Musical Obsessions

I thought I’d write a reflective note about my musical obsessions, because their pattern seems to be changing. For most of last year I would listen to the object of my obsession to the exclusion of everything else for weeks, sometimes months on end. The CD players in the house, in the car, the DVD player and the computer would be filled with Mark E Smith and the Fall (about fifty albums listened to over and over again) between March and September. Then it was Frank Zappa and the Mothers until Christmas. I must have listened to other things but I can’t remember what they were.

This year however my obsession span has been much shorter – days sometimes – and nothing like as single-minded. The year started with free improvisation: Derek Bailey, AMM, Japanese noise artists and Sun Ra’s very free phases. That was pretty exclusive: if you are listening to music completely devoid of tone or meter, then anything else jars horribly. That slipped into modern ballet music in February, then Detroit Techno, then the Grateful Dead. I’ve been avoiding the Dead all my adult life: I knew they were an obsession I could not afford, either financially or psychologically. But then Mick Kelly told me about the website from which you can freely download 2,777 Grateful Dead concerts, ie all the ones not commercially released. Fortunately I stopped after six three-CD sets.

And then a couple of days ago Will mentioned that he was listening to a lot of old hip hop again. Coincidentally, I’d been listening to contemporary hip hop – Madvillain, Peanut Butter Wolf, Beans etc – but talking to Will sent me back listening to the 90s and Gang Starr, Jungle Brothers, Quanum; which made me want to step forward in time again to El-P and Company Flow, Aesop Rock and Prefuse 73, all of which are on the car CD player now. Then yesterday I bought a Snoop Dogg CD….oh no, hip hop is tightening its grip on my musical life!

Nevertheless, Sun Ra’s ‘Life is Splendid’ is what I’m listening to as I write this, the atmosphere of which makes me think of Richie Hawtin’s club mixes, so perhaps things aren’t so bad. I’m not trapped in a single musical dimension again….at least not for a while.