Greatest Hits (2003-)
… after careful (re) consideration, I've decided to again air the (personal, largely therapeutic) "Greatest Hits (2003-)" suite in a public setting, namely via a SoundCloud "Set" (this time around in a "countdown" format more attuned to the progress & refinement made on the whole project over the intervening decade - recent, more fleshed-out ones first, crawling back to the early, primitive ones.)
While far from ideal, this does allow the casual listener the ability to skip around & focus on the songs from our shared youth, re-assess them in the way(s) that I have … plus it quashes the idea of attempting to make these available in some tangible / commercial way (a nightmare scenario if every there was one, from every conceivable angle - logistic, manufacturing, attribution / copyright, etc.)
On the eve of my 30th birthday, for no particular reason whatsoever (perhaps to combat the onset of the various mid-life crises ; insomnia, ennui, etc.) I began rendering "automatic" "enhancements" of the most salient aspects of the pop music of my youth; a line, bar, or fragment of a particular song (after being heard out in "the wild" in the present & re-triggering its memory; akin to running into an old friend on the street & having to stage that awkward, stilted conversation neither of you wants to have) was chosen based on how much my nostalgic recollection of it differed from its contemporary reality.
Each edit was looped at exactly half-speed, then run through a battery of time- & gain-based processes in series that slowly and meticulously chewed through the audio, revealing hidden layers of content, context, and temporal / spectral production details ... like shining a flashlight into the dark corners of each selection, exposing the hidden ghosts lurking within. Each representation here consists of a selected 3-20 minute chunk based on the perceived "significance" unraveled via this process, lasting a natural-seeming length (i.e. the ones that are less … "rewarding" tend to be shorter, the better ones longer) …
I'll be (slowly) uploading all 200 "Hits" (which should yield approx. 24 hours of music) to this SoundCloud set over the next few months/years. I know this is a cliché, but PLEASE PLAY THESE EXTREMELY LOUDLY, over GOOD SPEAKERS (subs are a MUST given the low-end emphasis; don't bother listening oover your laptop or computer speakers !!! you'll miss more than half of what's going on here) ... I've also uploaded an accompanying image for each "Hit" (all of these are derived from the artwork of a respective artists' "Greatest Hits" album - mass, minor, or tertiary market editions [personally I love seeing & using the various "Горбушка" -lineage variations] - or, failing that, the cover of the single or album from which the track came) made utilizing tactically similar means (cheap, often preset plugin "enhancement" algorithms, rendered in multiple passes) …
The entire suite is dedicated to Tim Haslett, without whose guidance (through the then seemingly-endless sea of post-'00 Houston chopped & screwed mixes) I would have undoubtedly missed out on the chance to dwell on the pivotal ideas at play herein.
