Spare Oom Unplugged (sort of)
Dec. 11th, 2023 08:32 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jon_chaissonIt's been a weird week in which I'm not listening to my mp3 collection. It's sitting safely on one of my externals, but I just don't have any of them plugged in right now. I mean, I could plug them in and spend part of my day off today adding new things and listening to whatever comes to mind, but I'm actively choosing not to. And that's something I haven't done in ages.
Instead I'm just listening semi-passively to whatever KEXP is playing right now, and I'm fine with that. In fact it's something that's a long time in coming: simply enjoying listening to music rather than manically obsessing over collecting and curating it. I'm well aware that I've been doing the latter for too long and I'd been trying to find ways to back out of it. It seems detox was the only answer, looks like! Heh.
Seriously, though: I've been thinking a lot about how my connection with music has evolved over the years. Sure, I'm proud of my ridiculously huge collection -- I'd wanted this sort of thing since I was a little kid -- but in the end the collecting was taking over the enjoyment of it and that was really starting to bother me over the last year or so. Like I'd forgotten how music resonated with me (pardon the pun), and I really wanted to remember and relearn that. This was one of the reasons I'd created the kind of playlist I did for Queen Ophelia's War: I wanted it to emulate that feeling I'd get when I used to listen to Cocteau Twins -- finding myself deep in a sprawling forest, away from civilization but not exactly alone. I found that I really missed that level of immersion, and obsessive collecting had been the biggest thing obscuring that.
So I'm taking this time to unplug, to detox, to just...immerse myself in the sounds again. To remember how to do that again.
Instead I'm just listening semi-passively to whatever KEXP is playing right now, and I'm fine with that. In fact it's something that's a long time in coming: simply enjoying listening to music rather than manically obsessing over collecting and curating it. I'm well aware that I've been doing the latter for too long and I'd been trying to find ways to back out of it. It seems detox was the only answer, looks like! Heh.
Seriously, though: I've been thinking a lot about how my connection with music has evolved over the years. Sure, I'm proud of my ridiculously huge collection -- I'd wanted this sort of thing since I was a little kid -- but in the end the collecting was taking over the enjoyment of it and that was really starting to bother me over the last year or so. Like I'd forgotten how music resonated with me (pardon the pun), and I really wanted to remember and relearn that. This was one of the reasons I'd created the kind of playlist I did for Queen Ophelia's War: I wanted it to emulate that feeling I'd get when I used to listen to Cocteau Twins -- finding myself deep in a sprawling forest, away from civilization but not exactly alone. I found that I really missed that level of immersion, and obsessive collecting had been the biggest thing obscuring that.
So I'm taking this time to unplug, to detox, to just...immerse myself in the sounds again. To remember how to do that again.
