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... )

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... )

"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... )

Inside CD Alley, a new and used record store in downtown Wilmington, North Carolina:



It's literally a hole in the wall; if you walk too quickly along Market Street by the Cape Fear waterfront, you can breeze right past it ( Read more... )

Visiting different parts of your home can be as alien as traveling to another province, another principality, another federation ( Read more... )

Before I moved from the great Midwest to the great West Coast, before I heard Negativland's Over The Edge records and programs, before I even knew what "freeform" or "chill out" meant, I was doing it, mixing it, creating it. Every Monday from what-the-fuck o'clock to just-shoot-me o'clock in the morning for thirteen weeks I pulled double unpaid ( Read more... )

A mix tape without a playlist is a series of pleasurable mysteries, but a playlist that lacks an accompanying soundtrack cannot support itself for long ( Read more... )

More compact cassette tape designs, mostly from the bottom of the creative barrel, but still watermarks from their day:


( Read more... )

Saying good-bye to yesterday is just as hard to-day as it was...erm, yesterday ( Read more... )