Friday, January 19, 2007

The Program: or How Make Listening to Music Fun Again


No this isn't installment 28 in the iPod Rehabillitation unit series. I'm happy to report that all my electronic friends are functioning within acceptable parameters. However, my organic friend Matt Cleveland
and I noticed that our iPods were making us susceptable to another sickness: we weren't really listening to our music anymore. I know this sounds counter-intuitive, given that the iPod is meant to make your whole music library as portable as a thin bar of soap (albeit fragile $300 soap). But what we noticed was that since our mp3 collections were in digital form now for easy uploading and sharing, we were acquiring so much music, so quickly (from friends, relatives and perhaps less... savory means) that we really weren't giving each album the time it deserved. What was worse, we weren't enjoying what we were listening to because there was so much else to get through.

Our solution? The Program: Together the two Matts have made a pact to choose two albums with which we are not yet familiar and give those albums as many listens-through in one week as we can (at least 3-5). Indeed, we choose to listen to these albums as if we had paid our hard earned allowance-money for them. Matt describes it in greater detail in the link above. We'll be posting the albums of the week on our respective Mog - Music Blog sites along with our comments and the cumulative effect on our listening enjoyment and hopefully a renewed appreciation for those albums that only start to really shine after a few spins. Feel free to play along.

Albums this week:
Cold War Kids: Robbers and Cowards - Raw garage-rock with high-pitched, multiple storylines.

Dntel: Life is Full of Possibilities - Postal Service minus Ben Gibbard. Trippy ambient textures and analogue syths for your enjoyment.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hmm, my problem is actually non-music podcasts take up all my time.

LeLe said...

I LOVE the Postal Service, but I don't know if I could handle it without Ben Gibbard. I'm kinda sweet on him.

Ben and Brandy said...

I think brother Wendel Berry would like this idea. I certainly do.
However, I'm afraid I had trouble with your links, all of which were self-directing. Did anyone else encounter this problem?

And Matt, choose with care to whose council you hearken.
Wake Forest beckons.

Yours,
Ben "Prince Myshkin" Utter

M. Lumpkin said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
M. Lumpkin said...

Thanks for the tip. I think all the links are pointing you all in the right directions. The first week of the program is complete. See our Mog pages for the results.

New albums tommorow!