Category: field notes

I’m under no illusion that a practice initiated at the turn of the year will extend long enough to become a habit, whether diet, exercise, meditation, or phone-use diligence. Nonetheless, the green shoots of resolution-adjacent blogging are always a pleasure in early January — and by “blogging” I don’t solely mean writing posts on standalone websites, though I do prioritize them. A certain breed of email newsletter counts, as well, when the issues double as URL-specific posts, and — and this is key — there is an RSS feed to access them. I remain convinced that an RSS feed is an essential component of a blog — that, alternately, to require people to repeatedly visit your website of their own volition, and in the process for them to recall precisely where they left off reading the last time they were there, is simply too much to ask of a reader. It was too much to ask in the late 1990s, and in our cellphone-mediated, notification-riddled present, it is all the more so. RSS brings the writing to the reader, and in some ways isn’t that distinct from email. How different is the interface of my email application (Mimestream currently, in large part because it matches the keyboard shortcuts of the browser-based Gmail app) from that of an RSS reader (Feedly for me at the moment, though I am looking at options)?

And while writing is the core of blogging, there are other forms of self-expression. Blogs that are mostly pictures or math or music are still blogs. The key thing is that blogging is not about final drafts. Blogging is as much a public notepad as social media is at its best (to be clear, most of social media is social media at its worst). It’s not a magazine; it’s a journal.

Which is why I am happy to see several musicians take up newsletters recently, and to do so with sketches, rather than finished work, on their minds.

Taylor Deupree has started up The Imperfect, a series of studio journal entries, a recent issue of which includes a reflection on the whole notion of works-in-progress, especially the earliest stages: “notebooks. portable synths. voice memos,” he writes — all lower case. “we’ve got tools to capture and remember these ideas while they strike far away from or studios… but remembering to have those with you while on the go, or beside the bed, or in the car, is another challenge.” That issue includes a brief bit of gossamer ambience to listen to while you read it.

Likewise, Marcus Fischer, who records for Deupree’s record label, 12k, has launched Dust Breeding, porting over to it the vast archive of posts he made to a blog of that name a decade-plus ago. True to blogging, he isn’t quite sure where the revived Dust Breeding will lead: “This latest incarnation will be something different once again,” he writes. “What that will be, only time will tell. I thought of naming it something else but I’ve kind of grown attached to it.”

If you’ve recently started a blog related to sound or music, please let me know. Thanks.

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Related: I loved this post from Molly White, highlighting a syndrome/tendency I have witnessed countless times — and reminded me of when I tried to sketch out a rudimentary publishing system in Perl, many years ago pre-WordPress (an exercise that did, indeed, negatively impact my output).