Monday, August 27, 2007

How can I waste time like this?

It never struck me until today how necessary a good soundtrack is for wasting time. In the midst of a good procrastination session, you feel anchored in your time-wasting by the constantly changing musical accompaniment. In essence, I waste time in order to be with music. One song might lead me to a different album by a simple spark, a drawn parallel, an autobiographical connection, etc. and I can spend a wonderful afternoon just bouncing around iTunes and zoning out. This pastime, however, is much more difficult when one is limited to a single record, just thirty minutes of music. Don't get me wrong, I'm enjoying the album, but I get enough chances to listen to it - I don't really need or have the desire to spend a whole afternoon with just one short album. I wish that I could say that limiting myself to this record has made me more productive, but I find other ways to pass the time without accomplishing anything. At any rate, my apartment is busy enough with changes right now to keep me from larger pursuits, but I kind of miss the smaller pursuits.

1 comments:

Matt Katcher said...

What is it with all the short albums these days? It seems like a bunch of the albums I've bought recently have been under 40 minutes (this one, Spoon's Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga, and I'm From Barcelona's Let Me Introduce My Friends come to mind. Also, Okkervil River's new album is pretty short). Ironically, one of the longer (and better) albums that I've recently bought is Panda Bear's Person Pitch, which is only 7 tracks.

Getting back to topic, Places Like This seems a little too short for everything that's going on in it. I listened to some of AIH's back catalog last night. Their first album is pretty short and has a lot of short songs, but there seem to be fewer musical concepts crammed into it and more space to breathe. After listening to Places Like This, I almost feel like I have run a marathon. By which I mean, about a mile or two, since that's probably about as far as I could run before keeling over.

I hope I'm not the only one reading this...(but it's pretty good so far, so keep it up)

- Matt