I know exactly what he’s talking about. These days, my daily internet behavior is depressingly predictable: Every morning I’ll click on more articles than I’d ever have time to read, clutter my browser with tab after tab after tab, and then at some moment every afternoon I’ll finally admit my own mortality and close all the things I didn’t get to. My listening habits follow a similar pattern, flitting restlessly between iTunes, Spotify, and SoundCloud—and there’s that tab containing a YouTube video for a song a friend sent an hour ago, expectantly demanding some sort of reply. I’m sort of ashamed to admit that I have occasionally caught myself thinking, “I wish I could listen to more than one thing at the same time,” but I know I’m not alone. Last week, I was talking to a colleague who had sent me some music by the mash-up artist Caddybay, and we discussed how his music feels like a response to the overwhelming “everythingness” of the internet. His full-length mixes edit together albums of two different artists—Gucci Mane vs. Boards of Canada, Puffy and Ma$e vs. Thievery Corporation—and the effect is the closest I’ve come to satisfying that 21st-century desire of listening to everything open in my browser at once.
http://pitchfork.com/features/ordinary-machines/9474-everything-happens-so-much/
Loved this singular piece and loved the column. It kind of sucks that it is going to be discontinued (as it did when Tom Ewing stopped writing Poptimist). I have my issues with the whole idea of the overflow of information as a contemporary malaise (I do not think there is an overflow of information, but a lack of good filtering on our behalf). However, the account of the trip to Berlin was very compelling and I see myself in the ginger thing every time I come back from Paris. Ordinary Machines will be missed.