The Great Caller

I’m a bit of a self-proclaimed (if novice) audiophile (though my hearing is a little too bad from too many loud gigs to be critical of sound quality), and a true music lover. Something I’ve been tussling with a lot lately is that I feel that I’ve been listening to the same things over and again – the music in my library is too well listened and comfortable to me. This is something of a problem for me, I don’t like too much ‘comfortable’, it makes me feel shut off from the world. I can’t stand anything that gets played on the radio these days, and as a medium radio is polluted with adverts and idiotic DJs, lending their two-cents on things they don’t understand, or singing over the last 30 seconds of the only good song they’ve played on their 3 hour show, ruining anyone’s enjoyment of the track.

So I need new music, something that isn’t churned out by the pop-plastics machine that is the popular music industry, and something different from those artists I’ve listened to over and over for the past 3 years – yes I’ll get their new albums, because I enjoy what they do, but even if they excel themselves above their previous offerings, that doesn’t change the fact that I don’t gain the same sense of satisfaction that I do from discovering someone with an entirely new sound. When I was younger – around 16 to 18 years old – I used to make a regular habit of visiting record stores and buying something unusual or a-typical, that was reduced or cheap to start off with. This gave me a distinct sense of satisfaction and superiority over those unadventurous types who would walk in and go straight to the ‘Top 20’ wall (as previously mentioned, why would anyone want that processed tripe!?), and even over my fellow metal-heads, goths and rockers who would buy the latest album trending amongst their friends, in the local metal club and in Kerrang! magazine. I was, after all, being more adventurous, right?

Well, I was certainly taking more risk. Considering that I’m not a gambling man, not in the traditional sense anyway. I certainly bought some awful discs sometimes. At the same time I did pick up some very good ones. What I feel was most important and influential was that the range of sounds I managed to listen to fuelled my appetite for and inflated my expectations of what I could get out of music. This, as you may have noticed, has turned me into a bit of a music snob – I enjoy complexity and experimentation in music. I play an instrument myself to a reasonably proficient standard, and simply put, I like hearing people with greater ability than myself playing!

When it comes to classifying or defining what sort of music I enjoy I usually tell people that I’m into prog rock and metal (which is true), but my musical tastes are far more complex than that – there are bands in both genres which I don’t like despite peoples’ expectations that I would. And artists I enjoy that one wouldn’t expect. This is clearly reflected in the music I listen to on a daily basis, and over a few months becomes very evident (I listen to music in cycles, depending on my mood and how long it’s been since I last heard an artist).

So you’re probably asking yourself by now what exactly it is that I’m trying to get at? Well, about 6 months ago I (re)discovered and decided to install Last.FM’s Scobbling software onto my PC. I clicked through a few things on the website and had a little play with the software at the time and then forgot about it about a week later – but most importantly I left the software installed and set to run at start-up, so that whenever I was listening to music, it was keeping a record and adding the information to their database.

Fast forward to about a week ago: I begin having this ‘no new music’ crisis again. (This happens on roughly an annual basis mind.) So what do I do? Well I’ve been relatively isolated these last few months (compared to when I was at uni, where it’s impossible to avoid meeting people and hearing their ideas and influences) so I hadn’t an awful lot of input to look back on and consider potential suggestions from, and I don’t have the liquid funds to go out and blindly purchase unusual albums at the moment – so where do I get some direction from?

This is where Last.FM re-enters the fray! Bear in mind that I haven’t clicked this inconspicuous little disc that always sits in the bottom right corner of my screen every single day (and has become camouflaged merely by its continued presence) for 5 to 6 months – and I’m not sure what it was that caused me to wander towards it this day, or what even reminded me of its presence. All the same, I opened it and started my ‘recommended tracks’ playlist. I have to say, I was impressed – I liked the first track it played, and the second – not so much the third, but skipping it taught Last.FM this and I’ve liked everything I’ve heard since.

I now have a list of artists and tracks that I like –names that I never would have thought of looking at previously – and it does it all for free. I have back the opportunity to browse the unusual and uncommercialised music, returning an enjoyment that I haven’t had since my days of teenage bargin-trawling.

Saying you ‘live off music’ or that silence will kill you is ludicrous. So of course my claiming that Last.FM saved my life is absured – what it has done though is revive my exploration of music and expanded my scope for aural stimulation. And music is a huge part of my enjoyment of life – so yes, Last.FM did save my life!