Pause For Station Identification.

What’s up, man.

Thanks for checking out my Medium profile. This is where I like to land all of my thoughts on media, mainly focusing on music. I tend to let my book reviews leak over here as well, but those reviews can also be found on my GoodReads profile. Feel free to add me as a friend on there as well, as I love seeing what everyone else is reading and having dialogs with each other going forward on what’s keeping our minds sated on new creative works by other authors.

I consider myself a writer and have for a long time, though I have very little to show for it. I’ve finished a few short stories, a few collections of poems, a few little scattershot collections of microfiction… all of which are distributed pretty modestly to friends and family. I plan to write snail mail pretty regularly this year. Sometimes that might have short story ideas, poetry, new tunes, little gifts, random grief… whatever it takes.

The thing that I’ve written about most and shared most is music. I have a passion for the art of it, and I have an unquenchable thirst for hunting down new bands, new labels, and new albums, all of which end up getting added to my list of old bands, old labels, old albums which I will then track and look back into and follow. In the mid/early ’00s, I ran a local music news blog on Long Island and I think that’s where I started getting a taste for it, and it simply has not stopped. The thing you’ll see written on this blog most frequently is a quarterly playlist about my favorite new songs that I’ve found over the 3 month period (Jan-Mar, Apr-Jun, Jul-Sep) and then my proudest moments are writing about my favorite records of the year which I typically post the first week of the following year. Every so often (I’d say on average every 9 months?) I share a playlist of songs from all over the place that I’ve remembered or listened to or discovered that I would like to share as well. Those playlists always fall under 80 minutes which was the standard length of a CD-R, which is how I used to share these playlists, though logistics has rendered that format deceased. Along with sharing all of these playlists, I’ll have lengthy essays associated with each song or album, sometimes incoherent, sometimes stream of consciousness, sometimes sharp, but all of which I am absolutely okay with you skipping if all you want is to listen to the playlist.

I used to have a huge collection of CDs but the utility of that sort of fell away, as did the novelty of having a shelf with my collection on it once I started a family and moved to Charleston, South Carolina. I do, however, still collect records (totaled at 443 as of this posting!) and I catalog them on my discogs and post about them on my instagram (@iamnoimpact) as well.

This year, aside from what I already regularly post on here, I’d love to post more regular recommendations about albums I find (both new and old). I also have a few regular posts planned in a sort of ‘regular column’ I’d like to write called “Gratitude” where I not only revive some of my best memories about records I love, but also a little bit of a backstory on the people around the music (like who helped me find it, who I listened to it with, who it reminds me of, etc.).

Beyond music, I’d also like to start giving television and movie recommendations (both new and old). I have lofty goals of also talking about video games on here as well, but I am slowly losing interest in that hobby as something that I find worth speaking about at length, and most of the things that I want to Talk About when it comes to games tend to be criticisms and shortcomings, and that’s not why I’m here.

I like to say that when I post on the internet, I’m more here to build things up instead of breaking them down. I don’t want to read your ‘Review’ and I know you don’t want to read mine. I don’t want to know what you didn’t like and I know you don’t want to know what I didn’t like. My mission here, my main goal, is to help you find great new stuff to experience and for you to find new things to consume. When you engage with that, I hope that you find things in your own sphere that you want to share as well. With me, great, but if not, at least with people around you.

Thanks for hanging. Looking forward to a productive and fruitful 2024!