Welcome to my world

So I want to be a blogger! Perhaps an explanation is in order for an urge to contribute to the burgeoning mass of text on the internet.

Last year my wife and I moved to a house about a third smaller than the one we had built and in which we had lived for nearly a decade. One of the biggest consequences of the move was that I had to pare down a fairly large collection of recorded music, which in this case meant selling off my entire vinyl collection, over two thousand items. Where I had a fairly large basement before for the music collection, now I have a smallish office, which also holds my piano and computer studio. The CD cases line the walls, and there isn’t much room for expansion.

I admit that I was (am?) a compulsive collector of recorded music, but this realization was brought home to me by a major acquisition run at a couple of Bay Area Amoeba stores in August, and as of New Years, I still have CDs from that run that I haven’t heard yet. Clearly, something must be done to slow the growth.

The behavioral change with which I will address the collection will be to write about new acquisitions, and perhaps even some older ones, in an effort to process them, rather than simply accumulate them. My tastes are eclectic, with a leaning towards ambient music, drones and a revisiting of the classical music that was so much a part of my younger life (but this doesn’t exhaust the genres of new releases). I’m an emusic subscriber and an iTunes user. I play classical piano and practice sound manipulation on the computer. I have written reviews for various online publications, including allmusic.com and, most recently, Ambient Visions.

Welcome to my world.