This thing would probably be better if it actually went somewhere. But if it did go somewhere and weaved around building to climaxes and quiet moments I'd be sitting here wishing it was braver and just stuck to the best moment over and over. And having heard it now for a couple of minutes non-stop I realise that it does go places, it's very subtle and you'd need to love it with the tolerance of a good mother for her annoying young son - I have that tolerance, I am this son's mother - you of course are not and will quite wisely pass over this one very quickly.
That doesn't matter. No one comes to Bandcamp for the music anymore anyway. I come here every morning and click on the scores of emails from musos alerting me to their new releases - none of them seem especially upset that I pass on by in a second - it's just that I've decided to catch up on the 9 external hard-drives full of about ten terabytes of music that I have already - I've just googled the following question and got the following answer =
"How much music can be stored on 1tb?
"A terabyte drive can hold about 330,000 3MB photos or 250,000 MP3 files. (At 4 minutes per song, that's a million minutes of music, or 16,666 hours, or 694 days, or almost two whole years of uninterrupted listening pleasure.)"
So my nine boxes already amount to about 20 years of non-stop music. It's fortunate that I'm the sort of music fan who instantly knows what they like - I'm not one of those people who needs to hear a track ten times before I know if I like it or not. At present my habits are such that I guess I hear an average of about 2 hours of hard-drive music per day. So I have enough music for the next 200 years before I need to start hearing anything a second time.
So no, I don't come to Bandcamp for more music. Though it's a habit that's hard to shake and I do still seem to be acquiring more each day. Perhaps about ten albums per day ...... oh lord, what a cluttered mess my life has become. My hard-drives are nicely stored in a smart little cardboard box and they give me joy so I don't think Marie Kondo would be cross with me. She'd be crosser at me I think for the hundreds and hundreds and hundreds (literally) of books I have which I will never have time to read, or the hundreds (literally) of maps I have of places I'll never visit. I should've started this life with all this clutter and then experienced the joy of slow disposal, not be finishing life with all this clutter after a lifetime of joyless acquisition.
I'm being unfair on myself a bit - a few times in my life I've had the Year Zero thing and got rid of everything. I do mean everything. The 8 months when I was homeless and only owned a pot to piss in, about 7 years ago, now seem like the happiest time of my life. Truly. I hope to be brave enough to do it again sometime. Forever.
Even in these days of acquiring nothing physical ever again I do break down. Yesterday I went to Smiths in the high street to buy some stamps and on the way out of course passed the Wire, and of course ended up buying it. This seems to happen every month - I do seem to quite enjoy it - even though as an old person I find its credulous believing-everything-the-creepy-lecturer-tells-me tone hilariously naff - it's a bit like a BBC journo interviewing Elon Musk, only without Elon Musk - so you're just getting the nervy stuttering Kumbaya consensus over and over.
A month or two ago the Wire came with one of its CD Tapper things stuck to the front. Of course I rushed back home and played it - I always want to find out what the new successful musicians are doing, so that I can copy them and become successful too. Well, as usual, they all seem to be making lots of humming noises. That's fine. So do I. My failure to network or to be personally engaging or to keep a straight face while a BBC journo stutters the new consensus about my privileges and how they've gifted me my unearned success in the music world blah blah blah - well I will say that the latest Tapper did come in a very attractive yellow and green cardboard cover.
The CD has vanished, but the cardboard cover is making a perfect coaster up here by the computer. As such, it has already lasted longer than any of my music or anything I have ever done or wanted to do, I just want everything to vanish, for some neutron shockwave to erase the internet and everything on my hard-drives and this computer and every phone - all that remains will be my beautiful coaster and the freedom to leave the house at last, leaving the crowded south, maybe leaving the country for the first time ever, somewhere out there there must surely be someone who's prepared to put down their phone and talk to me, I'd make them laugh when I told them that I once tried to make music.
........................
cover = Harold Pinter's house in Worthing 1962-64, photo by Vanessa Oliver, this week
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