What is this site?

It's not a terribly original insight, but one of the intangible parts of the music-listening experience that's been lost with the switch to digital media is the physical, and visual relationship that's always been a part of music listening in the era of LPs and CDs.

The first part is obvious: when your albums are just collections of tracks in a database, their membership in a proper album suddenly becomes a secondary concern. Unlike the old days where you'd have the visual cue of seeing the album cover as you took the record out of its sleeve, at this point it's unlikely that you ever encounter the packaging in the first place ... aside from the five minutes you spend unwrapping the CD and copying it to the hard drive.

But the greater loss is the sort of emergent filing system that resulted from having to deal with physical media. After a few days of listening, the top of your stereo had inevitably accumulated a pile of jewel boxes. But in the process you had also inadvertently created a ranking of the records you'd listened to most in the recent past, and could access this information through just a glance at the spines.

The sad thing about living inside of an MP3 player UI is that you lose these physical footprints of your listening habits. Sure, each track played is added to a log which can be called up for reference, but again you've lost the sense of the album as a single unit, and as a piece of art in which the packaging is an integral part of the experience.

This site is my attempt to counteract some of these forces, in an admittedly atavistic way, but one that keeps the music-listening experience closer to the one that drew me to this hobby/habit in the first place.

A sop to those who care about intellectual property

(of which I am one)

This site is unlinked and if you are here it's only because I invited you. As it stands all the actual audio files are hidden behind a password, but god only knows if this is sufficient in the insane IP environment we inhabit nowadays. But just to be sure, it'd be appreciated if people would not link to these pages publicly, at least to forestall any such legal considerations until I've added an attorney to the Samizdat payroll.

And in any case, virtually all the albums I'm including in this listing come from small independent labels and are made by bands small enough that they actually need your support at shows and at the cash register at the record shop. So I hope this site functions more as a shopping list for people, rather than a way to avoid rewarding the folks who bring such great music into being.

A sop to those who think this explaining is all a bit overdone

(of which I am one)

Yes, it's lame to have to be this moralistic and lecture-y, but it's equally lame to think that a site like this made for personal use could unleash a torrent of cease & desist letters. So until some balance is returned to (and some money removed from) the copyright system, consider this fretting my due diligence...