Mutant Sounds, RIP
The sharity scene really is fading out. A few new blogs are popping up, but vastly outnumbered by the established ones abruptly quitting or getting ultra-sporadic.
Persecution and fear of punishment obviously the major force, but it does also seem like the Project as such (sharing esoterica, excavating the buried, rewriting history) is reaching exhaustion point. Sharity blogs that have been going for a long while and that were
digging up compelling arcana. if they are still going now do tend to be offering pretty thin gruel. What's left to disinter, that really wouldn't be better off remaining submerged beneath a layer or three of topsoil? What shadows unlit by Official History's spotlight honestly deserve their moment of exposure?
I guess the Nineties as it recedes into the past will start to get picked over, a younger generation emerging now that has no reason to know about the more obscure stuff from then - but of course if you actually lived through the decade in a fairly alert manner you'll know why things were obscure... my sense is that mediation by that point - including zines , but the Internet was yet to be any kind of force in music-- was so intensive, that nearly everything found the level it deserved to be at. Every half-way construable weirdness had its champions.
Stop Press: Mutant Sounds un-RIP.
"There's been such a passionate outpouring
against our abandoning Mutant Sounds, so much encouragement from fans,
artists and labels associated with the albums that we've shared to find
some way to continue that it's driven us to devise a new way to keep
Mutant alive.
While all former posts will remain as text archives
only, Mutant Sounds will now carry on sharing rare, unreleased and long
out of print music both new and old from many of your favorite artists
here. It's just that this material will now be shared with the full
authorization of each artist and, as a result, will be hosted on our
personal Dropbox account.
Make sure to get the word out to your
friends: Mutant has not died. It's just transformed and is now about to
emerge like a butterfly from a chrysalis"
I guess they must reckon there's still treasure out there to be dug...
1 comment:
It wouldn't be so bad if these bloggers (and I'm not talking about Mutant Sounds specifically) were just deciding that little remained to be uncovered, and were keeping what they had already uploaded available. What's really depressing is that many of them are taking down years of uploads (or having them taken down mediafire, rapidshare, or whoever). In 2011 it was still easy to find live links to rare music uploaded as early as 2005. Now even much of what was made available less than a year ago is gone. What could have been a rich blogosphere-wide archive of obscure music, most likely never to be reissued, has been done in by the understandable fear generated in the wake of the megaupload takedown.
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