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(Re)building a music library
It’s coming up to the end of the year, a time for making plans, resolutions, projects and so on and so forth. How many of them will survive contact with 2025? Who knows. But here’s the tentative start of a new project: I’m going to rebuild my music library. And I’m going to document the process on here.
But why though?
The project? Well… I have librarian blood. It goes deep into who I am. Stuff’s got to be organised! And it really, really isn’t. I’ll get into the detail of the problem further down this post but it’s got to the point where it makes me twitch. Something must be done!
There are also loads of sensible, pragmatic reasons. Not least:
- Spotify (and equivalents) are fragile, capricious and temporary: Your favourite album might disappear next week. Your playlist might be missing key tracks. You don’t own this. It can be taken away.
- Size and space: I’m quite good at backing things up and keeping spare copies of digital information. Storage is cheap, but it’s not that cheap. It makes sense to keep only the stuff you want in your library if you’re paying to keep 3+ copies of it!
- Rediscovering old gems. A large part of this project was spurred on by the simple game of listening to every one of my vinyl records. We moved house, I got my record player set up, I got my records out of storage, and I began to work my way through relistening to each one. I found so much stuff that I’d forgotten about. Half of the point of this project isn’t really about the organisation, it’s about the increased engagement with the music.
How did we get here?
I was lucky enough to be really getting into music right at the tipping point from physical to digital media. All my first albums were on CD but we were busy ripping them to MP3 to write to a new disk, title scrawled on in marker. We were grabbing the early Arctic Monkeys demos from MySpace. I was posting on music forums, with mailing lists where we forwarded whole albums to each other (RIP AudioJunkies - much missed). I was testing how well iTunes’s windows app worked on a sprawling library (not well, it turns out, prompting a swap to FooBar2000).
Music was something to be explored and studied, and in doing so acquired. Before we had (semi-)reliable digital libraries, you had no idea if you’d ever hear that track again if it didn’t get added to your library. Right-click. Save-as.
So the library grew and grew.
How bad is the problem?
It’s really quite bad. My music library (heap?) appears to be 1TB in size, with roughly 76,000 files in it. This breaks down as 46k MP3s and 26k FLACs. That’s a lot of stuff. And I suspect that the vast majority of it isn’t stuff that I actually really want.
What can we do about it?
Start over. Sort of.
The plan from here is to build a new library. I’m going to curate it carefully from the ground-up, adding artists I like, labels I like, filling gaps where I find then. It’s going to be immaculately tagged and indexed, making exploring it a pleasure, not a chore.
It’s going to lossless (predominantly? totally?). It’s going to be organised. It’s going to be beautiful.
Quite how I do this will need some thinking about and another blog post.
Cinema 2024 Roundup: part I
2024 has started and there are lots of good films to watch! Here’s a bunch we’ve seen at the cinema this year…
Albums of the Year 2023
For everything else that 2023 may have been, or not been, there’s been a lot of excellent music. Here we are at the end of the year. Grab your headphones, hide from the world outside. Here are my favourite records of the year.
Shit and Shine - 2222 and Airport
S&S produces a lot of music, and a lot of it has never really connected with me. But this one does. By turns full of good beats, funny stories and weird noises. Excellent stuff.
Squid - O Monolith
I don’t love this quite as much as their first, but its still great. Spiky, post-punk loveliness.
Memorials - Women Against the Bomb
I was surprised by how much this stuck in my head. It’s the soundtrack to a film about the Greenham Common protests and isn’t subtle at all, but I keep finding myself singing little bits of it.
Lankum - False Lankum
This is my kind of folk music. Macabre, dark stories, told over shuddering bass and weird noises. Fabulous.
Hey Colossus - In Blood
Short and sweet, walls of fuzzy guitar noise.
Meatraffle - Superstructure
Cracking post-punk tunes with some wickedly funny lines. As you’d expect from a band called Meatraffle.
The Loving Paupers - Ladders
Gorgeous NY reggae. Their first album is equally good. Get to know.
The Mountain Goats - Jenny From Thebes
It’s the Mountain Goats. It’s a polished one, with horns and all. I love it.
Overmono - Good Lies
This is an absolute gem. Sits alongside Bicep’s Atlas in my mind, and that’s high praise.
Warrington-Runcorn New Town Development Plan - The Nation’s Most Central Location
Understated electronica. This one pulses and bubbles and fizzes. For fans of Pye Corner Audio, Demdike Stare and the like. I love this sort of thing.
Mungo’s Hi-FI - Past and Present
Mungo’s are a reliable source of bangers, but this one is wall to wall greatness. Absolute stomping tunes.
Reverend Kristine - SAVED
OK, this won’t be for everyone. It’s deeply weird and not an easy listen but its fascinating and very memorable. I love it. Very hard to describe. Give ‘All of my friends are going to hell’ a listen.
Belbury Poly - The Path
Sleeper hit for me. It’s very understated. All gentles tunes with a little folksy storytelling. Worth giving some time to. I love all this hauntology business.
Jellyskin - In Brine
Leeds Leeds Leeds. Bringer of Brine was my most listened track of the year, and ‘I was the first Tetrapod’ can’t have been far behind. Stomping techno-tinged wonky pop tunes.
James Ellis Ford - The Hum
I know nothing about this. Don’t know anything about the artist. Can’t remember how I found it. But it’s great.
Goat - Medicine
Everything these folk make is excellent and this one goes hard. Psych-folk? Alt-fusion? Chant-rock? The internet has no idea how to classify them. It doesn’t matter. This is ace.
Leeds International Film Festival 2023
And the film festival is done! Unlike some previous years where I’ve tried to review every single film in detail, this year I’ve decided to keep it light. So here are my Tweet-like short reviews of everything I watched. Let’s go!
Leeds International Film Festival 2023 Preview: Official Selection
It’s back. It’s nearly November, and that means it’s time to grab a copy of the film festival programme, a pencil and comfy chair. It’s time to start picking out the films to get excited about. It’s time to start working out quite how long it takes to get from the city centre up to the Hyde Park Picture House. It’s time to buy some tickets!
The programme launch, with its compilation trailer reel shown on a big screen in Vue has whetted the appetite, so now I’m diving into the list of films and trying to work out what I can see. The plan here is to do a post on each of the major strands, taking a look at what I’m excited about. In this post, I’ll start with the official selection. Let’s go!
Opening and Closing
The big name pictures that bookend the festival are reliably interesting. I’m definitely excited to see Poor Things, the latest from Yorgos Lanthimos. I’ve loved a lot of his films. Dogtooth and Alps are probably due a rewatch - I remember enjoying them, but not a lot about them. The trio that followed (The Lobster, The Killing of a Sacred Deer and The Favourite) are all certified bangers. Each very different and bonkers in their own ways but utterly compelling. The trailer for Poor Things looks pretty promising. A good pick for an opener.
All of which leaves closing film, Slow, with rather a hard act to follow. It sounds interesting enough but I’m not wildly excited about it. But I’ve misjudged a lot of small romances in the past. Sometimes the films that look a little bit dull on paper turn out to be memorable worlds that drag you in. We’ll see…
The rest of the selection…
I’m not going to look at every film, so much as pick out a handful that are calling to me loudly. And there’s a trio of films that are shouting the loudest. Anatomy of a Fall, Palme d’Or winner, looks like my kind of thriller. Meanwhile, Monster is the latest film from Hirokazu Kore-eda - I loved both Shoplifters and Broker (both at previous LIFF screenings!) so am very excited for this one. Rounding out my top three is Sultana’s Dream: I din’t know anything about the director or the source material (though a 1905 sci-fi feminist text certainly has me interested!) but the trailer was jaw-droppingly beautiful.
After that, we move into a mix of the enjoyable, the interesting and the downright weird. Both The Queen of My Dreams and The Holdovers look pretty approachable. I don’t think I’m expecting anything particularly new or exciting from either but they look like they could be sa lot of fun.
After that we’ve got All of Us Strangers (Andrew Scott in a relationship with Paul Mescal from Aftersun!), The Breaking Ice (I’m a sucker for a story about small lives in China) and Kiddo (a chaotic law-breaking mother-daughter road-trip). And my picks are rounded out by a couple of seriously weird looking choices: Chronicles of a Wandering Saint (staged miracles in an attempt to be more saintly than the other members of your church) and Sweet Dreams (a Dutch colonial tale set in Indonesia. The trailer looked weird).
In short…
It’s an exciting looking selection. The main strand can occasionally be a little bit earnest and heavy. This year though, there’s a good mix and plenty that’s calling me loudly.