i'm just looking at listening stats for some of the stuff i've been posting recently and, god, people have short attention spans nowadays. a desire for instant gratification.

pro-tip: when a song is five, ten, fifteen minutes long, it's hard to get an understanding of it from listening to the first 10-20% of it. that's just the introduction. i mean, we don't usually judge books by covers do we? with a large piece of music like this, there's usually a process in listening to it. the music has a shape: a start, a middle and an end. often, the song shifts dramatically through those ten minutes, incorporating radically different genres throughout it's length. sometimes the climax comes halfway through, and sometimes you've actually gotta even listen to the whole thing to get to the high point.

and, no, a solution is not to cut out the atmospherics and just focus on the intense sections. music that is meant to be digested as an art form cannot be reduced to an advertisement jingle. a cat is not a dog. when music is written with a process, the climax often *doesn't make sense* without the process that leads up to it.

i mean, if somebody wants to accuse me of not being an exciting rock artist, or a viable pop musician, i'll plead guilty to that. i'm not trying to be that, and never have been (except maybe for a few delusional moments around '97/'98). people that are looking for that kind of thing are going to be disappointed. but, that's why i'm not tagging any of this stuff with 'miley cyrus'. i'm tagging it with 'kosmische', 'post rock', 'glitch' - genres that generally attract people with longer listening spans.

i guess what i don't understand is why people bother pressing play at all if they don't intend to actually listen to it. i mean, what are they really doing? looking for something they've already heard? rejecting it the moment they don't recognize it?

grargh.

the flip side is that it seems to be that when somebody actually does listen to a full song, they listen to several. i'll go two or three days with nothing but partials, then get 30 full listens in a row - clearly all by the same person. that's encouraging...

i just wish i understood the psychology behind the partials. it doesn't make sense to me.

i mean, i sort of get that some people are going to grow bored of a four minute ambient intro. fine. they're not going to enjoy my music. that's ok.

what i don't get is why they'd click through the progressive rock tag to get there, notice the song is seventeen minutes long and then expect to understand what's going to happen at 12:37 after listening to the first four minutes.

am i being presumptuous to think that clicking on the prog tag, noticing the lengthy track length and then pressing play anyways pre-supposes an understanding that one needs to let the track finish before judging it?

i'm hoping this might help.

the music here has shifted dramatically over many years, from roots in punk/grunge through to experimental synth pop and into a type of kitchen sink post-rock with heavy electronics. the only consistency throughout is a lack of consistency, guitars and an impressionist aesthetic. "blender rock"

blender rock is what i've been calling myself for a while (check page description). no google hits except me. i like that.

"kitchen sink post-rock" brings up an article about trans am, who were a pretty neat 90s act. could have worse company.