routine by katharine eastman

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rather melancholy ambient/drone - things looking up again - I like this one - they either hit the spot forever or never, and for me this is the former
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A while ago to and for my amusement I started buying the Wire magazine every month. Not as subscription or anything formal - but when I was in Smiths in the middle of a month I'd not be able to resist going over to the end of that stand and copping a peek and almost always finding a reason to buy it dammit.

But lately I was getting behind with my reading and the mags/newspapers were piling up into stop-in tunnels and a couple of days ago I promised to stop buying the Wire forever. So this morning in Smiths I bought a copy. Well I had to really. Van Der Graaf Generator (again), and various Krautrock heroes, a few of whom I got to know very distantly yonks ago and e.g. Klaus Dinger quite well - fanzines are usually great ways to make enemies - if the fanzine is any good - but enemies never count - it's the few friends you make that count for everything.

But I am determined that this is the final issue of the Wire that I will ever buy - even though last April my ex-girlfriend predicted that I'd be on the front cover of the November issue and my starry eyes reveal just how gladly I feel cos there is no easy way down. And that means that probably for the first time in my conscious music life I won't have any maggy wordy way of knowing what's going on in music.

We were all born the same way and lived the same lives and I too once lived in NME and Sounds and then moved through all the other familiar names I'm no longer familiar with - but there were always ways, words, things to hold. And when I got a computer the dodgy music sites stood in and taught me everything I knew that was new.

And of course I'm probably kidding myself if I say that in spite of all the words there to steer me, I would have found all the cool beautiful music anyway, without their help. And it did start to get a bit silly lately. I'd skim the album reviews and mark off anything that looked good and go onto Bandcamp and almost always find it and hear it and I'm sorry to be so predictable but so much of it didn't appeal to me.

That's not me saying the Wire has rubbish taste in music, or even me admitting that I have rubbish taste in music - it's just me saying that it was silly of me to think we're all the same, even though the results are always the same, the ways we get there are always different - and it'd be so much easier to do what I used to do from time to time and still do now when I have a bit of time and a following mood, and that's just to randomly mooch around Bandcamp, cut out the middlemen, discover for myself that the music I love is the stuff that no one else loves - it's not a consciously-contrary reaction of mine that I find that the more little pictures of fans under an album the worse-to-me an album is - just as when I go into Smiths in the future and avoid the Wire and go instead to the newspapers I'll find that the ones I want are the ones that no one else wants.
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(recorded today, photo the South Downs near Midhurst a few days ago)
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