Time Capsule

Late last night, while I was looking for something else - I don't remember what now and it doesn't matter - I came across a box that I immediately recognized but hadn't considered for a while.  The box contained literally hundreds of handmade CDs (handmade as in I burned them myself, not that I manufacture my own compact discs).  Looking through them, I realized they were a veritable if inadvertent time capsule, documenting my changing tastes in music from 2000 up to 2014, but with a particular focus on the transitional years 2007 to 2010.

Short background - I've managed to download a lot of music over the years, and back in earlier times, computers didn't exactly have the one-, two- and more terabyte hard drives they have today.  Storage space was a precious commodity, so I had to burn music to CDs in order to clear space for new music.  But usually, as soon as something got burned, it was immediately forgotten, and eventually I just put the stacks of CDs away in a box, generally out of sight and out of mind until last night. 

Also, it's not that I don't buy and own hundreds of music CDs in addition to the hard-drive-clearing download project.  My CD collection (I'm guessing 800 to 1000 discs) dates back to the early 90s and fills an entire bookcase in a closet (see above), and this is after years of buying and then ultimately selling easily that many vinyl LPs from the 60s through the 80s, and then a not inconsiderable investment in cassette tape (easier for listening to in the car) during the transition years.

It took a while to sort through everything in the box and to recall the various projects and schemes I had employed back in the day.  There are at least four or five different series of CDs to the massive collection, and after I had gotten it all sorted out and chrono-numerically arranged (the anal-retentive archivist in me did an admirable job of documenting the discs, if I should say so myself), I was impressed by the diversity and breadth of the composite collections.     

The first series was designated by Roman numerals and stored in jewel cases.  Volume I was burned to a rewritable CD between February and April 2000, and is a pretty mixed-up affair.  It apparently contains whatever music I could find to download at the beginning of the millennium, and this includes some of the very first songs that I'd heard in the MP3 format.  But Volume I is all over the map and includes the funky Calypso Minor by Abdullah Ibraham, and Steely Dan's 2000 comeback album Two Against Nature (the very first album I ever downloaded in its entirety, and I remember that back in the days of 256-k dial-up modems it took me an entire weekend to download the entire thing).  It also has the Pink Floyd soundtrack to the film More (probably another weekend project), some blues, some reggae, some jazz, including Joe Farrell's Follow Your Heart, a song I had forgotten about but I now remember holds deep emotional resonance for me - another post for another day, I suppose.  Meanwhile, here's Ibraham's Calypso Minor with it's way laid-back bass line.

Volume I also contains Joni Mitchell's Coyote for some reason, as well as some bootleg live Frank Zappa, a single Brian Eno ambient composition, three Mongo Santamaria songs, and some random soundtracks beyond the Pink Floyd album, including some classic science fiction scores like Forbidden Planet and even some of that 70s wah-wah, porno-film soundtrack music.  Literally.  If you ever want to hear the love theme from Deep Throat, I've got it. To be honest, for all it's eclecticism, it's actually a pretty interesting CD, and I've already copied it onto my hard drive (from hard drive it came and from hard drive it shall return) for later listening.

There's ostensibly 162 volumes to the first series alone, from Volume I to Volume CLXII, which would be pretty heroic use of Roman numerology if I hadn't messed up in some places.  For example, I went from Volume XXII right to Volume XXXIII apparently without noticing the extra X in XXXIII, or else I'm missing Volumes XXIII through XXXII.  My guess is a typographical error on my part that just got carried forward to the next discs in the series, so there's most likely only 152 volumes to the series.  There are probably other errors in the series too, but who's got time to check 162 (or 152) Roman numerals? 

Randomly jumping somewhere into the middle of the series, Volume LXXVII (77) was apparently burned on July 25, 2002 (my 48th birthday).  Like most of the other CDs, it's more organized than the random songs of Volume 1 and consists of six jazz CDs.  It contains For Losers by Archie Shepp, Mercy, Mercy, Mercy by the Cannonball Adderley Quartet, I Hate to Sing by Carla Bley, Skateboard Park by Joe Ferrell, The Heart of Things by John McLaughlin, and a 41-song compilation of jazz-funk songs called Organic Grooves, featuring artists such as Les McCann, Sun Ra, Ray Barretto, Willie Bobo, Sly and the Family Stone, Randy Weston, and Kenny Burrell, and even Julie Driscoll's Season of the Witch.  Oh look - it's even got South Africa's Dudu Pukwana!  Cool!

There was one big change, though, after Volume LXXVII.  After that volume, instead of storing the burned CDs in those clunky jewel cases, I started storing them in the slimmer thin cases and printing adhesive labels that went directly onto the discs themselves instead of inserts that were slid into the jewel cases.  Over time, however, the labels developed little air pockets or frayed edges, and even the slightest imperfection to the label renders a disc unable to spin properly at the 500-plus rpms that CD-players use, and the music can't be accessed.  So I may never know what's on some of those CDs. 

What's more, in these days of streaming media, cloud storage, and thumb drives and portable hard drives (and reportedly the return of the vinyl format because why not?), not all computers even have CD players any more.  My time-capsule CD collection may become as antiquated and obsolete as my former cassette tape collection, which I frankly just simply threw away one day out of frustration that there was no longer anything available on which to play them.   

But anyway, Volume CLXII (162), the last disc of the first series, was burned on May 11, 2005, and consists entirely of what's been called lounge or chill music, more specifically several compilations by French DJ Claude Challe of Buddha Bar fame.  While I know that the entire Buddha Bar series is somewhere in these disks, the Claude Challe albums on Volume CLXII are some of his other output, including the two-disc Flying Carpet collection, Out of Phase (subtitled N.E.W. Sound Experience), the two-disc Nirvana Lounge, the one-disc Near Eastern Lounge, and something called Claude Challe Presents Karmix - Kuon Ganjo (every Zen Buddhist should recognize the latter name as Master Dogan's Genjo Koan).  To be clear, this is chill/lounge music, not to be confused with New Age (although it's probably accessible to New Age fans).  The music doesn't play very well on my laptop because the adhesive label messes up the CD play, but as with Volume I, the files can be transferred to a hard drive and enjoyed from there. 

So that's the first series.  I can anticipate many, many hours spent exploring whatever it was that I burned onto those CDs. 

I apparently rebooted the numbering system for the second series, getting rid of the awkward Roman numerals and designating the dics MP3s0001 through MP3s0063.  Even without the Roman numerals, though, I still somehow managed to mess up the numerical sequence a couple of times. For example, there's two MP3s0018 and there's a five-CD gap for some reason between MP3s0046 and MP3s0052. 

MP3s0001 was burned on October 1, 2005 and apparently starts at the end of the alphabet, as it consists entirely of songs by the avant-garde dark-ambient/industrial band Zoviet France.  More specifically, it contains Popular Soviet Songs and Youth Music (1985), Misfits, Loony Tunes and Squall (1986), Gesture Signal Threat (1986), A Flock of Rotations (1987), Look Into Me (1999), and What Is Not True (1993).  Decades later, this music is still very cool although incredibly inaccessible, but my point is the new series was off to a good start.

MP3s0063, the last of the series, was burned on December 9, 2012 and contains music likely more familiar to readers of this blog.  More specifically, it contains Drawing Down the Moon by Azure Ray, Water Curses and Transverse Temporal Gyrus by Animal Collective,  People Who Can Eat People by the Andrew Jackson Jihad, Before Today by Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti, Into Vision by The Art of Noise, and five separate LPs and EPs by Andrew Bird.  Obviously, I was clearing the albums off from my hard drive in alphabetical order, and this was the "A" list.

So that's a lot of music. On average, each CD holds between six and seven LPs, and between the two collections, there's something like 200 CDs (taking the numerical errors into consideration). That's, um, like 1,200 to 1,400 albums.  

But all that's only about two-thirds of what was in the time-capsule.  There were also about 66 or 67 CDs that each contain one album by the prolific German electronic musician Peter Namlook, including some very rare and hard-to-find albums.  ACtually, all his albums are rare and hard to find.  There's several complete box-set collections of John Coltrane, specifically the 17-CD (!) Complete Prestige Recordings, the seven-CD Complete Atlantic Recordings, and the eight-CD Complete Impulse Studio Recordings.  So if you're ever in the mood to hear practically everything John Coltrane ever recorded, you've got a friend.  I've got the discs if you bring the absinthe.

But it's the last part of the collection that most resembles a time capsule and not just a music library of staggering proportions.  During the time I was collecting all the music and burning all those CDs, I was also curating a private collection of chronologic "Best Of" collections.  The earliest ones are titled 2006-2007 Retrospective, Parts 1 and 2, which are pretty embarrassing to listen to now - it's all Top 40 pop and hip-hop, and includes lots of 50 Cent, Justin Timberlake, Brand New Heavies, Kanye, Ludacris, Mary J. Blige, Rihanna, Chili Peppers, Black Eyed Peas, Linkin Park, Maroon Five, and yes, there's even some Nickelback on there. To be sure, that's NOT what I was listening to at the time, but lost in my own world of jazz, industrial and electronic music, I was pretty out of touch with what was happening at the time in contemporary music.  But why, I wonder, do I insist on being so honest in this blog?  It would be so much more gratifying to either deny the existence of  2006-2007 Retrospective, Parts 1 and 2, or simply lie and say it contained all Pavement and Luna and early Animal Collective and Spoon recordings.  

A sister volume, Retrospective I and II:  2006-2007, is recorded in audio format (as opposed to MP3) for playing on the car stereo, but the 30 or so songs are all listed as "Track 1," "Track 2," etc., and I can't tell what they are without playing each one individually and then relying on memory and recognition to identify them (that, and SoundHound)  The few tracks I did play turned out to be Gorillaz' Feel Good Inc. and Diddy's Last Night (featuring Keyshia Cole), which are far from the worst songs on the larger retrospective, so my taste in selection is at least partially vindicated.

Anyway, this last group of 40-or-so CDs are a mix of audio and MP3 formats, with titles like New Music 2007 Volumes 1 through 7, 2007 Hip-Hop & Alt (I and II), Greatest Hits of 2007, and More Hits From 2007. There's eight CDs each titled New Music 2008, as well as New Music July 2008, New Music September 2008 (Discs 1 and 2), two CDs each labeled New Music 10-04-2008, and two CDs labeled New Music December 2008, and of course Best of 2008 - Volume I: A-K and Volume II: L-Z.

As you can probably guess, these are followed by New Music volumes for February, March, May (2 CDs), September, and November 2009, as well as New Music 12-19-09 and 12-24-09.  After New Music March 2010, the titles changed format a little and we have Retired Tunes - Favorite Singles & Downloads 2010-2011, and Parts I and II of KEXP Songs of the Day - October 2008 through January 2012.  We have New Music 2013, three volumes of New Music 2014, and 2014 Singles A-l and M-Z.  After that, there's a few compilation CDs of specific albums selected for listening to while driving. 

Taken as a whole, these CDs document my growing awareness of the indie rock renaissance of the mid- to late-aughts and a transition away from the hip-hop and Top 40 of the earlier part of the decade to my current, if still eclectic, taste for folk-, punk- and post-rock. Unfortunately, it also documents a transition away from a lot of African-American artists to almost exclusively white musicians, but the unbearable whiteness of indie is a topic for another post on another day. 

And that, my friends, is a boatload of music.  It's overwhelming and there's no way I can listen to it all or even to one select subset of the CDs (the Coltrane box sets alone would probably take a month to listen to completely).  On top of all that, there's still my actual CD collection (pictured at the top of this post), live music, streaming music, and every other format under god. At this point, I'm actually somewhat grateful that radio's no longer a viable medium for new music - one less format to have to consider.

Sorry that this post is so long, but as they say, I didn't have time to write a shorter version.