#over-enthusiasm

Vervain (Verbena officinalis) for those with very driven personalities. Keywords: strain; stress; tension; over-enthusiasm/over-effort to the point of physical exhaustion, illness or nervous breakdown. “Vervain is the remedy against over-effort. It teaches us that it is by being rather than doing that great things are accomplished” We are having a new intake for our Phytotherapy Level 1 course…

This year has been fucking amazing for music so far. Through my unbelievable new headphones (#firstworldblessings), which have no doubt helped with the whole business, (and people I owe "money" to: I moved into a cheap place, that I can't listen to music on speakers AT ALL. I had to do something. And - Jesus - music, Goddamn it.)  Jon Hopkins' new album "Immunity" just made me have a spiritual experience in the garden that I can't really explain with silly words (at the Abandoned Window…), but I'm sure Pitchfork will be able to. Baths' second album "Obsidian" leaked months ago and has been healing me ever since (and is now available "legitimately" for those still stuck in the past, which apparently includes Baths himself - shame.) The man made "Phaedra" with a 4/4 beat over a 3/4 melody. Is it me, or is that legitimate, no-bullshit innovation in western songwriting? I mean, it must have been done somewhere. But I hadn't heard it before this. Someone please correct me if that isn't the first time. No-one seems as impressed about that fact as I am. 

Justin Timberlake managed to prove that he in fact is THE "legitimate" pop artist of his generation. And no Auto-Tune! Well done Justin. You get it. I wish Michael Jackson could have been alive to hear "Pusher Love Girl", and I dearly hope Prince will listen to it instead of the sound of his own farts, and get the point, and release a decent album again. Well, I wish Michael Jackson could have also been alive anyway, I mean, that whole business was a shame. But yeah. Pusher Love Girl and "The 20/20 Experience" on the whole is world-endingly good pop music. Hooray! Everything else is going to shit, but we have access to sonic joy! 

In the "Eeyore"/Holy department, Mark MOTHERFUCKING Kozelek managed to bother to turn up on two albums and furthered his gangsta prowess by being a complete dick to Jimmy Lavalle. But still. He did things and then I got to hear them and talk about them with the two people I know who even know who he is. Grateful. The two members of Underworld release ostensible solo projects, again very grateful and I can't wait to get around to listening to them once I've finished compulsively listening to the webcast they made on the 12th December 2008.

In the dirty department, Culprate just goes on pwning and pwning, Dirtyphonics upped the ante that Knife Party have been relentlessly pushing with their new album "Irreverence" (thanks Luke), and Daft Punk (who?) released an expertly hyped album that... will doubtless be amazing once they've remixed it NEXT year, but more to the point fucking BOARDS OF CANADA are releasing an EVEN BETTERLY HYPED new album and the first single is so fucking sweet. It made dirty rainy parts of Greater London beautiful. Tyler released "Wolf" - excellent. Straight on the phone. Thom Yorke does a "South Park S2E01" by pretending he's releasing anything other than an (amazing) solo album with Atoms For Peace's "AMOK", and a completely undeniably next-level Essential Mix for Radio 1. (DJ Tre - Ping Pong Trak - what a find Thom). 

I also got into "Home Brew", Jehst all over again, realised Germans invented a lot of things in the 70s and 80s and just how good Genesis actually were (although don't listen to the 2009 remasters, they're practically war crimes). I discovered dubstep mixes that rival Eskmo's "Ancestor Mix" from 2009 - I also became one of these arseholes who swears he can now hear the difference between lossless and lossy compressed audio, and uses AUDIO PLAYBACK PROGRAMS that are supposed to be bought for £600 (I mean WTF, mathematics - which is supposedly a fairly reliable authority - says there should be no difference between that and iTunes). Of course, only for the initial trial periods. But anyway. This year has been fucking amazing for music so far. And the fact that I'm going to see Culprate and ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT at Boomtown kinda guarantees the second half will be amazing too. As well as the return/finale of the other Arrested Development. And wearing out Peep Show still isn't wearing. They're not music, but they are a kind of musical comedy in that they're not. 

A drugged-up, heartfelt rant I recently sent to SoundCloud when they asked for feedback on their "redesign".

Guys, what the hell. I understood the logic of having two disparate interfaces when "The New SoundCloud" was in beta, but now it's apparently out of beta, yet feels completely half-finished. I look at your job listings and I have to wonder what most of you are doing day in day out? I agree that the "New" SoundCloud has a much nicer aesthetic but that's about it. Where's the new functionality? Oh - there is none. Where's the old functionality? Still there - but a lot harder to use! Yeah, good going guys. For a start, keeping the "Classic" SoundCloud on "indefinitely" not only presents an maddeningly inconsistent user experience, but shows how frighteningly little faith you have in the "New" SoundCloud design (not surprising, given that half of it is missing). Switching endlessly between the two is a horribly disjointed experience, and what's worse, the two designs are different enough to confuse your customers, yet similar enough to prompt the question in even the most dimwitted observer, "what is the point of this half-baked redesign?" The "New" SoundCloud does have a much more attractive look, I'll give you that. But that should be the cherry on top of a rich, feature-filled, innovative cake that justifies uprooting the community and forcing them to adapt to an entirely new website. "Oh and not only does it do all these new things, intuitively and easily, but it LOOKS GORGEOUS AS WELL!" Unfortunately all this is, is a cherry on top of yesterday's stale, dry fruit cake. A regurgitated, remarketing of the exact same old site, just obfuscated and tarted up. It's not worth changing everything just to have it look a bit nicer, but work a LOT more infuriatingly, to say nothing of the glaring inconsistencies between "New" and "Classic".

If you guys are actually making a profit (I honestly have no idea) then you ought to be ashamed. Where are the social innovations that the SoundCloud brand, name, and site design seems to subtly imply, yet inexplicably resolutely fails in delivering? Why can't I, for example, have multi-threaded, linkable and taggable conversations on every sound? Why can't I use intuitive HTML5/AJAX tools to reference certain timeframes of different sounds, and post them on other people's profiles for feedback and discussion? Why is your ostensibly "modern" rewrite still dependent on fucking ADOBE FLASH? Why, again, can SoundClouders not upload multitrack versions of songs to encourage a creative mashup culture of remixes and collaboration? (Which would go really well with the features I just previously described).  Why - yet again, why - can you not see which content people listen to AND WHEN they listen to it, specifically, stats relating to which of a user's content is the "stickiest", i.e. generates the most clicks on that lovely "follow" button. You know, rather than knowing that a lot of Canadians listened to you last week (a stat to be sure, but basically useless in a web music culture that is - do I really need to point this out - global), knowing what parts of your output inspire connection/follows, aka (what ought to be) the only true value metric of a musician's success? Why am I limited to following only 2000 people, and only told that when I actually reach the limit, with no practical way to reduce my amount of follows without resorting to purging doubtless many many other artists that I would prefer to remain a follower of?

Seriously… WHAT ARE YOU PEOPLE DOING ALL DAY!? 

Basically, why are you squandering all the untold potential that this social music/sound , sharing site actually could have in this era and in the future? 

Get it together. Settle on a design - honestly, one terrible one would still be better than the unholy, garish union of the old one mishmashed together with an entirely superficial new one, better yet with no clearly-established roadmap for completion or closure. Ideally, take the aesthetic of the "New SoundCloud", but trash everything else, and rethink it from the ground up.

Then I won't feel like I'm pissing away my €9 or whatever it is a month.

If of course, you aren't making any money and it's just a severe lack of resources causing this dire vacuum of productivity and creativty, then… I dunno… stop presenting yourselves as a fast-growing, innovative young web company, because if THAT is what our best fast-growing young innovative web social audio companies have to offer, modern musicians are all truly fucked.

This has all come out of a dear love for SoundCloud (if you can believe it) as a long-term user who was initially enthralled by the promise of the original site, but over the years has grown more and more depressed at the lack of ANY real creative development in terms of the site's functionality. Maybe my irateness can be traced back to a support incident a long time ago, where I was told that the quality of your lossy preview audio encoder (which is still … JUST … AWFUL for the bitrate it is operating at - seriously, you must have actively TRIED to get it so wrong ) was "not a priority" for the site. SoundClouders, log on to your own website and navigate through all the different disparate bits of once-useful, once-intuitive fundtionality, and ask yourselves: What is the purpose of this site? Is it to engender creativity, creation, social distribution in a new musical economy the likes of which have barely even begun to reveal its breathtaking majesty, through uniquely useful and INTUITIVELY responsive functionality made dirt-cheap by the proliferation of highly advanced technology that nowadays the human race finds itself equally blessed and burdened with? Because that's what SoundCloud should be, and I really doubt you could even give me a concise statement of intent and motivation of the current site(s) designs; I would gladly welcome the opportunity to hear the rationale behind some of these completely - frankly - unmusical  decisions. Of course, if the only aim is to get subscribers to pay money into the pot, then the lack of cohesive vision and direction becomes a lot more understandable - you're obviously not trying to achieve great things, despite all the glossy copy. But the sad fact is that I have a very real fear that those folks over at (the new) MySpace may have (shock, horror) "gotten it" several orders of magnitude more than you have…. and it would be such a shame to watch the News Int. owned conglomerate war-weapon out-do you at a game you haven't even finished defining yet. 

I also understand that one over passionate email never changed anything, and I'm likely to get my account suspended or cancelled for the doubtless-to-be-considered "abusive" nature of my desperate, honest, balls-out, humanity and creativity loving plea to your more rational, forward-thinking nature that you lovely people must be in possession of somehow…

Oh how I long for a real SoundCloud. If this is really the result of all of you working at your peak performance, thinking outside and inside of every box, container and concept you can find, then I basically want to weep for all that could have been. 

I mean, I could do better. I honestly believe that. And I can't code worth a damn.

Sorry, Love,

I have a 600Gb iTunes library. That's 62,187 songs (currently), or 231 days' worth of music. I'm not showing off - it's more of a curse than a blessing - but it's important background for my next thought , so bear with me. 

When I discover new music that I like, I tend to download at least the album the music is from, and often - after having read reviews - the entire discography of the artist responsible. This generally means that while I have a great deal of music that I am intimately familiar with, and a working memory of what my library contains and doesn't contain (and how well tagged it is)*, there's also a LARGE amount of my iTunes library (probably about 60%) that I haven't even heard. I think this is testament to the age - days of dialup long passed have still emblazoned "THE INTERNET IS NOT A GIVEN"  into my psyche - and I live in perpetual fear of losing such essentials as internet access. So I want to ensure that when the inevitable collapse of modern industrialised society happens, I've got enough music to get me through it (likely dynamo-powered). 

So far, so obsessive. The main reasons I curse the size of the library is the sheer amount of CPU cycles iTunes appears to need to index it... But that's nothing on how long it takes me to select tracks to fill my portable music player (once Walkman, then Discman, then MiniDisc**, then iPod, then - glory glory - iPhone), taking care to not leave wasted space, and also to represent "important" albums in the full (Kid A and D'Angelo's Voodoo are two of very few albums that are granted Lossless privileges - although the latter is so well recorded it sounds good at 96kbps MP3). The last time I was forced to painstakingly pick and choose 50Gb of music to sync to my iPhone, it took me roughly 8 hours, and it's generally something that needs to be done in a single sitting. 

Now, unlike many who claim this, I have a genuinely diverse music taste, and a seemingly insatiable appetite to experience the music I know & love over and over again, as well as music that is new to me. I can't think of any major genre that goes completely unrepresented in my library, or without me having certain tracks I'd die for. I care not about the apparent "credibility" of the artist, I only care about the credibility of the music, and even then my parameters are astonishingly wide. The only things are RIGHT OUT are the cheap, nasty, ugly use of pitch correction to hide lazy vocal performances (WHERE'S THE HUMANITY - LITERALLY?), and music that I perceive to be made for no other reason than to make money. All the other reasons - the genuine, balls-out, proper reasons for music - to communicate, to make people dance, catharsis, expression, anger, and that stupid "love" nonsense - are all reasons that resonate with me. Strongly. Even music that others would (hatefully) refer to "guilty pleasures" stay in the playlist. If I loved it 20 years ago, I love it now (I completely do not understand people who like a type of music one year, and hate it the next. In fact, I think they're full of bullshit)

So essentially,  out of something that is entirely meant to maximise my own personal enjoyment of the music that I am so extremely privileged (and so are you) to be able to walk around and hear in awesome clarity as I potter about doing my daily doings, I'm becoming a highly-trained, finely-tuned, very experienced (I've been following this process for a decade) filter.

And basically, over the next few years, or just before I die (I'm likely to get warning, you see), I will publish my 50Gb's worth, or roughly 7000 songs, that I truly consider "essential" to me and my mobile life - that I pay a pretty premium to be able to store entirely on my phone (I may well recant these words in the future, but I think 64Gb is finally "enough" for my local storage needs on my mobile device. 50 of that for music, the rest fits in the rest.)

ANYWAY. So I am slowly, but constantly refining a playlist of around 7000 songs that I believe are worth integrating fully into my soul. 

And when it reaches a point of ripe, pluckable maturity, I will DEFINITELY be sharing that playlist, in full, on the web, with all the none of the people who are interested.

But in a very real sense, once I have levelled-up, I believe it will be the fullest indicator of who I was as a person, the first life journey I went on. So maybe it will interest people once I am inevitably murdered.  

*around 2006 I gave up trying to ensure that all the track metadata was correct in the library, when it reached about 80Gb in size. It basically became a full time job. And even though I admittedly was gainfully unemployed, that was specifically because I didn't want a full-time job.