Where have you been all my life? By Mark Morford

I have a question. It might be damn near unanswerable. It might be rhetorical, open-ended, imponderable, a bit obvious. But it also feels terrifically important, essential to a deeper understanding of how time and love and eternity function in this meek and humble terrestrial plane we call reality. Or maybe that's just the sake talking. Shall we find out?

Here it is: Why is it I find myself, suddenly and without any sort of warning, getting way, way, into heavy post-rock music? Do you know?

Wait, before you answer, let me just say, it also happened with tattoos. And sex. Yoga. Deeper concepts of God and divinity, consciousness and love and a few other things I don't really have the space to get into right now because this is a relatively tiny column and these kinds of ideas tend to squish out the edges of the screen and flood all over everything, and who wants to read that?

Let me back up a step. I am, you might say, a music addict; I listen to a constant stream of it, all day, almost nonstop, as I write and ponder, procrastinate and delve. Ambient to electronic, glitch to dubstep, singer to songwriter, mellow to metal. My iTunes library is an ever- growing hellbeast of audio joy, an evolving maelstrom of 8,000+ songs across a dozen musical styles, though as a former metalhead and '80s rocker/guitarist, I do have certain predilections. ...

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which is a pretty insular US music scene. Had he ventured to the east coast for any length of time and stuck to the left hand of the FM radio dial, he'd likely have discovered all the stuff he's raving about plus some of the stuff that has been around since the 80s and has given rise to it.

I stocked up on bizarre music when I left Boston, shocking the shoes off friends when I'd stop in at Newbury Comics to find it, but still missed a great deal of what was happening until net radio came of age.

Now I spend most evenings listening to my favorite station, WZBC, that has maintained a "no commercial potential" format of experimental music for decades. The local university station plays stuff that's almost weird enough for me one night a week, but it's just not enough.

Great music didn't end in 1972. It's continued to evolve worldwide, the center shifting all over the world as different people build on what came before and indie labels take chances on stuff that's different.

It's nice Morford has discovered it. It's nicer that he's helped other people discover it.

The internet gives a world of music at one's fingertips.

http://www.sing-sing.org/results.php?kbps=12288

But Morford is right about keeping an open mind and all.

I bookmarked it in Winamp.