Yoshimi "Two" (Ecstatic Peace)

My friend Timmy (not his real name -- I'm guessing he would not be particularly excited to have our association discussed publicly) bought me this record sometime around August 1994. The summer after our first year of college (at separate institutes) we lived in a tiny, awful apartment on Broadway and 123rd Street. It was infested with rats and cockroaches, had no A/C, and the only window looked out into the airshaft that collected the sounds of all of the music students who lived in adjoining buildings practicing at the same time. The apartment might have fit two comfortably, but there were four of us, plus a constant stream of guests (including two long-distance girlfriends). It was miserable. We also were living miserly (Timmy was working an unpaid internship, I was making minimum wage at a video store in Greenwich Village and was pretty miserly anyway), and sustained ourselves on rice, Malta Goya and a bunch of ice cream bars that I got to take home the day the freezer conked out at my video store.

I made a lot of noise about not getting anything for my birthday, being an insufferably sensitive type, and I think Timmy's girlfriend told him that he might want to get me something so I'd shut up.

I was pretty excited about this. The Boredoms were a huge deal for me and Timmy. We came across "Soul Discharge" during one of many fool's quests (this one: to acquire every record released on Kramer's Shimmy Disc label), and it knocked our socks off. It indirectly exposed us to noise music as well as we then started to try to acquire every available release by the Boredoms and affiliated acts (a difficult and costly task -- I recall paying over $20 for the disappointing Audio Sports CD), which lead to Hanatarash, which lead to Beast 666 Tapes, which lead to Merzbow, etc. etc. etc.

I couldn't really get into Yoshimi's previous project Free Kitten (never really got Kim Gordon -- Sonic Youth has yet to click with me) (Wikipedia says this was a Kim Gordon-Julia Cafritz project that Yoshimi joined later, which may be true but is not how I recall it). This record worked, though -- it was closer to the trash-garbage aesthetic of other Boredoms side projects (rather than the trash-raunch of Free Kitten). It's also an extremely short record, which I respect. The best thing about experimental/noise music is knowing when to call it a day.

Timmy got me another record that summer but I can't recall what it was.

The Seekers "Georgy Girl" (Capitol)

I'm very glad this was my first randomly-generated item in my collection, because it goes way back into my past. In fact, I first heard this record on 8-track. My friend Ben and I had claimed a small room in his attic as our "clubhouse" type space, and had put a few of his parents discarded apparatus there for our use, including an 8-track machine. As far as I recall, the only 8-track we had was "Georgy Girl" by the Seekers. We didn't give monkeys about the music -- in fact, I think our shared interests at the time were limited to old stand-up comedy records -- but thought it was cool to switch from track to track in the middle of a song.

I should mention that I was a couple of years older than Ben, and pointlessly cruel to him. I honestly believed that since I was picked on so much by my peers I could legitimately pick on others. I still feel bad about that.

I really can't be bothered to go back to listen to this record. I consider myself something of an expert in 60's music (the bulk of my collection dates from 1965-1973) and to me the Seekers (or, at least, my memory thereof) represent everything that sucks about the path folk music took to arrive at what we now consider rock music. Folk made an uncomfortable transition from coffeehouse to fraternity house while it was simultaneously being reworked into folk-rock and psychedelic music. To my mind, the Seekers represent the former. Too upbeat, a la the New Christy Minstrels, not somber or self-aware enough as good folk music should be. What makes this all the worse is that the record acknowledges its awareness of the latter development -- it covers "Turn, Turn, Turn" (two years after the release of the Byrds's seminal version), and Tom Paxton's brilliant "The Last Thing on My Mind" (one of the most covered songs of the era, which I used to sing to my daughter Addison until I realized how depressing it was and replaced it with the even bleaker "Wild World" by Cat Stevens).

What's most surprising to me is that this record came out in 1967, which is long after I assumed that popular culture lost the naive innocence that the Seekers represent to me. I'm also glad to learn that the Seekers came from Australia, which I didn't know.

At what point does "a lot" become "too many"?

Or, more to the point, at what point does a problem become a Problem?

I have over 9,000 "records" (see below) at present, and see no end in sight -- in fact, my life's ambition is to listen to every piece of music ever recorded, ever, which sets the bar rather high and requires both (1) an impressive lifespan or (2) the sudden cessation of all future efforts to memorialize musical compositions. I persist in the belief that both of these contingencies may well occur.

Of course, there's listening and there's Listening -- I could have music running throughout the day (and I come pretty close) in order to get through as much as possible, listening to everything just once, but then there's the problem of not really letting anything click, not really processing anything. And so, being somewhat inclined toward obsessive-compulsive behavior, I've devised systems, which involve, without going into unnecessary detail, some of the tracking features in iTunes (e.g., Play Count and Last Played) to ensure that I've given just the proper amount of attention to the music that enters my collection (see below).

And yet systems are really not enough. It's difficult, and possibly unhealthy, to take this all in without some sort of outlet. That outlet used to be pretty much anyone who would listen, without regard to their genuine level of interest -- which has mostly been curbed, but even now when my sister's boyfriend mentions that he liked something he heard on my computer (The Leaves) while he was looking after my daughter, he gets an earful about how they recorded one of the first versions of "Hey Joe" well before Jimi Hendrix etc. etc. etc. (As a side note, the authorship of "Hey Joe" is a hotly contested subject, but is historically attributed to William Moses Roberts -- 2/3ds of which is the name of my paternal grandfather.)

So what I've decided to do, to get something out of my pointlessly large record collection, and to avoid internalizing all of this information, and, selfishly, to try to better get a sense of why I'm not content with the 4 days of music on my hard drive that I still haven't listened to, I've decided on this: as often as possible, I will randomly (see below) pick a record (again, see below) from my collection and post something or other about it here.

A few notes:

I have two Excel files (one for 60's music, one for everything else) that list every record in my collection (excepting most of my cassettes and 45's acquired before I started compiling this list in the early aughts). (In fact, I don't really feel like any of my cassettes are part of my "collection," which is why I painstakingly converted a number of them to MP3 format until I admitted to myself that the sound quality sucked and that I'd be better off seeking out better versions. But I did burn almost every actual vinyl album in my collection during the first six months of the life of my daughter Addison while I was sitting around the house all the time.) My plan is to use a random number generator to choose a record from that list for comment.

A definitional matter: I am using the word "record" to mean "publicly available musical release." I was toying with "commercially" rather than "publicly," but a substantial part of my collection is not and was never really "commercially" available. The language is awkward, I know, but I like the idea of someone making a release available to the public better than it simply be putting it into the stream of commerce anyway -- I exchanged a lot of music that way in high school and college and like the idea of someone just wanting their efforts to be out there somewhere. (That said, for the purposes of locating things in my collection -- which I correlate to CDR or DVDR numbers -- I've burned a number of demos or recording sessions by my old bands which have found their way onto my Excel files, which skews the estimate of the number of "records" in my collection somewhat.) I toyed with the idea of "releases" rather than "records" but that just sounds ugly. "Albums" was quickly ruled out because I have a number of 45's, both in "hard copy" and on CDR, and I think those legitimately qualify for inclusion on my list. So, despite my penchant for unnecessary accuracy, "records" it is.

Finally, I do not pretend to be a music critic. This is really all about me. Also, I have a really crummy ear. I cannot tell the difference between and LP and an MP3. I used to sell used records for a living, and I would tell people that records sounded "warmer" than CDs and all that hooey but the fact of the matter is it all sounds the same to me. So be it.

Yours,

Matt