If You Find The Earth Boring...

When I was younger I had a date with my Mom (Happy Mother’s Day Mom!) to go see the Barnes Foundation Art Collection.  I’ve loved art before and after that day, but I will never forget how much I enjoyed that art exhibition. The Barnes Foundation has a new center in Philadelphia – located in the Fairmount Neighborhood – close to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Rodin Museum, and, I wouldn’t forget, the most beautiful and best thing about the city is in this neighborhood too. The new Barnes Foundation Building opens this month.  Tom Bugaj shot this amazing time lapse assembly of the new Barnes Foundation building by taking a photo every 30 minutes for two years. [youtube 4GIG4g7wdPo 600 400]

I’m going to premise this post by saying I’m at a loss for words, I really haven’t processed my feelings well enough to be writing.  For me, it’s nearly impossible to think or refer to Jeff without mentioning music – I know that absolutely and unfairly limits him here – but it was the initial connection that he and I shared, and sometimes it was all we shared. In a music diary sense, I spent yesterday relatively music free, driving in the pouring rain back home listening to and focusing on Maurice Sendak tributes on NPR.  After a day being disconnected from the internet, I checked Twitter to catch up on the news.  A tweet from him led to his blog, one post led to another, and everything quickly led to the phone. Jeff and I met in college at WUVT, Virginia Tech’s student-run radio station.  I was program director at the time and Jeff was one of the DJs at the station.  Slots on the FM station were pretty competitive.  Our protocol was to have DJs learn on our AM station – which was broadcast just on campus – and then to “graduate” to FM – which had something like 100 mile radius broadcast.  It wasn’t possible to listen to all the shows on both the FM and AM station 24 hours a day, so DJs made a cassette recording of a representative show and passed it in with their application for an FM time slot.  Jeff’s application tape was awesome. We ended up talking about music late into the night sitting in the radio station and this even resulted in our trading cassette tapes for a while.  I’ll spare you the music history details – the bottom line was that at the time electronic music (drum’n’bass, jungle, IDM, whatever) was competing with free jazz, old blues, weird world music, and modern classical, and pushing out the indie- and punk-rock out of my ears.   Jeff made me awesome tapes with electronic stuff from the Skam, Spymania, Rephlex, and early Warp Records releases.  I don’t remember what I put on tapes I made for him. The above picture is a representative tape that Jeff made for me back when.  He always put a lot of time into designing cassette covers on his computer, much more than could be said for my efforts into artwork.  He still made mixes online (8tracks and Mixcloud) that I would always listen to. Jeff and I didn’t spend very much time together as friends.  I moved west for graduate school and Jeff started working at the record store I used to work at before moving to DC.  I would have surely lost track of him if it weren’t for mutual friends and social media.  I moved back to the east coast and he moved to Seattle.  We didn’t really cross paths very much during these moves.  I saw him in September at Tim & Sarah’s wedding in California after years of not seeing him.  We talked for a while and caught up and we traded links for music mixes on the internet.   When I was back in San Francisco in March, Tim told me he was worried Jeff was really depressed.  I sent Jeff two quick one liner messages to check in, but he responded with his typical dry humor.  I wish I had tried to do more.  I know we weren’t the closest of friends, but I will miss him. Here’s a picture I took of him in September: Here’s a photo album of pictures of Jeff. …and here’s what some other people have said since yesterday (collected by atomic overmind): The last pic I have of Jeff (Stochasticity) Golden Gardens In Seattle Twitter funny guy RIP Jeff, 21st Century Pen Pals (Podcasts) RIP @fedge, Whom I Did Not Know Classic Jeff I guess this is where I pour one out for my homie Jeff’s Cats Why we’re shipping Jeff’s cats, and what we’ll do with the money UPDATE: #fedge fund update

I’m joining many others this week in contributing to Nick Southall’s annual Music Diary Project.  The premise is easy: you keep a daily diary of your weekly music listening habits for the week of May 7th to 13th. I’ve started this week on a relatively quiet note.  On Sunday, the girl and I both ran Philadelphia’s Broad Street Run, and I didn’t run with headphones, ear buds, or a boombox propped up on my shoulder, so it was relatively free of music for me most of the day.  I spent Monday visiting with my parents and working/writing, so there was no music there either since I was working at my parents house. Maybe it’s just where I am in my life right now, but some days I listen to very little music, other days music plays throughout all the moments of the day.  It’s a far cry from the past, particularly when I (co-)owned a record store, where music was playing – quite literally – 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. I’m currently in the middle of the never-ending project called organizing my digital music library.  Trying to keep up with new releases and advance promos as well as sort through two terrabytes of music stored on my computer.  Digital music listening takes place through my desktop computer, my laptop, and mainly through my iphone.  All listening not at home takes place through headphones. Most of my home listening takes place in the form of LP records.  I do listen to CDs, but as I have mentioned before, I haven’t purchased a CD in more than 12 years. On my iphone during my walking commute to work I usually listen to my local affiliate NPR newscast or newish music from the past few months.  I cycle through new music on my iphone and usually try to listen to everything at least once.  Some new releases get more attention than others.  The releases that get the most attention are posted in my end of list favorites (2010 and 2011). When I’m at work – and I’m rarely able to listen to music there – I listen on headphones to not disturb my co-workers with my unpopular musical tastes.  Typically I am concentrating on working or writing at work, so I listen to ambient, jazz, or classical (usually modern-ish).  Some work favorites for the last few weeks have been old and newer favorites: Alva Noto & Ryuichi Sakamoto’s Virus Series, The Necks, early Steve Reich & Philip Glass pieces, Tape, Tortoise, The Caretaker/Leyland Kirby, The Cinematic Orchestra, Jon Gibson’s Two Solo Pieces LP, The KLF’s Chill Out, Porter Rick’s Biokinetics LP, and Ricardo Villalobos & Max Loderbauer’s Re:ECM.

Pretty bummed out after hearing about this… Thank you MCA.  #AdamYauch #RIPMCA #NathanielHornblower

I got a pretty good laugh from Bon Iver Erotic Stories.