Many years ago I blogged about the desire for a subscription service that would send a selection of new music to you monthly. It occurred to me, after much longer than it should have, that such a service is provided by music magazines.
Further to that, the high Australian dollar has allowed me to subscribe to British magazines relatively cheaply. As such, each mag costs me around $8, instead of the $14+ they would have cost in the newsagent.
Unfortunately the reality is that all to often the cover CD of my first subscribed magazine (Classic Rock) is full of turd. Thankfully the magazine is also full of CD reviews and articles on bands which I use a prompters to search out new exciting music. So all isn't lost. I've also bitten the bullet and subscribed to Metal Hammer, the heavy metal sister mag of Classic Rock. While I find the introduction pages of this thing almost impossible to read (they seem to be aimed at 14 year old penises), the articles and CD reviews are generally good, and the CDs full of more metal than I could ever want, some of it good.
I also recently bought 20 old editions of Mojo magazine on eBay for what worked out to be $5 each. I fully expect these magazines and their cover CDs to take me months and months to go through.
Mojo typically do some pretty spectacular cover CDs. Their very recent Roots of Nirvana CD is nothing short of brilliant. They also do good article, but they tend to only review CDs I'm not remotely interested in.
Either way, I'm really looking forward to it.
I'm hoping, with all this new music flowing in, that I will put a leash on what has been some uncontrolled new-music-CD buying in the past year or so.
Far too many "this might be goods" have turned out to be "not goods".
We now have:
More than a Walken fan could ever possibly poke any kind of stick at.
I'm now working very hard on getting our Current Melbourne Temperature EP available to buy again, hopefully for a reasonable price, and potentially both physically and digitally.
More details when they actually happen.
Why? Coz. And I have a couple of boxes of CMT taking up room in my garage and I want them gone.
Over the last five years or so I've been slowly writing an expanded history of Walken that I think is of interest to approximate 5 people on the planet. Even so, it has been fun to write, and pending band approval I'll add that to the website soon too. Meanwhile, here is the abridged version officially rejected by Wikipedia as being irrelevant.
I'm adding my CDs, DVDs, Comics, Books to a database. This is an ongoing project that I expect will take years.
I'm occasionally photographing some old music magazines I have lying around in boxes so they are more easily read on the train (try reading a 30 year old broadsheet piece of paper that you do not want damaged on a crowded train). The combination of Australia's 2006 "format/space shifting" copyright exceptions, tripod, 9MP camera and smart-phone has finally made this dream simple and easy.
I'm slowly scanning every physical photograph I have. This was originally going to be a negative scanning project, but decent quality negative scanners are both very very expensive ($500+) and massive-overkill (thousands of pixels per inch). I've decided that if I find anything particularly awesome I'll pay to get it scanned properly from the negative. Thus I'm using my decade old scanner and scanning at 300dpi, a few photos at a time while I sit at the PC.
It is incredible how quickly any of these projects can eat up time. I've woken up from a cataloguing dream to find out I've spent hours and hours typing, copying, putting, returning, adjusting...
It seems this kind of thing is my obsession. I can't stop. I find, after a digitisation project is complete, I'm very happy with the results... but I soon find myself sniffing around for another digitisation project to work on.
It isn't particularly healthy.
What it has meant though is that I've slowly been rediscovering old photos, old recordings from my band, all sorts of fun. Previously these would end up on my blog, but these days most of this ends up on Facebook out of pure convenience. It is no longer easy and convenient to upload photos to this blog... not to mention the fact I don't want to share these photos with the world, only my friends.
So, as a result, you see nothing.
Meanwhile, I have continued to listen to music. A lot of music. I have wished to review it, or at least talk about it, but question my ability to properly articulate my feelings. So I do nothing. I hope to... one day.