gloamingdaydream

1. Tell me how you first got into music. What was so appealing about it originally, and how has your view of it evolved as you experienced more of it?

I bought my first albums when I was 13, and I did buy them. I didn’t have streaming, so I listened to the same stuff over and over. GKMC, TPAB, and DAMN were the first three albums I bought, but then in like January 2018 I bought 4:44, Atrocity Exhibition, The Money Store, Pure Comedy, and /\/\ /\ Y /\. I suppose that means music has always had an appeal to me even before listening to it. Because I was very selective with what I bought back then. It’s always just had more promise than anything else.

2. What would you define as an artist? Do you consider yourself one?

I’ll use artist to describe anyone who has made what I think of as art. If there’s a difference between me and others in this respect, I think it’s that I see the art as coming before the artist, not vice versa. “Who’s the artist” is the sentence where the word appears the most for me, and that is the answer to a question about art. I go back and forth when it comes to thinking of myself as an artist. More often than not, I think of criticism as a craft, and I dislike when critics stray too far outside of their subject. The art should have enough in it to suffice. There’s no more worthy subject.

3. One of your projects I’m most fascinated by is the “death of the critic” screenplay that you decided to produce. How did you first come across it? Are you working on it solely on your own? And what was so intriguing about it for it to make you want to attempt such a herculean task?

I came across it in my college’s library in 2021. It’s difficult to give context online, because I try to preserve some anonymity on here, and that work is very local to me, but I have been engaging outsiders when it comes to the project. It’s very obscure online, because it’s more of a real life thing, if that makes sense.

4. What was the process like while creating your 2021 fare forward voyagers review? How did it come to you to structure it in that way?

I wrote the review in 5 days where I was just working on it all day. Its structure was the culmination of my developing structural philosophy on art. It’s in three sections of three, and they evolve from and play off of each other. It’s inspired mainly by Four Quartets by T.S. Eliot, which also inspired the album. I think my emotions at the time were informed by the general negligence of instrumental music in the community. So that being the review with the most effort I’d put into something at that point was partially a reaction to the failures of others, as almost all of my criticism is. It was also the very last 10 I had to review. It felt like I was completing a body of work, even though my initial goal with the account was to review everything I heard. I started listening to much more than I could write about.

5. How did you first come up with your ADI system? What was the idea behind it?

ADI was to represent and rank artists by their discography automatically. It goes back to the idea earlier of the art coming before the artist. To me that was the only way to understand the value of an artist, through their work. I then baked into it the idea of exponentially increasing value in higher works of art, which is still accurate to how I feel. 4 8.5s = 1 9.5. Back in 2019, the conversation was pretty silly. People would count bad albums against genius artists. It was very reductive to the value of the best music. To say that you could make the best album ever and still be bad if you made a bunch of mid afterward. Also ties into my circular rating system, but I’ll wait to see if there’s a question about that.

6. Are you ever going to post a review of Finnegans Wake?

I always wanted to, but it’s less attractive to me now. I definitely feel like I could explain it better than anyone else, but there always seems to be something more pressing nowadays.

7. What made you agree to do this interview?

I like to answer questions.

8. What motivates you to keep experiencing music nowadays now that you’ve heard thousands of albums and have supposedly reached the peak? Are you driven by a belief that there is still even more to climb?

I don’t think I’ve reached the peak. I always have felt that the best art is probably buried under decades of neglect or lost in some corner of the internet. I imagine that, with popular consensus more closely approximating the WORST music, the best is actually the most difficult to find, not the easiest. And with every passing year, this suspicion is confirmed by another equal helping of perfect, genius artworks.

9. What is your current process for finding and experiencing new music?

I change this more than anything else. The last albums I’ve been listening to have just been post-hardcore albums with the most promise. What I look for is hard to describe because it’s so drawn from my experience. I know what to stay away from, more than anything. I’m drawn to what I can’t write off.

10. How much money would I need to pay you for you to play Outer Wilds from start to finish?

ong like 1k

11. A few years ago you said you had a books worth of things to say about the history of music and music criticism, but you wanted to learn a lot more about art before trying to write such a book. Do you think you’re now at a place where you know enough about art?

Interesting. I think that the video I’m putting out on YouTube this December will probably satisfy me in that respect. It’s a sort of surface scratcher for the history of art past 1900, and it’s like 4.5 hours long, so it might as well be a book. Just in a different format.

12. What is your biggest regret with this account?

Probably changing from the original birdmusiclog branding to birdslibrary. It probably made it harder for a lot of people to rediscover me, since my branding is literally the only online identity that I have. But that’s a lesson I learned back in like the first year I did it, after which I brought back the feed reviews, so I feel I got a lot of what I lost back with that move anyway. Really I don’t regret anything.

13. Have you ever considered making a birdmusiclog zine?

Yeah extensively back in 2022, I was thinking of turning to an excessive new type of experimental, more freeform type of feed content before I brought back my old reviews instead. I realized the latter would satisfy my need for freedom better and satisfy my audience better.

14. What art critic do you think has had the most influence on you?

I willfully take Richard Meltzer as my biggest inspiration, because he was the first rock critic and nothing else was even a little good until like 30 years after him. I like to imagine the history of rock criticism as a 50 year gap between him and me.

15. The Man Without Qualities.

I have a couple of posts about this subject.

16. What is your fondest moment with art?

EVER? no idea. I am not introspective whatsoever. I think about the future multitudes more than the past. Relative to the surrounding time in my life, I’ll say when I listened to Gorecki’s third symphony in late 2021 for the first time in two years. I had it as a 6 before, but I moved it up to a 10 off of that listen.

17. Is there anything I haven’t brought up that you would like to mention? It could be about anything.

Subscribe to birdslibrary on youtube because that’s where the book is coming out.