Rediscovery

A couple of months ago I replaced my Zen Micro mp3 player with a Zen Vision:M. Without getting involved in techno-wank I have to say that it is a phenomenal piece of kit. For the first time in my life I have become an 'early adopter'. Which means I bought the ZV:M as soon as it was released, while there were bugs to be fixed and before accessories were available. Why did I do this? Because it is a bloomin brilliant object.

So far I have filled up 15gb of memory with songs. I prefer to have the Zen running on random which means that I get some wonderful suprises. Mostly these are due to the fact that a little while ago I bought a dvd off ebay that contained all of the Now compilation cds. that's 60 double albums dating back to the early 80s. On my Zen Micro I had to be picky and only upload the songs I knew I liked. But with my newly expanded memory I was able to put all of the albums on.

Welcome back, "Camouflage" by Stan Ridgeway, and "Land of Confusion" by Genesis. I had forgotten about you. Welcome to the Pet Shop Boys and Erasure - I hated you at the time, but now appreciate you. The Christians, Utah Saints, Carter USM, McAlmont and Butler - all groups that produced songs I love but not albums I own. I had forgotten how good they sounded and now I have them back again.

The downside is that there is also an inordinate amount of shite on those albums but it takes just a second to skip past Darude and on to Shola Ama, or bypass DJ Sammy and check out They Might Be Giants.

I feel liberated by my rediscovery of the past. For a while I have felt my musical tastes contracting into a narrower band. Now my tastes are broadening again. When I get a new cd I don't have to worry about putting the tracks I like on the mp3 player, I can put them all on. The Arctic Monkeys being a recent beneficiary. And of course my 200+ cd collection is slowly being uploaded and I have taken a decision to only exclude songs I know to be crap rather than to only upload those I know I love. Today I felt the benefit. Once upon a time Symposium were the next big thing. I bough their first ep and liked some of it. Then they disappeared. Yesterday I uploaded the ep and today one of the songs cropped up. It wasn't one I knew but I liked it. If I had been picky I would probably have never known that.

So my advice, for what it's worth, is to get a large capacity mp3 player (30gb or more) to fill it with everything you have and to put it on random. Go on a journey. See what you will discover!