I live in the eastern portion of the San Francisco Bay area with my girlfriend Kate, and probably too many external hard drives, LPs, CDs, cassettes, and plants. I work in the gardening and landscape business. I have contributed music reviews to Part-Time Audiophile. In a previous life I was a buyer and product manager for a division of Tower Records’ main office, deejayed at UC Davis ration station KDVS, and wrote for Tower’s PULSE! magazine.
About this site:
I’m a vinyl fussbudget. I tend to obsess over the minutiae of LPs — mastering quality, surface noise, packaging…and sometimes even the music. I’m also picky about how labels and artists package LPs for shipping.
Regarding “buy” links: I urge you, dear consumer: please buy as directly from the artist as you can. For this reason I’ll only post, say, Amazon links as a last resort. Giving your money to the top of the music food chain doesn’t always mean that your hard-earned nickels and dimes are going to drop down through the gears of the machine to the source of the music you love, mixed-metaphorically speaking.
I suppose myself and my former music-biz and creative brethren should just be content to have music lovers pay ANY money at all for recordings, but please remember that your dollar (or quarter. or dime. or nickel) is a vote.
Consider the concept of buying direct from an artist analogous to buying locally-grown fresh food.
It matters.
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Labels/artists:
I like to review recordings sent to me when I feel they fit in with the general spirit of my blog. I tend towards the modern classical/electronic/Americana portions of the genre spectrum, but I’ve been known to be open-minded about other pigeonholes, as well.
I can be reached at anythingbutmp3 at gmail dot com.
Thanks for reading and listening.
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The current front-page header photo is a detail from “After Raphael” by Tom Phillips. A larger detail from that work is used for the front cover of Brian Eno’s Another Green World.
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…the goal of the writer is self-aggrandizement. There’s only one reason to write: because you consider yourself to be a writer, and you want people to pay attention to what you wrote. It’s the bane of your existence that you must write about somebody else doing something that you can’t do. The general summary that I make of most people who are in the world of music criticism – be it for rock and roll or whatever – the important thing is how clever will your column be? A lot of people are forced into the world of rock and roll musical criticism; at least there is such a world to keep them employed, because they sure as fuck couldn’t do anything else. – Frank Zappa, 1992
The people who know nothing about music are the ones always talking about it.
– Nat King Cole
The indigenous Cherokee elder, Stan Rushworth, once described “the difference between a Western settler mindset of, ‘I have rights’, and an indigenous mindset of ‘I have an obligation’.” “Instead of thinking that I am born with rights, I choose to think that I was born with obligations to serve past, present, and future generations, and the planet herself.”
