Last weekend, I revisited the 365 Days Project, a site where one obscure MP3 was posted every day for the entire year of 2003. The MP3s range from homemade tapes of people’s kids, to obscure and off the wall songs from albums you would never hear, right through odd recordings of High School bands. I laughed for hours at the various oddities that I was presented with, and found myself very nostalgic for the days when I used to spend full weekends hunting through record piles in flea markets for odd and obscure albums.

Like a yuppie at a Dead concert, the site brought up an itch from the past: The smell of musty cardboard, the stiff knees and sore back combination that can only be properly attained with hours of pouring over boxes of records stashed under a flea market table. Over the years of weekends spent hunting, I amassed a collection of around 1600 of those gorgeous vinyl beauties, but after a house fire so unconditionally ended my collection by transforming it into six giant, black cylinders, I never even sought to buy another record player.

There was a brief, but distinct mourning period, after which my music habit has been satisfied by been seeking out CDs from the local MegaloMart and ripping them down to neat little digital copies on my PC. Any reformed record junkie can tell you that collecting CDs and collecting LPs are beyond comparison. Beyond the basic difference of the extra attention that needs to be payed to play an LP, holding an album cover in your hand and reading the liner notes while listening to a record is the ultimate listening experience. Call it the experiential equivalent of 5 channel stereo: There’s artwork, there’s pictures, and there’s more writing than most childrens’ books. On the same level, squinting at the tiny inserts in a CD can be compared to listening to something in simple 2 channel stereo: You get a feel for the pictures and colors, and it’s ok, but it really pales in comparison. Downloaded music, on the other hand, is like listening to stereo in your car: it serves its purpose, but half of the experience is lost.

This may not be true with the latest Christina Aquilera hit. You really don’t need liner notes to know the story behind that: A Record exec buys a song, packages it with a synthesizer and a pair of tits, and sells it. And the pictures may be small, but the objects that they’re selling are large enough to appear closer than they are, or ever need to be. With an old record, though, the liner notes and cover are half of the experience. Reading about the way that the composers and musicians put the record together, or trying to figure out what the hell all those busty, cat-eyed femme fatales are doing dancing around that crazy, flaming Cuban bongo, or even just flexing your mouth to say “Ping-Pong Percussion” over and over, make the music all that more alive than any fake set of plastic tits ever could.

But that’s the mainstream: small minded music masked by big beats packaged with even bigger tits. It’s not an easy trap to avoid, but I really try to steer clear of it without getting so obscure that the time spent searching is outrageous. But, then, how obscure can you be in MegaloMart? You might be buying something that the teenage girl in the next aisle hasn’t heard of, yet, but if it’s in MegaloMart, it is mass marketed. If it’s mass marketed, it’s probably not very unique. Records, by their very age are infinitely more obscure and unique. There may have been 200,000 pressings of William Shatner’s Transformed Man in 1968, but odds are that you aren’t going to find any of the 96,000 existing copies in MegaloMart. Nor will you find one of the 500 pressings of Casper’s Groovy Ghost Show. In either case, it might be better that you don’t, but the fact is that you can’t. You will never experience the elation of finding a rare album that you have been looking for in the bottom of a dusty, forgotten box with a hand-scrawled “$.50/each” sign on it. You will never look around nervously while trying to contain your excitement while simultaneously hoping that the checkout girl has no idea of the value. That feeling is for treasures, and that’s not something that you can never experience in MegaloMart.

But, as I have gotten older, these feelings have been gradually lost to me. I robotically buy CDs, bring them home, and rip the discs to my computer. I even wrote a little script that trolls the web for the album covers. I write my crappy little reviews as if there are people out there that go, “Hey, Dyer likes the new High on Fire. What a find!” when no one really cares. I buy, I review, and then I buy more. It’s serves its purpose, but CDs are really the methodone of a hard core music addiction. And replacing LPs with music downloads are like replacing heroin with cigarettes.

Yet, the 365 Days Project is an anomaly. The person or persons that put together the site somehow packaged that feeling of finding an obscure LP under a flea market table, without all the back aches and haggling. For me there are few better feelings that pinpointing a person’s musical tastes than introducing them to a piece of obscure music that they didn’t know existed, and the 365 Days Project not only found the obscure recordings, but shared them on a grand and accessible scale.

Why am I impressed with that? I have no idea. Maybe music is one of the few areas that I can easily find common ground with people. Maybe it’s one of the few languages that I can use to connect to you. And I think that’s cool.

So, here goes. I went through the 365 Days Project and extracted a bunch of tracks that I put into a windows media player playlist. It includes Jogging For Jesus, William Shatner, Muhammed Ali, the Cackle Sisters, some Atari songs, and I even threw in some High School Band music for good measure. It’s a good way to get an idea of what’s over at the 365 Days Project, but the best way is to head over to the site and check out the music and the obscurities directly. Each MP3 comes with it’s own liner notes and story. For the non-music fiend, it’s a little hilarity on the web, but for the record junkie, it’s all the treasure without the sore back and long hours.

My Quickie 365 Days Sampler (Right Click – Save As):
http://www.dyers.org/media/365project.asx

The 365 Days Project:
http://www.ubu.com/outsiders/365/

Posted in Music