The Reed and Pickup

My word it has been a good month for music. The leaves are starting to fall from the trees, the clocks have changed to their winter setting and we can look forward to a lot of darkness for the next 6 months.

Fittingly, October has been a month of both death and doom.

An Abstract Illusion - The Sleeping City (2025)

Hailing from Sweden, An Abstract Illusion walk that line between technical death metal and melodic death metal. Arguably they are closer to the technical side than someone like Insomnium, but they manage to weave in such beauty between the ferocious growls and blast beats. Think Blood Incantation, with a hint of Fallujah.

The most striking thing about the opener, Blackmurmur, is the use of keyboards to provide a counter to the meaty guitars. An Abstract Illusion also scratch that itch of mine –a mixture of growls and clean vocals. The growls are invariably deep, purposeful and imposing, which makes the cleans that little bit of sunshine between the clouds.

The Sleeping City is my first exposure to this band, but I was hooked on the first listen. This immediately had me working backwards onto their 2022 album, Woe.

You can get it from Bandcamp here: anabstractillusion.bandcamp.com/album/the…

An Abstract Illusion - Woe (2022)

I could understand someone who has followed AAI from the beginning being slightly disappointed with The Sleeping City after listening to Woe. However, I think it would be unfair to suggest The Sleeping City is anything less than great. The trouble is, Woe is astonishing.

If anyone asks you what they should listen to if they are looking for some technical death metal, you send them to Woe. It has everything. It is the sort of album where it almost feels wrong to pick out individual tracks, as it is more of a complete piece from tracks 1 to 7. The tracks often run into one another but each has an identity of its own. Thankfully, it is the sort of album where you can start at track 1 and keep going right until the end without even a hint of boredom creeping in.

Tracks like ’Tear Down This Holy Mountain’ and ’In The Heavens You Will Become A Monster’ are the highlights for me, not just from the album but for the whole year. The former bringing in some classy guitar noodling in a relatively peaceful bridge; the latter breaking out in some searing female vocals courtesy of Lovisa Strindell.

I love how tech-death can throw almost anything at you and for it to fit right in. Any vocal style, any tempo, sometimes several different tempos and time signatures within a single song. It never gets old, it always surprises. Woe is a fantastic album.

You can get it from Bandcamp here: anabstractillusion.bandcamp.com/album/woe

REMINA - The Silver Sea

It is no secret that I’m a bit of a soft mark for anything Heike Langhans shares with the world. I can’t get enough of her ethereal vocals. She was great with Draconian, but I think she has really hit her stride with REMINA and Light Field Reverie.

The Silver Sea is the second full album from the minds of Heike and Mike Lamb and will feel right at home for anyone who enjoyed Strata or their recent EP, Erebus.

However, there are some additional bonuses in this one. Antimatter’s Mick Moss shares vocal duties with Heike in ‘Algol’. Mick has a very distinctive voice and has become a staple in the world of doom in his own right. Algol is a wonderful track, which is followed by the second guest spot, none other than Tony Dunn, the one-man band who appears under the name Sgàile.

Tony also has a great voice, which you can hear much more of in his 2024 release, Traverse the Bealach. His contribution to Vanta Ray is no less great here.

The Silver Sea weighs in at a far-too-short-for-me 43 minutes across its 7 tracks, but there are no duds on this one. It is another album that I can enjoy from beginning to end. However, if I was going to be picky, Algol, Vanta Ray and Io are my current favourites.

You can get it from Bandcamp here: remina.bandcamp.com/album/the…

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Albums that hooked me in September 2025

It has been a good month for releases if you share my tastes in death and doom. I’m not sure if I’m going to make a habit of these lists, but if there’s something worth talking about in October, you never know.

Paradise Lost - Ascension

I’ve already shared my thoughts on the new Paradise Lost album. I’m not unbiased in this as I have been listening to these guys since the mid 90s, but any new release from the gloomy crew from the north of England is a momentous occasion.

Thankfully, it was so good I bought it twice, once on Qobuz, once on CD. That thing’s a keeper.

In Mourning - The Immortal

Released at the very end of August, In Mourning’s latest release ‘The Immortal’ is a solid slab of melodic death metal from deepest darkest Sweden.

I adore melodic death metal for its ability to blend brutality with an unmistakable sense of harmony. The Immortal masterfully blends both harsh and clean vocals, brutal riffs with melodic leads. Highlights include ‘Silver Crescent’, ‘Song of the Cranes’ and ‘Sojourner’.

Nailed to Obscurity - Generation of the Void

Releasing on the 5th September, Generation of the Void was my first taste of German death-doom crew Nailed to Obscurity. I really like what I’ve heard so far.

I’d probably categorise ‘Generation of the Void’ as more melodeath, but there’s a definite hint of doom in there too. As with In Mourning, there’s a lovely blend of harsh and clean vocals at work here too.

Highlights include ‘Overcast’, ‘Echo Attempt’ and ‘The Ides of Life’.

Honourable Mentions

Between the Buried and Me - The Blue Nowhere

Between the Buried and Me released their new album ‘The Blue Nowhere’ on 12th September.

This album is completely mad. There’s bits of death, bits of funk and a lot of prog to bind it all together.

Whilst I enjoyed it, it didn’t grip my as hard as the three mentioned earlier. It can be a difficult listen at times, but it is undeniably impressive what these guys have put together.

Counting Hours - Dreaming in the Mire

It is always a good day when Counting Hours release new material. However, this was one new track and a proper release of Wintry Insight, which previously appeared on an unreleased demo.

I love both tracks, but hopefully the rest of the album will follow along soon. I will probably buy it immediately, because it is Counting Hours.

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I’m sure there has been a time in your life where you caught a few notes of a song on the TV or radio only for it to get its hooks into you and never let go?

What if you didn’t know what it was and had no way to track it down? That happened to me at a time when there was no internet, no Shazam or even a schedule on the ol’ TV. This is a story about that time.

It was the 90s, man…

Picture the scene… It was around 1993 and Little G was on the customary six week summer break from school. Little G spent much of that time watching any old trash on daytime TV in those days. These were long, lazy days of watching anything on the four TV channels we had and eating beans on toast. Good times.

Thankfully, kids TV was much better back then and there was usually a film on in the middle of the afternoon. One day, I became engrossed in a film about someone pretending to be a boy so they could get into a band. At the end of the movie there was a song that I really, really enjoyed, but I had no idea what the film was, let alone the song.

Back then we had purely analogue TV and whilst Teletext existed, we didn’t have it on our wood-panelled TV. The only way to know what you were watching was to catch the opening credits or buy the TV guide, which I hadn’t.

This song would proceed to live rent-free in my head throughout the 90s, the 2000s and even the beginning of the 2010s. I went roughly 25 years without hearing that song again.

Around 2010 I found myself with an hour-long drive to work every day. The day would start around 6:00am and I would tune the car’s radio to the local station, until I lost the signal halfway down the motorway. One morning, I caught the end of that song again.

It was just the last few bars, but the DJ didn’t say what it was. The frustration continued.

Bicycles…

In around 2015 I found myself diving head-first into the world of cycling. I even had a blog about my adventures and discoveries cycling around my home city. This was also the time when Twitter was still good.

A chance post about bicycles in movies caught my eye one afternoon in an all-too-frequent scrolling session (it wasn’t that doomy back then).

In that movie, there was a scene where this group of kids were cycling through their town and I knew immediately it was the movie I was looking for. It turned out to be called The Challengers.

The Challengers was a made-for-TV movie from Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), released in 1990 but first aired over here in 1993.

The song turned out to be by Jon & Vangelis and it was called ‘I’ll Find My Way Home’. In 2025 I finally have the album on CD and it neatly ties up a few strange coincidences.

It would be only a few years later that I would be teaching myself to play the guitar, followed by the drums and getting into bands, recording demos and playing gigs anywhere that would take us. I would also encounter Vangelis again in the sublime Blade Runner soundtrack.

These days you can just reach for your smartphone and get an app to identify the song for you, but those were simpler times. I am starting to wonder whether trying to find my way back to this song has influenced the directions I have taken in my life so far. Was it Vangelis’ distinctive sound that drew me to Blade Runner? Was it the idea of performing on stage in The Challengers what steered me towards music?

Perhaps I am over-thinking it, but it does make me wonder.

G.

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It is not every day you get a new Paradise Lost album to talk about, but thankfully today is one of those days.

You’ll remember from my previous gushing blogpost about Draconian Times that Paradise Lost has been a feature of my life for well, most of it. I’m not exactly an objective witness. There will be some (30+ year) bias ahead.

Ascension, which released today (19th September) might be one of their finest albums to date. Weighing in at almost exactly an hour, save for 54 stray seconds, it pulls in bits of their more death/doom metal chapters from the early 90s, re-discovered in the late 2010s and 2020s with some distinct Icon / Shades of God vibes, mixed in with more modern (think Obsidian, Icon 30) production sensibilities.

This isn’t to say they completely discarded the One Second/Host phase. The maturity of their songwriting evident in that era is still in play here too, but without the Sisters of Mercy inspired rhythms. Thankfully we still have HOST and their 2023 album IX to scratch that particular itch.

Nick and Gregor appear to be at the top of their game with Ascension. Nick delivering some of his customary growls and gutturals, but also some wonderful, often harmonised cleans in the choruses. I have a particular weakness for artists that manage to blend the growling with the singing, which has drawn me to melodic death metal and technical death metal in recent times. It has been wonderful to hear Paradise Lost gradually introduce more and more of this this to their sound over the years, particularly with their previous album Obsidian, with tracks like ‘Darker Thoughts’ and ‘The Devil Embraced’.

Paradise Lost’s trademark has always been Gregor Mackintosh’s lead guitar work, which act more like a second vocal than a standalone part. There are solos, of course, but Gregor’s melodies run throughout and keep the momentum going, allowing Nick to focus on bringing the misery.

The whole package feels incredibly meaty, consistent and quintessentially Paradise Lost.

From the songs they didn’t release as singles, Salvation has what I just talked about in spades, but Lay a Wreath, Sirens, and This Stark Town are future classics. Crucially, there’s no filler; no wasted time; no songs that I feel the need to skip. It’s a rare quality I’ve found in very few albums (Draconian Times, Whitechapel’s ‘Kin’ and Insomnium’s ‘Shadows of the Dying Sun’ aside).

If there is to be a weak point, I’d say ‘Diluvium’ doesn’t reach quite the lofty heights of the others, but that is not to say it is bad. It is just not as excellent as the others. I don’t think being sat between ‘Lay a Wreath’ and ‘Savage Days’ helps, because those two are fantastic.

I’m really happy to have Ascension in my collection. Paradise Lost really knocked this one out of the park.

Where to find it:

On Qobuz: open.qobuz.com/album/o89… On Bandcamp: paradiselostofficial.bandcamp.com/album/asc… Listenbrainz: listenbrainz.org/album/d40… On their website: paradiselost.co.uk

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Peter Gabriel is someone I’ve had on my radar for quite some time. I have a copy of his seminal album ‘So’ and I love it, but I didn’t really delve any deeper than that.

Today I stumbled upon a live version of my favourite Gabriel song, ‘In Your Eyes’ from his 1993 tour and it completely bowled me over.

It’s a celebration more than it is a song, but it features Paula Cole and Papa Wemba. Paula cuts through so clearly against Peter’s slightly gritty delivery, particularly as she enters on this track (at 1:20). Papa brings in his own special sauce, delivering some native Wolof lines with some warm and earthy tones.

I also can’t ignore Tony Levin’s legendary bass lines. Needless to say, I have the blu-ray on order as well as a copy of the album. Wow.

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After seeing Microsoft speed-running the end of the Xbox brand, culminating in more cancellations and thousands more jobs deleted from existence, I’m reminded of an unfortunate truth about cultural artefacts and the nature of public companies –they don’t belong together.

For clarity, when I refer to public companies, I mean those whose shares are available for the great unwashed to buy from exchanges or their broker of choice. A great many companies involved in the games industry are public –Microsoft, Ubisoft, EA, TakeTwo etc.

Their job, above all else, is to provide value to shareholders. The line must always go up. Either the price of a share needs to increase, or you need to kick back enough in dividends to keep investors interested.

The main reason why they are not compatible with culture is, culture is never a one-size-fits-all thing. It is meant to provoke a reaction in people. It is meant to ask questions that may not have cute, cuddly answers.

Public companies want to make things that have the broadest appeal, that is not going to make waves or make anyone feel anything that might be considered unpleasant. It has to be neutral, it has to be safe, or someone might not like it. It doesn’t matter whether we are talking about games, music, movies or paintings. Are you making art, or the wall it is mounted to?

As that saying goes, those that try to please everybody, end up pleasing nobody. Without Xbox, Microsoft has no product that customers would use were they not forced to by their employer’s IT department. A company bereft of culture; a 3.65 trillion dollar super-massive black hole.

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Whilst early metal music may have been fairly one-dimensional, in 2025 I put it to you that there is probably a sub-genre of metal for everyone.

There was a study ‘Charting the Universe of Metal Music Lyrics and Analyzing Their Relation to Perceived Audio Hardness’ by Isabella Czedik-Eysenberg, Oliver Wieczorek, Arthur Flexer and Christoph Reuter published in 2024 which scanned through 124,288 song lyrics and mapped them out. It also charted the perceived heaviness of the songs.

It then plotted the various themes covered by these songs on a grid against the subgenre in Figure 6.

If you were ever wondering what to listen to, but had a psychological itch you needed to scratch, Figure 6 may help you figure it out.

However, the answer is probably going to be Insomnium and their extraordinary album from 2014, ‘Shadows of the Dying Sun’.

All the pain and suffering;

Will dispirit or feed you, dispirit or feed you;

For each and every time your failures will craft you;

When the fear of them is gone, fear is gone.

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It was 1995 and the world of heavy metal was at a crossroads. Metallica had drifted from its thrash roots to something more polished and mature with The Black Album; the hair metal of the 80s was becoming a distant memory and even the more extreme forms were starting to mellow.

Paradise Lost, not to be outdone were also starting to fill out their previously oppressive and bleak sound with melodies and string arrangements. Icon, released in 1993 had a beautifully warm sound and was far easier on the ear than 1992’s Shades of God. Yet it was easy to tell both albums came from the same artist.

It was 1995’s Draconian Times that would take the formula into a whole new level.

A New The Black Album

This may seem like a reductive sub-heading, but there is a good reason for it. When Draconian Times released, it arrived in a limited edition box, complete with a beautifully designed booklet and artwork. The outer box was completely black, just a sticker on the front to tell you what was inside.

The black album comparisons don’t stop there though. Like Metallica’s self-titled album, a more concise and accessible progression from where they had traveled between Master of Puppets and …and justice for all, Draconian Times was a further refinement of what Paradise Lost had achieved with Icon.

Icon always sounded warm to me. The mids were very forward, the bass and treble slightly recessed, so the drums didn’t have a lot of impact. They would go on to rectify this somewhat in their re-recording from 2023 (they didn’t own the rights to the 1993 recording of Icon, the label did, so they had to re-record it and put new artwork on it), but Draconian Times had a more lifelike sound. The bass drums have more of a slap, the snare cuts through nicely and the guitars fill the space allowing Nick Holmes to deliver his raspy vocals over the top.

The vocals, much like with Icon, are more tuneful than they were in Gothic or Shades of God. Think singing angrily rather than a death-metal growl.

From a songwriting perspective, Draconian Times continues the doom and despair themes from previous albums, but the album is paced in such a way that the songs stand on their own rather than all bleeding into one, like Metallica’s last three albums have (oof, did you really have to go there?).

Enchantment starts us off with a piano and big pondering riffs, before upping the pace with Hallowed Land, but even that has a piano bridge to provide some breathing space. The Last Time and Forever Failure change things up again before Shadowkings and Elusive Cure provide some airy and dare I say it, progressive stylings.

It is the middle of the album where Draconian Times really hits its stride. Shadowkings, Elusive Cure and Yearn For Change may be the best songs Paradise Lost has ever released. They are unmistakably Paradise Lost songs, but they are songs that I can’t help but sing along to.

This is not to say the rest of the album is bad, far from it. Shades of God, Hands of Reason and I See Your Face are absolutely fantastic, but if I was to be picky, that middle three are untouchable.

Jaded is the last song and is the closest thing to a ballad on this record, but it is the point in the record where I realise it is nearly over. Now, I’ve been listening to this regularly since it was released in 1995. My first exposure to Paradise Lost was from a Kerrang cover CD, but since the album was released it has been never far from my side.

It is 2025 now and I’m still not in any way shape or form bored of Draconian Times. It has been 30 years, but I still can’t get enough of it.

If you’ve not listened to it yet, you’ll find it here: https://listenbrainz.org/album/564ebe39-4d24-32c7-982d-416149393780/

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As someone who enjoys tinkering with computer hardware, for various reasons I’ve found myself bouncing between Windows 11 and Linux.

Windows has the 3rd-party software support and a slightly more resilient driver arrangement, particularly with Nvidia GPUs. BUT…the ads, the Bing content in search results and the insistence on shoving CoPilot down everyone’s throats inevitably pushes me away.

For those times where I find my way back to Windows again, despite my best efforts to leave it in the rear-view forever, I want to bookmark these two tweaks for future reference.

The Bing Crap

There’s a good guide here for editing the registry to remove the Bing crap from search results.

Ultimately it involves navigating to: Computer\HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\Explorer

Then adding a new 32Bit DWORD called DisableSearchBoxSuggestions then changing the value data to 1.

Make CoPilot f*** off

This can be done by creating a group policy. Open the Group Policy Editor and navigate to: User Configuration\Administrative Templates\Windows Components\Windows Copilot

You can then switch the value ‘Turn off Windows CoPilot’ to Yes.

Hopefully Microsoft will continue to allow users to nerf some of their most egregious over-reaches, but if they somehow patch them out, that’s it. There’s no going back.

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I realise I don’t spend enough time talking about music on this blog, even though the Reed & Pickup was meant to be a music blog when I registered the domain. So…

I adore Whitechapel’s 2021 album ‘Kin’. It has many pearls of wisdom buried within it, like this one.

What is the point of running away

When you don’t know who you are?

I’ll always be one step behind

Until you realize who I am

We can often find ourselves running from one situation to another without really knowing ourselves. We collect emotional baggage without taking the time to figure out why we are carrying it around with us.

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I realise it has been a little while since my last post. After 2024 ended, my Stoic 366 project along with it, I didn’t really feel like saying very much. Partly I’ve been adjusting to the ‘new’ world order and the chaos that seems to be ensuing.

What has been consuming my time is getting my head around how exposed I am to USA-based technology. For a long time they felt like a neutral partner in ‘the West ™’. Sure, their companies and culture were spreading around the globe, but they were usually pretty safe. I don’t think that is true anymore.

One major sticking point has been the smartphone. There are currently only two major players in the smartphone OS market these days and they’re both American. I have stumbled upon /e/OS, a form of Android that has been #degoogled and the various forms of tracking swapped for something less intrusive. You can buy /e/OS pre-installed on a Fairphone –a repairable smartphone that has a removable battery and many replaceable parts (seriously, why is this a novelty in 2025?!). Both appear to be European, with Fairphone being Dutch and Murena being French.

I think my next step is to pick one up to see if I can daily drive it. You can learn more about them here: murena.com/products/…

The other thought going around in my head is what to do about my growing book collection. I don’t want it to get too much bigger so an e-ink reader seems like a wise investment. It can’t be a Kindle, so I’ve been looking at Kobo. They’re a Canadian company but are now under the Rakuten umbrella, a Japanese company.

If you are on the fediverse, there’s a rather wholesome hashtag to follow #unplugtrump which is gradually filling up with interesting ideas.

I think that’s it for today. Until next time…

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Why Narcissistic Leaders Always Fail (In The End) - The Daily Stoic

This is an excellent video from the Daily Stoic. A timely reminder that what the world is facing today isn’t new. It too shall pass.

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So, I bought some books recently. I didn't think about it much at the time of ordering, but these seem somewhat related.

If we don’t heed the warnings of the top two, we can probably look forward to life resembling something like the bottom one.

Now I’m kinda alarmed…

We’ve become so dependent on our devices that when one breaks we feel like there is a part of us missing.

However, in recent times these devices have started to feel more of a curse that only serves to grant access to a network of unspeakable shit-bags. I used to be excited by new technology, but now I automatically look for the catch.

So, I think I’m going to go old-school in 2025. I’m going to double-down on the physical media, the CDs, blu-rays and books and try to spend as much time away from screens as I can.

I have a nice new pen, a nice empty journal. I also have this rather minimalist new blog to share the journey with, but I think it is time to put big tech back in its box.

I don’t really believe in new year’s resolutions. Most people fail them within a couple of weeks and end up reverting to their default programming in short order, but there is some sense in having a vague plan for what you want to do with the year.

This year my plan was to take a photo every day and to absorb a meditation from my Daily Stoic book. I also wanted to get back into some routine physical activity. I’d like to think I did that.

I’m thinking I’ll just stick with the physical activity for 2025. That’s not to say the Stoicism and the photography were a waste of time –they definitely were not. I think I just need to give my head a rest for a few months.

This year I think the main project will be downsizing into a couple of bags and getting some work done on the house. It’s not terribly exciting, but it does need to be done.

I will also be doing my best to avoid the news. One thing I can take away from the Stoicism is the idea that if something is not within my control, I don’t need to dwell on it.

That’s all I’ve got for now. Hope you had a good festive break and hope 2025 is a good one for you.

Sometimes a quote appears in the Daily Stoic that stops me in my tracks. This is today’s instalment - 26th December.

”It’s not at all that we have too short a time to live, but that we squander a great deal of it. Life is long enough, and it’s given in sufficient measure to do many great things if we spend it well. But when it’s poured down the drain of luxury and neglect, when it’s employed to no good end, we’re finally driven to see that it has passed by before we’ve even recognised it passing. And so it is –we didn’t receive a short life, we make it so."

–Seneca, on the brevity of life 1.3-4a

To keep things short (for once) and light-hearted, here’s a post about the games of 2024 that really got their hooks into me.

I wouldn’t call myself an achievement-hunter, but I collected all of them on these.

Jusant

I’m a sucker for a low-stress exploration game, but Jusant was the full package.

A low-stress exploration game where the main focus is climbing a parched, abandoned monolith, trying to figure out where the water and the people went.

A simple but beautiful art style combined with a gorgeous soundtrack by Guillaume Ferran had me glued to the screen from start to finish.

I liked it so much I earned the Platinum trophy on the Playstation and a Perfect Game on Steam.

Astro Bot

Who would have thought it, a puzzle-platformer with excellent mechanics, an inspired soundtrack and a boatload of Playstation fan-service would turn out to be so good.

This probably explains why Nintendo seems to be doing so well as the rest of the industry falls over itself to be as cloying and predatory as it can possibly be.

No micro-transactions, no egregious monetisation, just good clean fun.

As the year draws to a close it is perhaps time to reflect on the year that has passed.

At the outset I decided to accompany the daily photo project with a dose of Stoicism, using the 366 passages in the Daily Stoic. Have I learned anything?

Why Stoicism?

One thing I’ve always struggled with is knowing how to exist in this world. The first 15 years or so were fairly typical and I think I had a fair grasp of being a normal child and a normal teen, but the wheels started to come off as my twenties approached.

For various reasons I didn’t have a lot of luck with father figures so when those situations arose where the advice of said father figure would be helpful there was none forthcoming.

So, I found myself following the path of least resistance and not really getting anywhere. Between then and now my mental health has been a seemingly well-controlled dumpster fire, at least until I reached out for some help and had some counselling and cognitive behavioural therapy.

The latter made a big difference in figuring out where I was starting to go wrong, helping me retrace my steps and take corrective action. Many people have said that CBT takes some of its inspiration from Stoicism, so I thought I’d try to absorb myself in it.

For the most part it does feel like many of these passages are sinking in. My instant reaction to various issues that crop up is more measured now and I’m less likely to ruminate on various things that bother me.

“The chief task in life is simply this: to identify and separate matters so that I can say clearly to myself which are externals not under my control, and which have to do with the choices I actually control. Where then do I look for good and evil? Not to uncontrollable externals, but within myself to the choices that are my own…” –Epictetus

Considering the Stoics lived around the time of the Roman Empire there were very few instances where passages from the Daily Stoic felt dated. Granted the book has hand-picked passages from ancient writings and reinterprets them for a modern audience, but the meaning doesn’t seem to have been lost in the previous two thousand years or so.

The premise of the book is a passage a day for 366 days, so as this year was a leap year with, as luck would have it, 366 days it made sense to do it this year. I’m quite glad I did. Each page is a pearl of wisdom you’d hope your wise and knowledgeable father would impart at the dinner table.

Even if you don’t feel lost, like I occasionally do, I suspect most people will get something out of the various teachings of Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus and Seneca all those centuries ago.

The Photos

I know we’re not at the end yet and I still have a week left of work before I see daylight again, but I’m hopefully going to complete another year of taking a photo every day.

By some miracle, quite a few of my shots were picked up by Flickr’s algorithm, so the views and favourites has distorted my stats somewhat, but it’s always a bit of fun when it happens.

I’m going to have a year off from it next year, at least the posting part. I may carry on taking photos in private and only post the good ones, but the routine is healthy and I don’t want to lose that.

After going on for way too long about physical media, a couple of news articles crossed my bow today that I’d like to record for posterity.

The first one from the BBC asks why vintage audio equipment is booming and talks about how people are seeking out old audio gear because it was built to last and far more repairable than devices today.

He says people are restoring old audio gear they’ve bought on platforms such as Ebay. “Things were certainly built better back then, and are much more repairable than the latest equipment.”

One of the big problems with internet-connected devices is they have an inherent shelf-life that ends when the manufacturer decides, not when the hardware gives up the ghost. CD players, record players and even cassette players don’t have that problem.

Personally I’m longing for the day when MiniDisc starts to boom again.

The second article from the FT which is unfortunately paywalled, written by Sarah O’Connor postulates that we’ve given up quality by trading it for convenience.

If hundreds of millions of normal music listeners (like me) have decided to trade audio quality for convenience and variety, then fair enough. But what disconcerted me is that I didn’t know that’s what I’d done. I had simply forgotten how much better music used to sound.

The problem youngsters are going to have is they may never know how much better music could sound, if they don’t realise Spotify is hot garbage. CDs still sound much better than most streaming services.

I’ve mentioned the Mullenweg Skirmishes already in my re-introduction post. However, I first started out with Wordpress in the early 2010s and even won a Wales Blog Award for the technology category in its inaugural year.

However, it was in essence a second phase of maintaining a home on the internet. The first phase was in the days of Netscape Communicator and Frontpage. I would build static websites before they were cool. Sure, they looked dreadful by today’s standards, but they were mine.

The decision to give up my own little corner of the internet was one borne out of despondence more than anything. I was getting frustrated with the LLM fad, the flagrant disregard of platform holders –particularly Wordpress, to respect the efforts of their users in the pursuit of training materials for Grand Theft Autocomplete.

At the time it felt easier to just walk away entirely. I nearly did, but not having a place to call my own didn’t feel right somehow. I hope that Micro.Blog will serve me well.

As the web becomes an anaerobic lagoon for botshit, the quantum of human-generated “content” in any internet core sample is dwindling to homeopathic levels. - Cory Doctorow - The Coprophagic AI crisis

I’d like to think that humans continuing to write or create art solely for the benefit of other humans is something worth clinging onto, however futile it may seem right now.

Trying out Sunlit…

One thing I hadn’t appreciated when I signed up to Micro.Blog is the variety of apps that are available in addition to the main Micro.Blog app. One of them is called Epilogue and is a way to track your books –the ones you are reading, the ones you want to read etc.

The other one is Sunlit, which is for sharing photos. It seems a bit short on features right now, but I like the idea of a separate app that feeds into your main blog.

Photo taken on St David’s Day in Cardiff, Wales. Shot on a Nikon F80 with 50mm F1.8, Ilford XP2 film.

Those of you who may have known me from Mastodon, or from Wordpress before the Mullenweg Skirmishes --that’s what I’m going to call it from now on. I found myself in a place were I didn’t see much point trying to carve out my own little space on an internet I was convinced would be overwhelmed by AI Slop before the decade was out.

The Skirmishes gave me a plausible excuse to get out, save a bit of money and spend some more time in the real world.

I then had this crazy idea about making an online music magazine. But then I remembered I quite like music but didn’t really want to make it feel like a job. So, I binned that. Besides, I had started building it in Ghost, which is great but much more than I really need.

So, then I was then pointed towards Micro.Blog by someone on Mastodon and...it’s five bucks a month and seems like a far better fit. I still had the domain there waiting to be used so, here I am.

I’m Gavin, a middle-aged guy from Wales. I like taking photos, I like technical death metal and its softer, brassier cousin, jazz. I’ve also had a long time love-affair with Paradise Lost. No, not the John Milton poem but the doom metal band from the north of England.

Pleased to meet you.

Between the days of compact cassettes and the arrival of the iPod, there was no ideal way of carrying your music around with you. Sure, the Sony Walkman was legendary in the portable music world, but cassettes were still a nuisance that would chew up if you so much as looked at them the wrong way.

Also, you couldn’t jump to the track you wanted to listen to and too much messing around would see you having to untangle the tape from the read heads in the player. Winding your tape back in with a cheap ballpoint pen was a common occurrence.

CDs were the main format by the early 90s, but portable CD players were pretty awful. Shock protection wasn’t really a thing in those early portable CD players, so you had to place them flat on a table and hope nobody with heavy feet walks by too quickly. Also, battery life was often atrocious. See, these were dark times.

However, Minidisc changed all that.

In around 1998 I picked up my first Minidisc player/recorder. It was an AIWA AM-F65 and it was a revelation.

Nearly CD quality, shock proof and with the ability to jump straight to the track you want. You could also delete tracks and replace them with others. I was hooked, recording disc after disc with the optical cable. Come the early 2000s and I’d have my first proper car too. Sure enough, I put a Kenwood (KMD-44) Minidisc head unit in there, so I could listen to all of those discs in the car too. A year later, Minidisc would appear in The Matrix. If it was good enough for Neo, it was probably good enough for me.

Whilst digital music was starting to appear in Ye Olde Internet, storage was still a problem outside of a 3.5″ desktop hard drive and connection speeds were glacial, with most of us rocking a 56kbit dial-up modem at the most. Portable devices with the ability to hold more than around 64MB of data were still to catch on. Heck, not even USB was all that well established and where it was, it was slow. Early music players like the iPod or Creative Jukebox shipped with a Parallel or Firewire connection along with USB1.

Minidisc used a form of compression called ATRAC to provide the same recording time as a CD, but in a much smaller package. It worked by removing sounds that were masked by other sounds –a process not too dissimilar to MP3, which we’ll be hearing about later. Best of all, you had to listen really carefully to notice any difference to the CD version.

Minidiscs were double sided and housed in a caddy, much like the old floppy disks we were (sadly) still using at the time –USB flash storage was still in its infancy too. The caddy meant they were surprisingly durable and ideal for listening on the move, or dropping down under your seat in the car, never to be seen again.

At the time, the best way to transfer music to Minidisc was using an optical (TOSLINK) cable, out of the back of a CD player. Once recorded, you could then edit the track names, so they would scroll by on the LCD screen and in-line remote. I’ll be honest, this part was really fiddly, but you got used to it after a while.

In 2001 the iPod would launch. Whilst it wasn’t the first mp3 player, its integration with the iTunes Store would prove too tempting a funnel for music listeners. By the mid 2000s it was pretty much all MP3, or Apple’s own AAC.

2001 was also the year Sony would release NetMD, sensing that it was about to be eaten alive by the MP3 players that were starting to appear. This would allow you to transfer your MP3s onto a disc and mess around with the track names using your computer, negating the need for a CD player, which was also on borrowed time.

Whilst Minidisc never really caught on in the US, it did to a certain extent in Europe, but still not to the degree that it did in Japan, where it would be a going concern up until the 2010s.

Sadly, the writing was on the wall out here in the west by the early 2000s and in 2003 I found myself with a Creative Nomad Jukebox 2 and didn’t really look back. A few more Creative players entered my collection, before an iPod Classic and then the iPhone 3G.

However, I’m feeling quite nostalgic at the moment. I’ve just acquired my first Minidisc player in over 20 years and…it’s strangely exciting. I picked up the Sony MD-N707, boxed with all accessories and a handful of blank discs for about £100 on eBay. It was in mint condition and I’ve just spent a few hours transferring a couple of my favourite albums onto the blank discs –Whitechapel’s ‘Kin’, Miles Davis’ ‘Kind of Blue’ and Paradise Lost’s ‘Draconian Times’.

Minidisc today

Whilst Sony shipped its last minidisc devices in 2013, TEAC and TASCAM continued making devices up until 2020. Blank minidiscs are also still fairly easy to get hold of, particularly Sony’s Niege range.

If you can find a device in good condition, you’ll likely get some good use out of it for years to come, particularly if it uses regular AA batteries. My MD-N707 uses a single rechargeable AA battery, which are still readily available.

You’ll need a source with an optical/TOSLINK output, or if you have a NetMD recorder, some software. This is where things get slightly thorny.

Way back when NetMD first appeared, Sony released its SonicStage software to support it, but that has long since been abandoned and is difficult to get running on Windows 10 or 11. Thankfully, an enterprising fellow named Stefano Brilli released a web application called Web Minidisc Pro that allows you to transfer music onto your NetMD device. You can access it through the ever-useful Minidisc Wiki.

Whilst it works… most of the time, it will occasionally fail without warning. However, I’ve successfully written a few discs now and all is good.

Thoughts

Whilst I’m as equally guilty as anyone for abandoning minidisc when the shiny new MP3s came along, I’m becoming acutely aware of what we’ve lost in these intervening years.

Back then, music devices had replaceable storage (Minidiscs, cassettes etc), replaceable batteries and were fairly easy to open up and replace parts when they wore out.

Nowadays, you’re likely to be listening to music from a streaming service that you will likely pay forever with nothing to show for it, whilst the artist also receives next to nothing for your investment, on a device with a battery and storage that has a finite lifespan, but cannot be easily replaced.

I have a sinking feeling that we need to turn back before we lose physical media and serviceable devices forever. I’m really glad people have taken to vinyl again. It’s not for me, I like CDs too much, but there’s a lot to be said for owning your favourite music in all its forms and formats.

As for minidisc, it is nice having a music player that doesn’t require an internet connection (I can still use TOSLINK); isn’t arbitrarily limited by the manufacturer’s firmware updates; and requires only single rechargeable AA battery to run.

If the end of the internet does come, at least I’ll still have something to listen to. My task for the coming days is to get the camera out again –my nostalgia collection has a few disc-shaped gaps in it.

There’s a lot to be said for having access to nearly all the music that has ever existed since the dawn of time, for ten bucks a month.

Then again, if the thought of waking up to discover your favourite album had been wiped from the face of the Earth brings you out in an icy cold sweat, perhaps it is time to rethink your relationship with the songs you hold dear.

The land before streaming

Believe it or not, there was a time when the internet didn’t exist. There were times when the only music you could listen to was on the radio and it would largely fit into three groups - classical music, pop music, or even more pop music. The only way for a disaffected youth such as myself to get hold of anything with more vigour was by setting the VCR to record at some ungodly hour of the morning to catch the latest Beavis & Butthead, or Noisy Mothers.

Either that, or you would have to take a chance and buy the album on your preferred physical format. This often meant you would either end up with something you would cling to for years, or a real stinker that had the single you quite liked.

It wouldn’t be until the early 2000s when you could reliably get music from the internet, but at that point it was either obtained from a legal grey area, or it had DRM and all the potential complications that brings.

Much later, music streaming services would arrive allowing people to pay a flat fee to listen to everything they had available at the time. So, society did what it was told by the people selling the streaming service –get rid of your CDs and vinyl, we’ve got everything here…

Attachment styles

I’m well aware not everyone feels the same way about music as I do. There are plenty of people who won’t dwell on the music they enjoyed in the past. There’s plenty of music coming out every week to satisfy even the most voracious listener.

I’m not like that. I will listen to new music, but if it gets its hooks into me it will stay with me for the long haul. I still listen to albums from the late 80s and early 90s on a regular basis. If Pearl Jam’s Vs; Alice In Chains' Dirt or Paradise Lost’s Draconian Times were to vanish from streaming services I would be beyond mortified.

I don’t like the idea that my continued access to certain albums (or songs from those albums) is predicated on the continued agreements of corporations, whether they are representing the artist or the service.

Physical formats are the only way to ensure the music you love will always be available to you.

The changing face of physical

Unfortunately, whilst there was a time when you could buy a CD player from nearly anywhere, in the mid 2020s they’re becoming a niche item with a distinctly niche price. Yes, you can buy used, but as mechanical devices they will probably fail at some point.

It may be that they disappear completely in a few years. I think we need to expand our definition of physical accordingly.

If you think about what you get with a CD –a collection of DRM-free files on a disc, each file being 16bit and 44khz. From that you can create lossless FLAC files or lossy MP3s. You also get a physical booklet, which is nice.

If you can live without the booklet, you are left with just the files. It is still possible to buy DRM-free files from places such as Bandcamp, 7Digital and my new favourite place, Qobuz.

Once you have the files you can use them however you see fit. Nobody can remove them from your hard drive without you knowing. You do need to keep backups though.

I currently use Qobuz to discover new music, before buying the CD or FLAC files to stream from a Network Attached Storage (NAS) device running Plex. Plex (with Plex Pass) works like your own do-it-yourself streaming service.

Alternatively, you can import ALAC files into Apple Music, but note that if you do, make sure you keep a separate backup of them. Apple Music likes to replace your files with its own DRM versions without so much as a warning.

The third option is to buy a portable music player. This is ideal for people with high-impedance headphones (typically over 30 ohms) or those who don’t want all of their eggs in a smartphone-shaped basket. Sony still makes these, as do Fiio. Astell & Kern have a few portable players for people with slightly deeper pockets.

Why own your music?

Apart from the prospect of your favourite album disappearing from streaming services, there are other benefits to owning a copy of your favourite music.

Aside from the obvious point about your CD or vinyl still working even if you stop paying that monthly fee, the major difference between a physical release and a stream is the amount of money the artist receives.

Here, there is no comparison. One stream on Spotify pays about three-tenths of a penny — that means 1,000 streams pays $3. To put it a bit differently, you would need 3,000 streams to make $9, about the same profit you will make when you sell one CD at a concert for $10. CD vs. Streaming: The answer to which did better in 2022 is not as simple as you think

The second point is that the CD will usually sound better. All CDs are mastered to a lossless 16bit, 44kHz. It may be a little less than the original master (possibly 24bit, 192kHz), but unless the streaming service offers lossless files, or if you are really lucky, hi-res lossless the CD will most likely sound better.

Yes, there is some variation between streaming services, but the CD is usually the best way to listen.

Best of all, you’ll have a shiny disc with some nice artwork to put on your shelf.

Here’s an obligatory Hello World post. I’m still in the process of moving in, so stay tuned.