The History of Music according to the Compact Disc
where a solitary listener reaches uncharted depths of his collection
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1. One's Own Library – The New Year's Sound
2. More Jazz Masterpieces, More Discography Confusion
3. Organizing Your Jazz Listening with Cook and Morton's Penguin Guide to Jazz
4. Keep It All Unsunken – Summer Stasis
5. Numbered Ratings, Horrorshow
6. Prioritizing Obsessive Listmaking
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Prioritizing Obsessive Listmaking
The way that I organize my listening, reading, and viewing has conformed to a three-pronged pattern for some time now. Regarding listening... I have catalogued my Compact Discs and other items for more than a decade, being quite fussy about what I buy (both the condition of the item and what issue or edition it is). I have written about music for roughly three decades (however unprofessionally), and attended live music concerts regularly since I was 16 years old. And while I have not consistently documented what I have listened to, I have experimented with doing so (to be precise, in 2009 I did) and could tell you roughly what I have heard by a particular artist or of a certain kind of music, with a degree of exactitude that surprises me and probably strikes most people as odd. Besides putting my writings about music online, I have documented (incompletely) my collection at Discogs and over the years participated in varied online forums about music.
As for reading... I maintain a list of books that I have read from 2014 to the present, and I continually experiment with documenting short-form works that I read, generally settling on documenting, critiquing, and reconsidernig which sources I draw upon for news and non-fiction. However, I have barely begun to consider extensive re-reading of books: that is, more of an intensive study of the works that I like most, a practice that would lead (I hope) to reading more poetry. Similar efforts to study literature, such as a review of varied books about pagan gods or a better system for not only looking up words that I do not know as I come across them while reading but also memorizing those words, have stalled out: too much to do, too little time.
For viewing, I have been relatively lax. I watch movies and T. V. series that interest me or in rare cases merely to pass the time. I do not document what I have watched, though I at times look up a list of all the films of a certain director to see what I have missed. I have also made short lists of movies that I want to see, mostly those that are harder to access; being delayed in watching them, I do not want to forget about them.
By taking obsessive organizing and documentation of my listening to "the next level," so to speak, with this ‘History of Music in the Form of the Compact Disc’ series, I begin to ask myself if I should organize and document my reading and viewing more effectively—exhaustively. Having recently subscribed to Night Flight, an online video service developed out of the cable-T. V. series of the same name, I find myself immersed in the world of camp aesthetics, "B" movies and exploitation cinema, Punk/ New Wave/ Synth Pop music, and the like: such is Night Flight's specialty, its ethos, its subscribers' fetishes. I take stock of which of the movies available there have already been viewed (endured) by me: Angel? Yes, turns out I had watched that one, but had forgotten it. Andy Sidaris films? No, those are new to me. In the last few years, I have attempted to re-engage with contemporary cinema, exploring more thoroughlly the work of directors like Ryusuke Hamaguchi, Céline Sciamma, Lee Chang-dong, Joachim Trier, Ari Aster, and Nuri Bilge Ceylan and been almost-mesmerized by certain films like Hamaguchi's Drive My Car, Lee's Burning, Sciamma's Portrait of a Lady on Fire, and Aaron Schimberg's A Different Man. Should I also try to keep up more with the movie world? Make note of the big names at the Cannes, Berlin, and Venice festivals? The winners of Oscars, Césars, Golden Globes, and BAFTAs? Read more film critics? Consult lists of movies? All sounds good, but ultimately I do not have the time, unless I were to read and listen less, and for now I am not going to do that.
Besides, having done a fair amount of international traveling recently, my "viewing" and "reading" could also entail the museum exhibits visited, photographs taken, and ephemera collected during those trips. In some respects I could document the museum exhibits that I have seen over the years rather well; that is because, living in a small city, most museum visits for me have taken place while traveling and thus I almost always have kept documentation of the visits. If I lived in New York or Paris or Tokyo, with countless museums to visit on any given day of my life, would I be able to make a list of exhibits attended? Probably not, if my experience in documenting music concerts that I have attended is any indication. In my teenage years, when going to nightclubs was still a fresh experience, I kept a list of shows that I had gone to. The list was maintained for a few years (1996-1998); sadly, I lost track and gave it up. I kept another list of Jazz and experimental shows that I had gone to, but that only listed for a few years as well, roughly 1997-2001. In recent years, from roughly 2009 on, I have kept a list of major shows that I have seen: that is, mostly out-of-town acts, in contrast to the many local shows that I see in Athens. Presumably, then, if I went to museums or similar events (speeches and conferences, dances, open mics, what-have-you) as often as I attended music concerts I would have documented them with similar inconsistency.
That is not to say that I do not fantasize about having a complete list of everything I have read, watched, or listened to, going back to at least when I became old enough to decide for myself what I wanted to consume, if not my birth. The notion of recreating a particular date is not what's appealing. What I would like, for example, is to be able to document what movies I rented from the video store during a defined period of my life: for example, 2001-2004, when I mostly lived in Madison, Wisconsin, and checked out D. V. D.s from Four Star Video Heaven. Then I would compare and collate these videos with those I rented in the following years, 2004-2017, when most of the movies I watched came from Vision Video, the video-store chain of Athens, Georgia, or in the mail from Netflix. I could also document what movies I watched streaming and wat I watched on television. And those I watched as illegal downloads (a smaller number, in contrast to my listening habits in the years of the "sharity" blogs). Not to the mention the tiny number that I went to cinemas to view. Or I would like to know what books I read as a kid (having in that regard only a reading journal for my Eighth Grade year, an assignment that I diligently fulfilled but not a practice that I maintained).
But would I really want such a perfect reconstruction of my past? Would it not drive me toward insane obsessive documentation of my daily life? One benefit could be that, if I know how much time I spent watching mediocre television series, I might strive to avoid television in the future. But still, having already experimented with keeping a daily journal tracking my daily activities in at least rudimentary, almost shorthand, ways I know that any effort to document all that I read, view, and listen-to would drive me batty. So, absent a robotic or supernatural being that would follow me constantly, I accept that I cannot find in my files documentation of what I was doing on a given day in 2005, or what I read in 1998. Instead I mostly have memories.
All this is to say... while I will continue to document my travels well, when it comes to reading and viewing and all their attendant activities and ephemera—plus social activities that leave a sort of cultural imprint, producing artifacts that I might save—I am likely not to get too obsessive, live and let live. Listening, on the other hand... I have already taken the plunge—many plunges. There is one year, 2009, for which I can look in my "files" and see what I was listening-to on any given day. But most of all, I have my catalog of C. D.s, plus some L. Ps. and cassettes. Some of these C. D.s, I do not remember buying. But many of them, I do. More importantly, they help me recall times when I have listened to them, especially when doing so with other people or on road trips, and the concerts that I have attended, and other social activities connected to a particular artist or their music, and so on and on...
Appropriately enough, I want to continue forcing myself to delve into my collection, and improve my catalog, which still has lots of missing information. Looking back over the C.D.s that I had picked in 2025, and seeing more precisely to what extent I had covered my entire collection, I began pondering how I would proceed with the ‘History of Music in the Form of the Compact Disc’ series. I considered only listening to the C. D.s that I had already listened-to from January, 2025, to January of this year. After all, I can always listen to new music online. Nonetheless, I would clearly have taken a step into absurdity if I were, for the rest of 2026, to refuse to put on a C. D. that came to mind, or that I saw on the shelf, and felt the urge to listen to. A compromise, then: strive to return to the C. D.s picked out last year, especially those that I did not explore deeply. Secondly, listen to the previously-unselected titles by the artists listened-to last year. And on top of that, if I pick a disc by an artist not represented by last year's selections, I will try to limit myself to artists for whom I own only a small number of items. This last stricture is not as tough as it might initially seem; the artists most plentifully represented in my collection (David Bowie, John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Duke Ellington, Sun City Girls, Sun Ra, Frank Zappa) ranked among my 2025 listens.
But if I am a sentient human who goes out into the world and has new experiences (and I am... sometimes), I will discover new music, and (even more so) I will be reminded of old music, to experience for the first time (finally), or to revisit, or to listen-to closely having failed to do so before. For example, I order a copy of the new book Now Jazz Now: 100 Essential Free Jazz & Improvisation Recordings 1960-80 by Mats Gustafsson, Thurston Moore, and Byron Coley. While many of the 100 recordings noted are familiar to me, a good number are not; and I am spurred on to listening expeditions that I had not planned for this year. So be it, that is a good thing. I might even own copies of some of these albums that I do not know well; either way, as much as I try to control myself, I am likely to buy copies of albums discussed in the book.
Online listening was neglible, as I was traveling for three weeks in Japan and only rarely resort to listening to music on my mobile device with its horrific sound quality; then focused on listening to new C. D.s upon my return.
Online: Anri; Phil Collins; Death; Deep Purple; Dinosaur Jr.; Peter Hammill; Hatfield and the North; Cem Karaca; Erkin Koray; Little Feat; Barış Manço; Moğollar; Junko Ohashi; Oneohtrix Point Never; Bernt Rosengren; Hiroshi Sato; Selda; Spooky Tooth; Steely Dan; McCoy Tyner; Urge Overkill; Minako Yoshida; Otomo Yoshihide; Tom Zé.
Around the mid-point of February, I decided to choose in advance what to listen-to for the remainder of the month. Some new titles as well as previously-selected C. D.s were picked out and placed beside my stereo system.
Online: Alien Sex Fiend; The Associates; Pat Benatar; Billy Bragg; The Comsat Angels; The Cravats; Floyd Dixon; Fad Gadget; Jake Holmes; Curtis Jones; Killing Joke; Thomas Leer; Little Feat; The Monochrome Set; Palais Schaumburg; Sha Na Na; Sonny Sharrock; Sex Gang Children; Superchunk; Swans; Art Tatum; Uriah Heep; Alan Vega; Wah!; The Wedding Present; Victoria Williams.
–Justin J. Kaw, February 2026