by Mike DeFabio

Look, I fully accept that music streaming is one of the main ways people listen to music now. It’s not going away anytime soon, and I’d rather the industry focus on that than on suing 12-year-olds and grandmothers for ridiculous amounts for downloading a few songs. But I do have a little problem with it becoming the main way people listen to music, and I’m going to try to explain why.

by Mike DeFabio

I like to get really meticulous with how I tag the music on my computer. I use the sort artist field to sort solo artists by last name. I scan the cover art myself if what I get from a quick image search is too low-res. It’s really satisfying when I get everything tagged and sorted just the way I like it. But I never touch the genre tag.

by Mike DeFabio

Most of the music I listened to when I was a kid was either on a record or on a tape I’d made from a record, and as was typical for me, I didn’t properly appreciate it at the time. Records, as I saw it, were what you bought used because you didn’t have a CD player, and tapes were too expensive. You couldn’t dance around while they played or the needle would jump. You couldn’t bring them with you on a long car ride. You had to get up and turn them over halfway through.

In 2002, some friends and I took a trip down to LA to go to the All Tomorrow’s Parties festival, which was curated by Sonic Youth that year. On the bill were some names that I knew and loved, like Aphex Twin and Stereolab, and a lot more that I’d never heard at all. One of these was an unassuming fellow with a laptop who went by the name of Merzbow. Merzbow’s set began with an enormous low drone, the kind earplugs are almost useless against because it makes its way in through the bones of your face. Over the course of what I think was probably a 45-minute set, that drone gradually changed and grew into its ultimate form: a wall of hissing, squealing noise. Noise, you see, is Merzbow’s instrument. He plays the noise.