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Monthly Missive // October 2021

I was too busy writing about mental health last month to mark the occasion of one year since we moved Heavy Blog over to the Missive format. So, here I

2 years ago

I was too busy writing about mental health last month to mark the occasion of one year since we moved Heavy Blog over to the Missive format. So, here I am, doing just that: happy anniversary to one of the best decisions we’ve ever made! Let me explain. Beyond the perhaps “obvious” advantages (the ease of editing content in a block, more straightforward planning, the redesign that came with it), the format has allowed me to rethink how I approach and consume music. I’ve spoken about this before on the blog but let me re-introduce the idea: writing about music and, in fact, just engaging with music in an active way, encourages a consumerist perspective. Music, much like other things which short your emotional circuits to elicit a powerful response (AKA drugs), comes with a diminishing return. Combine that with the cultural/social pressure to always be on the edge, to always be updated, to listen to the hot new thing, and you get a pressure that is always forcing you to hear new things and to, regrettably, forget the recent.

Now, don’t get me wrong: there are very few things which I love more than discovering new music. But sometimes (and more so in the recent few months), I’ve found myself recalling a time before I approached music with the voracious appetite that I’ve built ever since I joined the blog. There are albums which I love from the previous few years that I don’t get to listen to anymore, simply because there are albums I loved even more and so many of those. Which is a good thing, of course, but also…sometimes I wish I had the time to dally with an album, to give it its time to breathe, to really get to know it. Not because it’s the best album I’ve heard in months or because it necessarily “deserves” that time but because I love music and in spending time with different expressions of it, with the different feelings it elicits within me, is a worthwhile thing. “This album is good” is just an important of an emotion as “this album is freaking amazing!!!”

Coming back to the “new” format of posting for the blog, I have found that it really gels well with this desire of mine. First of all, the column format frees us to write about albums from whatever time period, though we tend to make sure the majority of our coverage is current. Flash of the Blade is a good example; the column has allowed me to go back to some releases I had forgotten about and give them the light of day that they “deserve”. Secondly, the pace of the content has allowed me to spend more time with new albums that I discover. I’m no longer pressured to fill time slot in with more and more music, so now I can relax a bit and spend more time on albums that I might not even write about. And, lastly, it’s simply freed up more of my time, so that I now have more of it to put towards the reason we actually do any of this: music.

So, to sum up, two key takeaways from this little introduction of mine. First, the blog’s “new” format has been an utter success for us, here in the back-end of things where the content get made. It has freed us to write about the things we truly care about, while allowing us to divorce ourselves from the grind of numbers, social media best practices, and anxiety over filling meaningless slots of schedules which no one, at the end of the day, cared about. And, of course, none of this would be possible if you reading this hadn’t stuck with us while we made our transition. Thank you for that. Secondly though, this is a good a time (get it) as any to ask you to give music more time. Not necessarily more minutes on the clock but rather to resist the impulse to always check the hot new thing and to spend some time with music that you already have or have heard in the past. Just let it sink in a little, you know? Think about what the music might be trying to tell you that you might have missed the first (or twentieth) time around.

OK! With that being said, here’s a boatload of new music. Enjoy!

Eden Kupermintz

Columns

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Heavy Blog

Published 2 years ago