The Last CD

I recently organized my CDs for the first time in years.  Everything I bought since the last major reorganization effort came out of the jewel cases and has been filed away in CD wallets.  At this point I don't bother trying to have a complete alphabetical filing system that covers the entire collection.  I have way too many discs, and it would be a logistical nightmare to merge and refile them all.  Not to mention that I have hundreds of "missing" discs I left behind in T.O.

The birth of our son has forced us to clear out the clutter in the apartment and be more efficient with how we store our belongings, not like it wasn't a good thing to do regardless.  Going forward, that means being more frugal with buying stuff for ourselves as well.  Among other things, it means that digging through second hand CD racks and grabbing twelve bargain discs for twenty bucks or thereabouts probably won't be happening as often.  These curiosity/"deals too good to pass up" purchases have been tailing off for some time anyway, since I'm essentially a suburban husband these days.  My mini-windfall from Munich and Vienna from earlier this year (the New Order Be Music box set, a collection of rare 80's electronic music from Dusseldorf, the "Rumours" 2CD reissue, and plenty more goodies) may have been my last gasp of combined new and second hand CDs for a while.

Or maybe forever?  There's a distinct possibility that I have bought my last CD.  Twenty years ago, such a concept seemed nearly unthinkable.  The CD was looking like the final chapter in music collection.  They were small (smaller than vinyl), reliable (more so than cassettes), and sounded as good as music could get for a non-audiophile hardcore fan (or so I thought, until I became a vinyl collector).  I've probably bought about two thousand of them since 1994, and I could never bring myself to sell a single one.  It defies all common sense but I could never imagine getting rid of any of them, it seemed like the antithesis of what collecting was about and I honestly couldn't say there were any I regretted buying.

At one point, I didn't think I'd stop buying cassettes either.  Until one day I did.  Even though I'd planned to continue buying less expensive cassettes and save my CD buying for the less readily available import purchases, I ended up buying my final new cassette around the fall of 1994.  There was no indicator that it was the last cassette, so there was no fanfare, no philosophical musing about the end of that mini-era.  Save for blank cassettes and mixed tapes, which I continued with for almost another decade, I stopped buying them.  There was nothing to mark the occasion (and there was no way to know there was even an "occasion") and so I'm not even sure what my last cassette purchase even was.  It very well may have been "Definitely Maybe" by Oasis.  Perhaps I picked up a couple of used cassettes later on, like an old Cure album ("Paris", for instance) but Oasis' debut album may have been the final, newly released album I ever bought on the format.  Or maybe Suede's "Dog Man Star"?  And around the same time, Pulp's "His N Hers"? 

Same goes for vinyl.  Starting in 2000, my vinyl collection ballooned from a couple of dozen records to several hundred by 2006.  By 2002 it was my most purchased format, obviously thanks to techno.  I bought new albums on vinyl specifically for the superior sound, for instance, I bought nearly everything I own by GYBE on vinyl.  Later on, when second hand shops started popping up everywhere, I took full advantage of being able to find catalogue album on vinyl for a fraction of the cost of even a used CD.  I bought old Gordon Lightfoot and Walker Brothers albums for a dollar.  It felt like if you looked hard enough in Toronto, you could buy just about anything released before 1987 on vinyl for less than five dollars.  But I moved away in 2006, didn't bring my turntables, and never bought a replacement.  I love my vinyl, but who has space for it all?  Thinking about the situation breaks my heart every time.  In the meantime, vinyl sales have taken off in the last decade, no thanks to me.  It's looking quite likely that I've bought my last vinyl record, but what was it?  I really haven't a clue.  Probably some 60's or 70's rock thing I bought for a dollar.  As for new records, I bought Low's "The Great Destroyer" and Animal Collective's "Feels" in 2005.  They were the only two vinyl purchases out of my top albums from that year.

How about CD's?  I'm not 100% certain, even though my last purchase was only a couple of months ago.  I kept some of my CD's, especially the ones I hadn't yet listened to, in their original bags from the store with their receipts. But after filing everything away, those rough groupings have been lost, and it was only later on that I realized that I may have bought my final CD.  However, I believe my most recent purchase was at Third Ear Records, where I bought the 3 CD collection "Luna" by Stephan Bodzin vs Marc Romboy, bought together with the 2 CD collectors edition of "Bummed" by Happy Mondays.  However, for new releases, I'm quite certain it was Carl Craig's "Versus", bought with Nathan Fake's "Providence" at a Saturn store in Munich.

There are always amazing things out there you can learn about music: two examples

I had no idea that Phil Collins basically invented the gated drum sound, and with it, the entire damned 1980's.  I can't count the number of times that I heard "In the Air Tonight" but in all those listens, I never once thought of whether I could name an earlier song that used the same drum sounds.  Maybe it's because I never liked the song very much, and never bothered to enter into deep thinking about a song I've long been sick of. But the drums quite obviously are the star of the song.  There aren't any flashy solo parts or even a vocal melody that works outside of the context of the recording.  It's all about paranoia of the first half, and the drums crashing in for the second half.  This was never really the case for any of the countless 80's hits that followed, where the huge, gated drums were buried under maximalist keyboards and FX-laden guitars.

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There's been no more sobering realization of the speed that time flies (musically speaking) than the spate of 10th anniversary tributes to Burial's "Untrue".  Has it really been ten years?  Typing it out does nothing to make it seem less impossible. 

I can't argue with those who have called it the most influential electronic music record of the past decade either.  Nothing sounded like it when it was released, and nothing sounds like it today.  Much like the Caretaker, or the early Aphex Twin records, Burial's style is a lo-fi, reclusive personal studio production that seems like it'd be very easy to copy, and yet nobody has ever managed to do it.

Resident Advisor's digital essay on "Untrue" (a first for them!) dives into the origin of some of ghostly, alien samples on the album, and it turns out that some of them are Beyonce and Usher samples that have been staring me in the face all this time.  I suppose I would have known this if I had listened to a complete Beyonce or Usher album or ever browsed an online thread dedicated to sniffing out Burial's samples.  But I never did, and learning how the sausage got made only makes me appreciate his work even more.  Anyone can be a hero by sampling something that nobody else can find, but a genius takes what's in plain sight and makes art that nobody else thought about doing.