2005

Earlier this month, I was binge listening some CD-R's that I burned in 2005 and early 2006.  I've written about late-2003/early-2004 being a transformative time for me, the last stand for brick and mortar music stores as my main source for new music.  I'm only now beginning to appreciate the significance of that 2005/2006 stretch, perhaps as an equally transformative time.

2005 was my peak year, no doubt, for keeping up with the widest variety of new music and criticism. My posting frequency during that time is a clear testament to this.  I listened to about twice as many new releases as I have in a typical year, before or since.  And because I moved in mid-2006, this period had a definitive end point and was extensively archived in the forms of these CD-R's.  

This mini-era was preserved like no other, because with the founding of Youtube in 2005, the growth of other streaming services shortly thereafter, and data storage becoming ever cheaper, it was the end of CD-R's as a preferred medium.  These twenty or so CD-R's now look like lost relics from a forgotten information age.  I carefully handled them and played them as you would a valuable piece of vinyl rediscovered decades later in a hidden attic. 

Besides mp3 copies of albums, I saved a trove of live recordings: lots of Animal Collective, noise artists, some techno, cool rare gems like a "Contino Sessions"-era Death In Vegas gig.  There were also CD-R's of individual tracks that I presumably found via yousendit links and file sharing programs.  Lots and lots of Michael Mayer and Jacques Lu Cont remixes and similarly styled club techno of the day.  This era of techno came to a crashing end for me too, as I stopped buying vinyl and collecting remixes by the usual suspects, and shifted my focus to podcasts and hitting the clubs more often.