?

HL: Maybe stopping talking about it would help. One of the things you've
talked about is primary source material. Is most of the stuff on Musicophilia Daily still primary source?

Ian: It is, mostly. What I can own. What I meant by primary source [when we discussed it via e-mail] are the blogs that uncover primary sources. That do the crate digging. For example, the really, truly obscure stuff, like the 1981 Briefcase disc. The stuff I'm not going to spend $75 on a 7" for. But fortunately there's Chuck Warner at Hyped to Death to put his compilations together, and there were pieces I would take from those guys. And there's bits on Musicophilia Daily like library stuff. I'm not a library digger, made of cash. I have what you can get that's been reissued, and thank god for the ones that have, but there's hundreds of those things and they are people who are insane Robin Hoods as far as I can tell. No, they're not Robin Hoods. They're the rich stealing from the rich and giving it to everybody else. These guys that will buy some Italian library record for $200, rip it, and put it on their blog. Those guys are amazing.

HL: I started off with primary source and the actual record, but that's what I was getting at.

Ian: Oh, OK.

HL: Spending $500 for some single and then putting it on the internet for
everyone to download, it's crazy and amazing.

Ian: Yeah, those guys. You know, if I were an NBA player, that's what I'd do. I'd buy tons of records, archive them, and then put them on the internet. These blogs and Hyped2Death or Anthology Recordings-style operations that are empowered by the internet are great, too, because
this is stuff that's truly limited in commercial appeal. So people can hear
things that under normal economic and material pressures would probably
be lost completely. And then the stuff that does get reissued--and I bet
interest shown in stuff at Mutant Sounds or whatever has prompted some
informed reissues--the dorks who downloaded it and loved it are going to buy it. Listening to music in general and making mixes, for me, there's not a lot that I've paid more than 30 or 40 bucks for. I'm just not enough of a
specialist and I'm not a trust fund kid to where I can rationalize it. In the days before I discovered these first source download things, it's the kind of thing that you knew it existed and sounded amazing, but you let it go and enjoyed what you had. Now you don't have to let it go. Before if you weren't going to spend $500 to hear something, it might as well not exist, but now it's there. So those guys are the amazing ones--blogs like 'Library Music', The Library Hunt, Egg City Radio, Monone's Library have rescued an exclusive world for a broader (if still small) audience, and I can't see anything bad about that. If any of that stuff has commercial potential now through Dusty Groove or whatever, I think the blogs have helped, not hurt.

HL: I know I've found albums like the World of Pooh album [members of
Thinking Fellers Union Local 282, Caroliner, and Barbara Manning's early
band] online because I couldn't find a copy for sale anywhere and I didn't
have my high school copy anymore. So, yeah, one day I entered it in google
and, holy shit, there were two copies on the 'net.

Ian: It seems like a weird world. A lot of it, you know the Mutant Sound guy takes photos at an angle so no one else can pretend that they did it. And there's some weird tagging issues on the songs, occasionally sketchy info, so there's a little weirdness to the whole thing. But, beggars can't be choosers, I guess. It's not perfect. The guy who does the Library Hunt one.

HL: I haven't seen that one.

Ian: He's just throwing it all up there. He's created an "offline archive" PDF
with hundreds of albums... I haven't even downloaded a fraction. The site
proves, though, why I need to write a blurb on the Musicophilia stuff so
people have some idea what they're getting--because he doesn't write
anything or if he does it's kind of inscrutable. So you just kind of go with the names you recognize and then take your chances--but it's still a work for the greater good, what he's doing. Then there's Jean Claude Pierric, who I just discovered. He was someone who played on a lot of the library records and he's ripping his own stuff and putting it up, stuff that's selling for $500 on Groove Collector or whatever. You know, record geeks hit the wall of knowing there's infinitely more good music than what you've heard, but sometimes you get to the point where it's just not flowing. The sound library thing is this bizarre cure. Obviously some dudes kept the memory alive, but I'd never heard of it prior to a few years ago. You hear "Apache" [by the Incredible Bongo Band] and think, "That's amazing. There should be other stuff that sounds like this." Or you think the instrumental parts of Serge Gainsbourg are great and you think, "What else were those guys doing?" It's one of those things where you would know the shape of the elephant, but you don't know it's there. Maybe I just didn't know about these blogs. Some of them have been around for a couple of years at
least; maybe they were around longer. It still just seems like this thing where there was a time capsule and someone said, "Well, contemporary music's not doing a lot..."

HL: Let's go back.

Ian: Let's hear all this amazing French, German, and Italian guys doing stuff.

HL: I also wondered, too, if someone doesn't spend a ton of energy learning
about something they've discovered, like studying for a PhD basically, where you spend all your time on this one tiny speck and then you explode with all this information. And with the internet, you can give it to the world, you know.

Ian: I think that's... it must have been sort of like the way people were seeking out This Heat vinyl or something and then on the rarified level of those with the serious money, somebody knew. And in order to inflate the
value--scarcity alone did a lot, but somebody knew it was good stuff. It's
sampled in golden age hip hop, so someone knew, and I think that's probably what it was.

HL: Someone told the wrong person and they leaked it out, so they had to kick him out of the circle.

Ian: Yeah, maybe the Library Hunt guy is the Judas and has taken all that he's been hoarding and spread it everywhere. He'd be a person to interview.

HL: Anything else you want to talk about?

Ian: The one other thing I wanted to talk about... did we talk about the idea of a Portland mix club?

HL: We did.

Ian: I had one in my hometown and it was easy because there was a small
cadre of hardcore music geeks of which I was like lowest of low. These are
serious guys who usually were twice my age or just people who were music
journalists or else they worked at record stores.

HL: Was this in, uh...

Ian: Little Rock. It was just a lot of fun to reassert, partially, the artifact. We physically made these mixes with cover art, sleeves and stuff. Some were lazy about it and some of us would do attempts at nerdy cover stuff. I'm not a cynic obviously about the potential of internet music sharing. I don't find it any less legitimate. The fact that you can just casually talk to musical heroes, Ana da Silva or Alan Sparhawk or David Toop through internet mix-making is very cool...

HL: That's amazing.

Ian: And the demysitification is not a bad thing to my mind because then
what you're listening to is the music and if it's good it's good and if it's not
you're not buying into a bigger thing. But the in-real-life mix club was fun. We'd get together and bring the mixes we had and put them in a CD changer, not that anyone has those anymore, and you just put them on random and everyone geek talks for hours.

HL: That sounds fun.

Ian: Get together once a month and a half, two months. I wanted to start it
the last two winters and then let them go by without doing it.

HL: That would be fun.

Ian: And we could also all agree to take the mixes, or at least most of them,
and put them on a collective blog for anybody. We had like 20 members so
physically you can't have more than that. And at any one meeting 5 or so
aren't going to show up. So you never end up with more than 13 people.

HL: That would be awesome. I'd love to do that. I'd be afraid to do it, a bit,
because I think I'd be way outgeeked.

Ian: Well, we just had a theme. So you just had to justify your theme, but if you did you could put anything on it. No one was worried about cred. That helped because we were all friends so there were no strangers. You give it to some friends or something. Then you just put the CD player on random and let it go and then you talk.

HL: I think that's a great idea. We should do it.

Ian: So far I don't have any good names, just 'PDX Mix Club" or something
very generic. I kind want to name it, not gentleman's club, but like was it the Arlington where people talked and smoked cigars?

HL: Oh, right, like the Algonquin or something.

Ian: Maybe we could have them at a decent bar or something in downtime
and get it on their PA. Now's bad timing with Portland being great in the
summer and no one wants to be inside.

HL: Well, we could set it up.

Ian: Just do it infrequently enough and then it's not like a chore. Every two
months.

HL: Yeah, you don't have to do it all the time and if someone's busy, they
don't have to come.

Ian: Alright, let's do it.

HL: I think that is genius. It could take us all summer just to come up with a name.

"Are you taking orders or are you taking over?" - The Clash

Josh Hooten

The public school system vs. Josh Hooten of Herbivore Magazine. | READ ARTICLE

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