musical monogamy

But, like you said, so is jazz.

Lately, I listen to nothing but jazz and classical music. At this point, I am enjoying obscure flute sonatas, which is something so far removed from the first genre I fell in love with (metal) or the second (punk) or third (post-punk art rock... uh, okay, let's just say Sonic Youth et al) or any other contemporary rock-inspired music (can we agree hip hop is really just a variant of 60s rock music?) that I have no idea how anyone could limit themselves to a finite number of articles of music as a way to express "true love for music."

This has convinced me that it is equally ridiculous to fuck just one woman for the rest of my life. Thank you.

I couldn't ever just listen to one genre of music all the time forever, though. Sometimes I want Coltrane and sometimes I want Kraftwerk, y'know?

But shit, to listen to something in exclusion of everything else? Seems like a waste of time.

i have a pretty difficult time handling the usual kind of "so what sort of music are you into" inquiries, if only because my experience has been that the people who claim the greatest eclecticism with regards to their listening habits almost always turn out to have frighteningly parochial tastes (i.e. they're usually just indie rockers). i've always wondered whether the whole "i listen to everything...except country and rap" phenomenon is a specifically american person-on-the-street response, particularly as it boils down to "i listen to anything that allows me to continue ignoring whatever privilege i derive via race and class..."

i definitely have my specialties and areas of specific knowledge, as well as areas in which i'm happily engaged in educating myself at the present...but so many of these areas are so ridiculously nerdy and microscopic (e.g. drone minimalism, sonic arts union, "kim1-era" bay-area network music) that i have a pretty hard time imagining myself constructing an entire identity around them...

Today, Willie Nelson plays "western" music. Alan Jackson plays country. Western has more jazz and Mexican influence. Always has, always will.

the central faalacy of any such musical monogamist argument. it's ridiculous to claim that any genre exists in a vacuum. dont take this guy seriously!

also, wtf is "kim1-era" bay-area network music??

league of automatic music composers, the hub (to some extent), david behrman circa "leapday night" and "on the other ocean," some mark trayle, etc. basically centered around mills college in the late '70s and early '80s. some recordings are still available (e.g. the aforementioned behrman records, the league piece on the "just intonation" tellus cassette plus the 7" in the "lovely little records" box...most, however, are out of print, and there weren't many of them to begin with.

the kim-1 itself is an early microcomputer that was used by many of the artists in this scene to facilitate the construction of complex networks for performance, typically involving all the homebrew synth gadgets of the performers wired through two or three kim-1s into a ridiculously messy a-life-ish organism.

it's interesting to me both as an offshoot of the sonic arts union lineage that points both to maxmsp/powerbook improv and to power electronics, and as a fascinating and completely mental approach to working with people and machines as an improviser.

one of the better sources for getting into this whole thing is here.

This is called serial monogamy and is the only workable paradigm, for music-to-human or human-to-human relationships.