Situation Not Yet Normal, Please Stand By

Thursday 7 November 2024

Just when I thought I was in, they pull me back out. I’m sorry there’s been no activity here lately, but new music took a back seat during an enforced upheaval of living arrangements, then with hassles connecting to the internet and, just as I was settling down at my desk with the hi-fi set up nicely in the new digs… poof! The hard drive disappeared. Not literally; I can see it right now, sitting there on my desk, completely inert. My computer, however, says it doesn’t exist and in a philosophical way it’s correct because only the hard drive’s corpse remains while everything that made it what it was has departed: the thing’s dead as a doornail.

Of course I usually keep backups but of course that also took the crowded back seat over the past few months and of course I was just about to make a new backup when… poof. I had a bunch of cool things to write about but it feels a bit dismissive to write reviews of them based on my hazy memories at this time. In the meantime, people have been sending me interesting-looking stuff which I haven’t got around to yet.

The recovery plan is as follows: Step 1, go on holiday. Step 2, go back through my emails and see what I can still recover for review, while also playing catch-up on what people have been trying to tell me while I was out to lunch – this may start while I’m still on holiday as I do happen to enjoy it after all. Step 3, actually write and publish some reviews.

Thanks to all the artists who have been sending me music: I will be following up on as many of these as I can. It may take a while, as it always has (in the past I’ve left some things for up to two years before I took notice of them). Regular updates will resume as I start to get amongst it. My big lesson from all of this (besides the need to buy more hard drives) is that your music is important to me and I hope it’s not just me who benefits when I publicly engage with and respond to it.