Slow Listening

I am so behind the times. I haven’t yet bothered to formulate an opinion on Micachu & The Shape’s highly bloggable Jewellery (it’s alright, I guess) and, what’s worse, I haven’t even listened to a single track from Bat for Lashes hotly celebrated new record Two Suns (the last one reminded me of a less volatile Tori Amos and I’m skeptical that the new album is really such an amazing leap forward). I do my best to keep up, honest I do, but with all the full album streams, free promos, e-mailed demos, saved eMusic downloads, legit purchases, und so wieder and so forth that I ingest with little to no effort each month, even a part-time blogger such as myself can easily get bogged down with more new music than he can possibly digest.

Now, I’m not trying to impress upon you the magnificent scope and scale of my personal music collection; clearly, any nerd with an internet connection, a Western Digital external hard drive, and the fortitude to do so could easily dwarf my collection in one Dewmocracy Voltage-fueled weekend. No, the problem isn’t in acquiring new music, the problem is in actually finding the time to listen to and appreciate new music. Lately I’ve taken to creating month-by-month playlists in iTunes just to keep track of all the random mp3s I download over time. That, combined with overanalyzing my last.fm charts, has been one semi-useful method for reminding myself of my more recent mp3 hauls, but sometimes that isn’t even enough to maintain structure and so I resign myself to whatever my iPod wants to randomly play in shuffle mode.

Thankfully, it turns out I’m not the only one obsessively-compulsively bemoaning an overindulgent digital download diet. Last month, the Chicago Reader published an interesting article about music critic Michaelangelo Matos and the “Slow Listening Movement.” (To be honest, I don’t know if it technically counts as a “movement” if it only really consists of one man and his blog; however, both the article and the blog archives are well worth your time to read.) Long story short, “slow listening” is not meant to be confused with “deep listening” — it isn’t about how you listen to music, it’s about managing your consumption of music. The general rule proposed by Matos is that for every song or album you download, try listening to it all the way through at least once before moving onto something else. It’s about pacing and restraint. The older I get the more I come to realize the futility of amassing a large collection, since it’ll never be complete. Being a music fan should be more about enjoying the music you have, rather than trying to own all the music you might one day enjoy. For me, at least. I’m giving it a shot to see how it works, and to be honest, it’s harder than it sounds. All I’ve picked up this week, for instance, are the new Grace Basement record and Sebadoh III.

If you’re looking for a good blog that perhaps unintentionally embodies the slow listening spirit, I’d recommend checking out Scott Tennent’s amazingly organized Pretty Goes With Pretty, where he breaks down his weekly and hourly listening habits and discusses which records stood out and why. It’s actually more interesting than I make it sound. Scott also runs the music tumblr Do You Compute, which hosted a remarkably thoughtful weeklong review of the complete Low discography last week, which I suppose counts as slow listening of a different sort.