Record Reconstructor

When I look ahead in my first pile of CDs to see what is coming up next, I start to think about what that album means to me, or how I'm going to feel listening to it again.  Yesterday, I saw this, and just thought "Oh, hell yes". listen to me here I can't remember how old I was when I first heard this album;  maybe 7 or 8, possibly even younger than that.  I know one of my parents' favourite parenting tricks when I was a young boy was to put my Dad's big headphones on me, sit me down next to the record player and put on some long playing album, and leave me parked there, entranced.  There were a bunch of narrative-led albums at the time, because it was the 70's and why wouldn't you make a narrative-lead concept album if you were a musician, and I probably sat through all of them in my parents' dining room, next to the record player. "War of the Worlds" probably came later than other stuff like I'd listened to as a kid, like...

I used to work with a girl who was a champion trampolinist.  Trampoliner?  Regardless, when she was younger, she bounced and flipped on high tension tarpaulin so well she won European medals for it before the strain of all that jumping destroyed her knees by the time she was 22, ending her competitive bouncing career.  She was also incredibly petite, we're talking Kylie Minogue levels of tinyness here.  When she was told she could no longer Trampoline, she took up free climbing instead. She's the reason I own this album. Listen to me here We both worked similar jobs in different institutions; junior, brainless, and stressful, neither of us were happy with where our life choices had landed us in terms of our vocations.  We had spoken a few times by phone, back in the day when it was actually preferable to phone someone to deal with a problem rather than email them in the hopes that you can get through another working day without being forced to intera...

Ooooooooo-AH-AH-AH-AH. Listen to me here The record which spawned a meme, a thousand terrible karaoke performances , and arguably was the tipping point for bands like Limp Bizkit and Papa Roach to give way from the Rap/Metal crossover to the nu-Metal era at the turn of the millennium.   When I said in the mission post at the start of this blog that these albums all come with some kind of memory, I can't listen to this album without thinking about my friend Alex.  I kind of knew Alex peripherally for a while.  I'd met his sister back in the days when I was helping to DJ the Rock Nights on a Saturday Night at the now demolished Queens Park Hotel in Chesterfield, as sorry a gathering of metal and rock fans of all ages in a dilapidated function room as you will ever see.  When that closed down, I would run into Alex's sister from time to time;  through her, I met a girl called Kate who would be my first real girlfriend; and through Kate, I got to know ...

I've spent about an hour now trying to figure out how to approach talking about this album.  The cheap, easy, populist approach might be to spend some time making fun of my younger self for listening to the kind of music which has become the cliche for the angsty teen.  But maybe the better, healthier approach is to look back at that version of me and embrace what it was - a phase, but not one to feel any particular shame about. My name is Rich, and I was a Rap Metal fan. listen to me here There's some interesting stuff to talk about relating to this CD which aren't about the music.  The first is something which Spotify and the general availability of information on the internet in general have denied us, but I loved at the time. See how the first track is labelled as track 13 on the track list?  As well as that being so Metal a choice that it hurts me just to think about it, it's actually an indication to people that when the CD starts, if you j...

It's important for me that you understand that despite the highly scientific "piles" method employed in organising the office room, there's no real rhyme or reason to the order the CDs appear on these piles, so its possible that there are going to be some, let's say, abrupt shifts in tone as we go from day to day. However, in my mind, we're starting things off on a great footing. listen to me here . I can't remember the first time I heard Pearl Jam.  It's odd, because I have very specific remembrances of the first time I heard other bands that would become part of my angst-filled adolescence, but not for these guys.  It's possible that after buying Soundgarden, Nirvana, Stone Temple Pilot and Faith No More CDs all around the same time, a copy of Pearl Jam's "Ten" just spontaneously manifested in my music collection as a kind of sympathetic vibration of the universe.  Stranger still is that I don't actual own a copy of ...

Weird.  I've never owned a domain before.  Now here I am on the internet, writing words that, in all honesty, probably aren't going to reach enough people to justify the £10 I spent registering this domain.  But this isn't about you, it's about me.  I'm big enough to admit that to myself at least. I honestly couldn't tell you whether the blog is an excuse for me to listen to all my CDs again, or whether listening to all my CDs is an excuse to write this blog.  It's entirely possible this is just a manifestation of a slow burn mid-life crisis which has been festering since I turned 18.  Regardless of the reasons, I've been excited enough by the idea when it popped up on Twitter a few days ago that I've decided to go through with it.  In a year where I've been trying to commit to stuff I start and actually get to the end of it, this might be my final test.  Can I keep the momentum going to write something on here every day it's reasonable fo...