(Mirrored at conformer.wordpress.com.)About a hundred years ago, Your Humble Narrator had a job at the local community college's radio station. In addition to initiating an appreciation of jazz, forcing a surface knowledge of classical music, and exercising cut-and-paste mixing skills, the other primary takeaway was an exposure to a relatively ( Read more... )

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As is customary, as well as habit, during dry spells between employment engagements, portions of The Concrete Standard are tossed overboard as ballast in order to keep the lifestyle that Your Humble Narrator has grown accustomed to at Monkworks afloat. For years, my record collection has served a dual purpose as a semi-obsessional focus of ( Read more... )

Matching up the contents of La Norme Concrète with the real-world copies of The Concrete Standard is the easy part. The advantage to maintaining a record collection that only exists virtually is that the sentimental factor is greatly reduced in some instances, because one of the greatest dealbreakers when it comes to deciding whether to hang on to ( Read more... )

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The first of the year started for Your Humble Narrator much like previous firsts of the year; extended periods of concentrated slacking off, a sudden but unexpected release from professional obligations, and a cloying ennui that carries over into the subsequent weeks. This year's first was decidedly more on the downer side; I had stopped blogging ( Read more... )

If Your Humble Narrator's physical record collection is called "The Concrete Standard," and the filesystem of digital copies is "La Norme Concrète," then what, pray tell, should the parallel collection of compact cassette tapes be dubbed? The very nature of the previous two titles are indicative of the quasi-permanency of each respective format; ( Read more... )

The Polecats: (circa 1981)


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"This tape collection gets bigger every minute. I find it very hard to fit music to the mood, and there's nothing worse than to make the wrong choice; except to sort right through and find nothing suitable. But then I find just the right thing..."
It's a forgone conclusion that Your Humble Narrator will most likely never make another mixtape ( Read more... )

Before the age of constant superconnectivity, before the rise of online content distribution services, and before the malaise of exponentially decaying volume of originally-produced micromedia, (writing begets blogging, blogging begets tweeting, tweeting begets retweeting) those of us who so proudly, haughtily, or in the case of Your Humble ( Read more... )