Your opinion, please: 366-band, 411 track 1981 box set

This thing about Elvis and black music is a canard. To my ears, Elvis was equally influenced by country music and Dean Martin as he was by Big Mama Thornton. But that's a whole nother discussion.

Again, I'm not carping or complaining. This set is a public service.

I really appreciate your perspective. What you're saying is fascinating to me, actually--in fact, what you say confirms my suspicions about the ways in which my views might be skewed by knowing the whole era/sphere pretty much from the music only. It doesn't surprise me at all, really, that the musicians may have been able to make leaps that their audience were not. It seems a pretty common occurance that eclectic musicians are doomed to end up serving as "translators" for less eclectic fans, somehow making music said fans otherwise might not try easily digested. It's a shame to think this was the case even in so wide-ranging a sphere as the "post-punk" milieu; it's been my complaint about all this current "dance-punk"/"post-punk revivalist" stuff: the bands involved may know their roots and their roots' roots (I'm in no position to say); but I've met many a young kid who simply feels he doesn't need PigBag, because he has his !!!. I'm ambivalent, because I think the best music is made by those who're most aware of their forbears but least worshipful of them; and like I said before, I deeply resist the concept that there's any "pure" music in the pop world.

$11.50 plus postage. It costs you what it costs me.

The vast majority of the stuff on this thing is not new to me, but as a collector of the era I gotta make sure I cover all the bases. Nice to see you've got some good old fashioned early 4AD stuff in there, too!

Several people called Mark emailed me, but your email address here isn't on my list.

I've got a Gary at an .au email, so I think you're in ; )

i didn't get a reply though...

i was 18 in 1981. its kind of a "out of home go crazy" year for me.

Hmm. Does your last name start with an L? I've got the reply I sent you in my "sent" box, Thursday 10:21 pm

Bimble ---

Very sorry, friend. I don't know how I could've missed it if I got it.

Yeah, I've got you, too. Both you and Mully were amongst the very first few, sent you a reply 10 minutes before Mully. I hope this Lycos thing is reliable. . . I've taken emails from 65 people here, and I've replied to every one of them, by my account. . .

I admit I don't share the nostalgia for vinyl of many; nor do I have any evidence that, on your average player, it is a "superior" format. Honestly, when kids spinning shit over thrift store systems tell me that, I have to try hard not to laugh. I do prefer vinyl sleeves, obviously (LP anyway). That said, when something's only available on vinyl, that's how I'll get it if I need it. I tend to avoid ammassing too much vinyl, though, because it takes up so much space. I'm able to keep about 2,000 CDs in nice black binders in a locker (literally a high scool locker) in my closet; I couldn't live in my place if I had 2,000 LPs.

Conversely, I'm a huge fan of the democratising effect of the CD-R. Talk about "it was easy, it was cheap"! Sure, some store-bought CD-R with one of those horrible "mini-cases" will make an awful artefact; but done right, they can be reasonably attractive.

Anyway, thanks again. Good luck with the deluge of e-mail. Hopefully, nothing crashes! Oh, and if you are able to add me to a waiting list sometime in the next year or two, that would be awesome!

Thanks so much. Really, the kindness everyone who's contacte me has shown has been inspirational. I honestly posted here a bit trepedatiously--I'd heard rather lofty things about the place, and had a minor notion I'd get told what poor choices I'd made, what I'd missed, etc. To a (wo)man, from music editors to teenaged kids, everyone has been very complimentary. I hope everyone feels the same way when they've been digesting the mixes!

Re: the physical object, yeah, I'll always want one. Truth is, at this point, I've begun thinking of the actual discs as permanent "back-ups". I got a 250GB HD about a year and a half ago, and a 100GB portable mp3 player about six months ago, and they've radically changed the way I listen to my music (for the better). It's a far cry from the romanticism of turning the LP over halfway through, but gosh--being able to put a lifetime of music *on random* is pretty awe-inspiring. It's made me feel that my constant rationalisation for my record-buying habits---that I was "building a library" to last a lifetime---wasn't just a convenient justification. I really do love it all, things I haven't heard in years. I'm a traditionalist in many, many ways--but I'm becoming a modernist in regards to music making/listening technology. Hell, the fact that I've been able to make my own little records (ha, CDs) as easily as I might've kept a sketchbook---there's just nothing bad about that I can see.

I definitely share the ambivalence. I wonder if "we"--those like us, from about the age 20 through maybe 60--have the best of both worlds, a combination that will probably be lost on younger kids. I have an aversion to the concept of iTunes that borders on irrational; but younger kids might argue correctly that we're materialists to a fault. I'm not sure who's right, but I do enjoy the "personal archaeology" of looking through my physically-housed music. I like that I have that option, even if I rarely excersise it these days.

You know whos opinion I'd love to hear/read on all this? Brian Eno. Talk about a guy who's managed to be a revolutionary modernist/post-modernist/technologist and yet maintain a level of craftsmanship that almost only comes through a visceral understanding of the music-making process.

Eeep. You probably won't like me much--I made an edit of "Raindance". I agree it's a great track, fantastic atmosphere and very underrated, but I wanted to get as many artists represented as possible (and let people seek out the full versions of the tracks I edited, if they'd like). I still left about 5 minutes of the track ; )

I hope no one will mind that I did an edit of Crispy Ambulance's "The Presence".

Crispy Ambulance is my second fave band ever, but the Presence is the kind of song you can do an edit of and it wouldn't be too offensive. I can understand where you were coming from. Don't worry about it. Remember I'm here to hear the stuff I HAVEN'T heard.

Yep, I got yours this time. Did you get my reply?

For vinyl transfers, I'm not very high-tech, I admit. I just use Soundforge for pretty much all my wav capturing/editing. Then I manually clean clicks and pops, if it's close to a clean rip. I don't trust "auto" cleaning filters--even running Soundforge's "pop" seeker, it almost always finds elements that aren't clicks/pops. So it's just the tedious task of listening close and watching close--but I like looking at waveforms, so it's ok. If the vinyl is irretrevably vinylly, then I just leave it that way.

Before anyone gets the wrong idea---about 15% of the stuff in this set is indeed mp3-sourced or from friends' vinyl. I'm too young to have been "in the right place at the right time," or to have the money to afford multi-hundre-dollar 7"s. And some of the tracks (mainly on the 'Cassette' mix) are sourced from Chuck Warner's rips. I tried to limit the set only to what I owned for a while, but there were some great things I just didn't want to leave out. The vast majority, for better or worse, I've spent the money on over the years.

I only did edits in very judicious ways. Where I could, I even pulled off "seamless" edits, rather than resorting to fade-outs, etc.

I've never met anyone whose second favourite band was Crispy Ambulance before. Are you a big Crepescule/Fac Bel fan in general?

interesting peeps have responses to the mixes themselves. the ilm cdrgo's being mp3 discs tends to make them "resources" rather than playlists i think (i rarely listen to 10 hours at a go...nate's discs are an exception as they work as folders) so your decision to go with 80 min discs entices this response...deliberate?

Fac Bel yes, Crepuscule some, but not as much.

Well, I'm quite sorry not to be able to answer that question. I DID actually go through a little phase with Popol Vuh sometime last summer. Can't recall if I heard Nosferatu theme in the process. Seems like I read about that album, though, or a lot of people liked it or something. I remember Nosferatu more as an old horror movie I saw in my childhood than anything else. Older than Popol Vuh, and no music comes to mind.

deliberate

Not to entice response, no, but to facilitate listenability/accessibility, yes, definitely. Numerous people who got the 1st Edition have told me they love the set, and yet haven't gotten around to the mp3-CD. 181 tracks on one disc is a little prohibitave. I always focused on the mixes--the 'Briefcase' was a means I came up with to allow myself to focus on making the best flowing, most listenable and cohesive mixes possible, and yet still include all the stuff that was great/good/significant but didn't flow.

Some of the "sounds" of the mixes are pretty obvious--the 'Amplifier' disc is clearly the more "rock" disc. But some of them--the 'Flame,' the 'Icicle,' the 'Brain' are a little less analogous to genre. So I'm curious how others think they hold up as individual mixes. I have found that with the exception of a couple of them, they stand as individual mixes with any others I've made, even with all the time/sound "restrictions". Maybe it's like a sonnet--you have to try harder in ways than with free verse, but sometimes it can facilitate a big payoff.

did you get my e-mail, i.m.? i sent it out last night german time and didn't get a reply.

I did indeed get your email, and I sent you a reply.

I wonder if I'm being filtered into people's spam boxes, somehow?

Sure none of you real writers want to salvage its readability with a cogent anecdote or insightful analysis?

Yes, and replied. Looks like I may have to swith email providers for this project. What a pain.

I'm using a new email address. The lycos one seemed to be giving people trouble. So now be on the lookout for a message from soundslike1981@gmail.com instead.

I will send out a mass email to those on each list (separately) so that you'll know your status with certainty. I apologise to anyone who didn't end up on the reserve list because of email problems.

You will not need to reply to the email I send, it's just FYI. If you haven't received notification by Tuesday night (U.S. CST) and you feel you should've been on one of the lists, then email me and we'll sort it out.

Thanks

Here's the updated version of my "essay," I'm very open to any suggestions or criticisms, bearing in mind that I'm far from being a writer/critic myself:

1 9 8 1

My first idea of how to introduce this set was with a pretentiously lofty-sounding question: "what do we do when we realise Pandora's box really can't be shut?" This was supposed to set me up to cogently persuade you that the music found on this set provides an answer: that when our belief in a fundamental order is broken, survivors resolve to make a beautiful mess. I wanted to argue that a lot of this music belongs to a noble lineage of "outré" and progressive popular art made by people trying to restore hope and meaning (and fun) amidst the smoking embers of classicism, modernism, and post-modernism. I wanted to say something pithy about how the shattering of the notion of discrete, monolithic cultures not only enabled this music, but made it necessary. I'd even have set the stage with Thatcher, Reagan, wasteland suburbs, post-industrial economic shifts, the dole, the rise of fundamentalism and yuppiedom and anti-disco rockism. My imaginary essay would’ve made you think you were reading a collaboration between Simon Reynolds, Brian Eno and George Orwell.

But the truth is, I was in diapers in 1981. I didn't start my daily worrying about Grandpa Reagan’s nuclear winter until '87 at the earliest. As far as underground music is concerned, I have about a decade of experience with the stuff. My parents were kindly hippies spinning Joan Baez and James Taylor records. They imbued me with a sense that music was deeply important, but didn't have much of its sonic or cultural breadth to share. Presently, I "know" about as much about music as could be expected of any musically obsessed twenty-four year old who owns only a couple hundred jazz records, a hundred hip-hop records, overuses Skip James on mixes, and only heard his first Talking Heads album as a junior in high school. The point is, I don't have any special insight enabling me to write cool, authoritative, impressively linernotish liner notes. When it comes down to it, I put this set together as a way to avoid having to put in words what is so great about this music. After all, the music puts it best.

This set inevitably reflects my biases as its curator. Indeed, I chose to emphasise certain spheres and leave others out entirely (for someone else to anthologise, hopefully). Still, I hope the set has depth and breadth enough to allow you to decide the "best," "most important," "coolest" sounds. I realise you may even disagree with me that 1981 was worth all the trouble. Personally, I think something was happening from about 1978 to 1982 that is noteworthy in the history of pop music. There was an earnest expansiveness and playfulness regarding the boundaries (or absence thereof) between genres and between "art" and "pop". And I think 1981 may have been the most diverse year of the period, if not the most intense. But nothing I can say will convince you—only the music can.

A portion of these tracks sound undeniably dated (if charmingly so,) and will probably trigger nostalgia even if you've never heard them before. Progressive (in pop terms) as these particular tracks were at the time, they established the paradigm for the infamous "sound of the 80s," and by extension the cartoonish aesthetic currently revered by college freshmen too young to actually remember the decade. However, I believe that the majority of the music comprising this set’s “sound of the 80s” would set a fire were it released today. The paradigm in which many of these musicians operated was expansive enough that a lot of today's "progressive" music is still exploring it (in just the way that many of 1981's best bands were working through Can, Kraftwerk, Sun Ra, the Velvet Underground, et al).

Investigating threads of Influence and innovation; glowing about "prescience;" and dividing the thieves from the originals are games which can arguably enhance musical enjoyment. But I hope you'll first take this music on its own terms. I came into my interest in “the post-punk period" slowly. Till I was about 17 I bought the hype that punk was the Sex Pistols, whom I didn't especially like, and therefore I skipped ahead to Yo La Tengo and the Pixies. It was only after I stumbled through a couple dozen records that I started to notice ’79, ’82, 1981. Any conscious, intellectual concept of a "movement" came only after I first felt the music without analysing it. Though I've become fascinated with the "culture" this music evinces, I'm not pained by not having "been there": the music stands on its own, even without a perfect understanding of its context.

On to the indisputable facts: 411 tracks, 366 bands, almost 21 hours of sound, touching most elements of the post-punk, art-pop, new wave, hardcore, no wave, d.i.y., new romantic, power-pop, dancepunk, art-punk and electropop spheres. Nine of the discs are audio CDs, carefully sequenced along sonic or emotional themes. The tenth disc is an mp3 "appendix" containing tracks by 130-plus bands that didn't fit the main mixes, most of whom are just as good as those on the main CDs. While it may also be a resource, I hope this set is above all a good spin.

For some of you, there is little new here. For a good many, this may be all the "post-punk" you'll ever want. I don't need to change your life, I just want to play you some music; so if you enjoy any of it, my effort has been worthwhile. My secret hope, however, is that for a few of you, this set will be a further step toward a deep, passionate addiction to music you might not have known existed. The event called music doesn’t truly occur without both passionate performance and passionate listening; you turn chaos and noise into meaningful beauty by listening well.