The Hunt Is Over. Finally.
That's quite a weird thing to say for someone like me who's been on the hunt for new music for the most part of his life. A fascination which started in the late 80s after discovering AcidHouse, NuBeat, Agreppo and SynthPop at primary school age before becoming a dedicated raver and die-hard fan of electronic music a few years later before stepping into the public light as a DJ in 1997. DJ'ing and hosting radio shows have been a main focus for me for almost 30 years even though - especially in the post pandemic period - they've become less important due to a growing feel of disconnect with most of the electronic music scene, a change in attitude within it, and for the most part a lack of communication skills in bookers, venues and event promoters as well as a lack of reliability - not necessarily in financial terms but in a broader, more general sense and therefore an ever growing feel of being fed up with people and a growing unwillingness to deal with bullshit. The latter is one of the reasons I finally decided to call it quits when it came to working shifts at the record store I used to work at in late 2k24 after more than 25 years.
Whatever this scene had become, I didn't want nothing to do with it anymore. I still felt love for the music, even though the popular trends had never really interested me and I've always rather explored the harsher and more experimental underground things. I had stopped going out to clubs a long time ago when DJ'ing went digital and I had built what I'd always called 'my own bubble' of close friends and artists which seemed to exist in an entirely different universe than the rest of the so-called 'scene'. This bubble still exists and I'm absolutely happy with this tightly knit network of like-minded outsiders and an infrastructure of websites, labels, social media channels, merch and a global distribution partner who's able to get our releases to record stores and online vendors basically everywhere in the world - Australia, China, Japan, the US, UK, all over Europe, you name it. Yet, with all that being said I still felt the urge to hunt for new music on a daily - hundreds of open tabs in a browser filled with DJ mixes I still felt I needed to listen to. Daily stops on Soundcloud to listen to new tracks and podcasts. And - working a dayjob in a vinyl distributors warehouse and physically coming across hundreds and hundreds of freshly released imports resulted in adding a weekly average of fifty plus records to my ever growing Discogs wantlist which soon exceeded my already vast collection in numbers by far. The interest was there, the love for the music still is.
But something changed. The hunt for new music started to feel like a daily grind. FOMO set in. Also the realization that financial resources - and probably the part of my lifespan still ahead... - wouldn't be ever enough to acquire and listen to all the records sitting on my wantlist right now. Or to fully honour the majority of the multi-thousands of sound carriers I do already own. A two metrical ton archive of vinyl records, CDs, tapes and floppy disks, probably hundreds of DJ mixes and other unreleased demos on CD-r as well. Which probably all need to be listened to, catalogued and evaluated a new at some point. So I just stopped. Not entirely but I radically cut back on buying new music and decided to focus on backwards completing my collection and archives for the most part. I don't miss the FOMO and the hunt. At this point I don't really need more music right now. I don't even miss being on the DJ and radio circuit and my return to it is rather unlikely at this point in time. And it feels rather freeing and liberating.
So what does all of this mean? And why am I even posting this?
- For this website not much will change. I do enjoy the regular influx of new music and the process of writing reviews which will be and remain the main focus of this operation. So keep on hitting me with promos - probably at a new address soon - and I'll continue to review those. Probably I might even be going back to write reviews for other publications as well in the future. Yet I might even start to implement other content, commentary, thoughts, observations and other things on here as well as interests are shifting and new things start to inspire me more and more - e.g. I feel myself drawn to abstract art, architecture, film and design rather than to music x vinyl related posts on Instagram recently which some of you might have already seen being reflected in my stories feed.
- The Youtube channel will continue to operate, yet also covering a broader spectrum of topics and probably further exploring the shorts format.
- I even feel the desire to dive deeper into Tumblr culture again and go with whatever sparks my curiousity over there.
- Musically I see myself turning more towards experimental, harsh, unformatted electronic music again - with an ever growing interest in Goth, Industrial, EBM, Minimal Wave, PostPunk, Ingenious Dilletantes and reissues of early experiments in those styles. The curiosity about the dancefloor x club music aspect will most likely be covered by a retiring DJ's vinyl collection I'll be taking over which will also be the foundation of increasing Discogs sales activities on my part. Also two further CD collections I've taken over, including both a ton of electronic music promo CDs and a few hundred Library Music CD albums, will provide me with plenty of music to explore for a foreseeable future.
- The future main focus clearly lies on my label Intrauterin Recordings and its subsidiaries which will most likely resume new release activities within a 6-24 months time frame, with prioritized focus on a backlog of still unreleased music. Studio sessions and the creation of new music are halted for now until most of the backlog has been taken care of. Exceptions might occur for dedicated commission works, remixes and x or physical releases on other labels.
That's the news. For now.
Whatever this scene had become, I didn't want nothing to do with it anymore. I still felt love for the music, even though the popular trends had never really interested me and I've always rather explored the harsher and more experimental underground things. I had stopped going out to clubs a long time ago when DJ'ing went digital and I had built what I'd always called 'my own bubble' of close friends and artists which seemed to exist in an entirely different universe than the rest of the so-called 'scene'. This bubble still exists and I'm absolutely happy with this tightly knit network of like-minded outsiders and an infrastructure of websites, labels, social media channels, merch and a global distribution partner who's able to get our releases to record stores and online vendors basically everywhere in the world - Australia, China, Japan, the US, UK, all over Europe, you name it. Yet, with all that being said I still felt the urge to hunt for new music on a daily - hundreds of open tabs in a browser filled with DJ mixes I still felt I needed to listen to. Daily stops on Soundcloud to listen to new tracks and podcasts. And - working a dayjob in a vinyl distributors warehouse and physically coming across hundreds and hundreds of freshly released imports resulted in adding a weekly average of fifty plus records to my ever growing Discogs wantlist which soon exceeded my already vast collection in numbers by far. The interest was there, the love for the music still is.
But something changed. The hunt for new music started to feel like a daily grind. FOMO set in. Also the realization that financial resources - and probably the part of my lifespan still ahead... - wouldn't be ever enough to acquire and listen to all the records sitting on my wantlist right now. Or to fully honour the majority of the multi-thousands of sound carriers I do already own. A two metrical ton archive of vinyl records, CDs, tapes and floppy disks, probably hundreds of DJ mixes and other unreleased demos on CD-r as well. Which probably all need to be listened to, catalogued and evaluated a new at some point. So I just stopped. Not entirely but I radically cut back on buying new music and decided to focus on backwards completing my collection and archives for the most part. I don't miss the FOMO and the hunt. At this point I don't really need more music right now. I don't even miss being on the DJ and radio circuit and my return to it is rather unlikely at this point in time. And it feels rather freeing and liberating.
So what does all of this mean? And why am I even posting this?
- For this website not much will change. I do enjoy the regular influx of new music and the process of writing reviews which will be and remain the main focus of this operation. So keep on hitting me with promos - probably at a new address soon - and I'll continue to review those. Probably I might even be going back to write reviews for other publications as well in the future. Yet I might even start to implement other content, commentary, thoughts, observations and other things on here as well as interests are shifting and new things start to inspire me more and more - e.g. I feel myself drawn to abstract art, architecture, film and design rather than to music x vinyl related posts on Instagram recently which some of you might have already seen being reflected in my stories feed.
- The Youtube channel will continue to operate, yet also covering a broader spectrum of topics and probably further exploring the shorts format.
- I even feel the desire to dive deeper into Tumblr culture again and go with whatever sparks my curiousity over there.
- Musically I see myself turning more towards experimental, harsh, unformatted electronic music again - with an ever growing interest in Goth, Industrial, EBM, Minimal Wave, PostPunk, Ingenious Dilletantes and reissues of early experiments in those styles. The curiosity about the dancefloor x club music aspect will most likely be covered by a retiring DJ's vinyl collection I'll be taking over which will also be the foundation of increasing Discogs sales activities on my part. Also two further CD collections I've taken over, including both a ton of electronic music promo CDs and a few hundred Library Music CD albums, will provide me with plenty of music to explore for a foreseeable future.
- The future main focus clearly lies on my label Intrauterin Recordings and its subsidiaries which will most likely resume new release activities within a 6-24 months time frame, with prioritized focus on a backlog of still unreleased music. Studio sessions and the creation of new music are halted for now until most of the backlog has been taken care of. Exceptions might occur for dedicated commission works, remixes and x or physical releases on other labels.
That's the news. For now.
posted by baze.djunkiii at 1:31 PM
2 Comments:
I definitely identify with the tone of this post. My volume of sound carriers is maybe 1/6th the size of yours, and I struggle to listen to it all. I didn't pick up any records in January (just CDs) but just got back from a week in Toyko where I picked up six 7" records and 4 CDs. There's a lot of music out in the world and I'm drawn to taste as much of it as I can. I step outside my typical wheelhouse as often as I can. Good stuff!
curious to see what you picked up in tokyo, m8! my angle might be subject to change in the future but at this point in time i simply need to pursue different avenues which are more fulfilling. and that's where the focus on label work comes in.
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