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connaticI'm one of those people that likes to listen to recordings of live music. Sure, studio albums are nice, but to me a recording of a live performance - where the band is on fire, improvises and jams - is infinitely preferable to a polished, perfected and, well, safe studio recording. Whether it's a recording of a great concert thirty years ago, a recording by a band I'm planning to see in the near future, or a memory of a great concert I attended, for some reason the live aspect just works for me. Heidi is the opposite way - she's annoyed at a live concert when the band doesn't play her favorite songs in the exact same way as they sound on the radio.
Getting hold of these live recordings used to be tricky. Fifteen years ago, you'd find occasional bootlegs in the alternative records shop - generally overpriced and of unpredictable quality (i.e. often hissy, distorted and distant) but there would be the occasional gem that would make it all worthwhile. Until about two years ago, that's exactly how I used to get my live music fix - looking in small stores on St. Mark's Place.
I had heard of traders clubs, but frankly the hassle of mailing CDs and tapes back and forth, and having to deal with delays, unreliable counter-parts and all that just wasn't worth it. Downloading MP3s wasn't my thing either - the quality was often poor.
Hence it was a real pleasure to find various sites where live music is traded in lossless format (flac, Shorten), where people care about lineage, quality is generally good, and there's a continual, often overwhelming, flow of new shows. Thanks to broadband connections and bit-torrent, you too can download twenty live recordings in one weekend; finding the time to listen to all of them is the hard part. There's often a real sense of community on those sites - people helping each other out to complete their collections, mailing members with less bandwidth some CDs, and tracking down performances and setlists of bands that haven't existed for over twenty years.
Once thing that has been a real eye opener is the amount of new material that surfaces after a long time. How many high-quality soundboard recordings of Led Zeppelin's 1975 US tour would you to expect to surface in the last few years? I have several of them, and the trading sites are all buzzing with the news that yet another one is about to come out (to be exact, Vancouver, March 19th 1975). Who tapes a band like that and then sits on a high-quality recording like that for over thirty years, and then shares it? A completely uncirculated five-minute movie of the same band from 1971 surfaced last week. The maker had kept it semi-secret for thirty-five years - and now everybody can have a copy at the cost of a 30-minute download and some disks pace.
So here I am - overwhelmed by too much choice, and loving very minute of it. It's like the old MTV slogan (all your favorite music and more), but this time the "and more" is a lot more, and it's all good, and I just wish there were enough hours in the days to listen to it all, over and over again.
Getting hold of these live recordings used to be tricky. Fifteen years ago, you'd find occasional bootlegs in the alternative records shop - generally overpriced and of unpredictable quality (i.e. often hissy, distorted and distant) but there would be the occasional gem that would make it all worthwhile. Until about two years ago, that's exactly how I used to get my live music fix - looking in small stores on St. Mark's Place.
I had heard of traders clubs, but frankly the hassle of mailing CDs and tapes back and forth, and having to deal with delays, unreliable counter-parts and all that just wasn't worth it. Downloading MP3s wasn't my thing either - the quality was often poor.
Hence it was a real pleasure to find various sites where live music is traded in lossless format (flac, Shorten), where people care about lineage, quality is generally good, and there's a continual, often overwhelming, flow of new shows. Thanks to broadband connections and bit-torrent, you too can download twenty live recordings in one weekend; finding the time to listen to all of them is the hard part. There's often a real sense of community on those sites - people helping each other out to complete their collections, mailing members with less bandwidth some CDs, and tracking down performances and setlists of bands that haven't existed for over twenty years.
Once thing that has been a real eye opener is the amount of new material that surfaces after a long time. How many high-quality soundboard recordings of Led Zeppelin's 1975 US tour would you to expect to surface in the last few years? I have several of them, and the trading sites are all buzzing with the news that yet another one is about to come out (to be exact, Vancouver, March 19th 1975). Who tapes a band like that and then sits on a high-quality recording like that for over thirty years, and then shares it? A completely uncirculated five-minute movie of the same band from 1971 surfaced last week. The maker had kept it semi-secret for thirty-five years - and now everybody can have a copy at the cost of a 30-minute download and some disks pace.
So here I am - overwhelmed by too much choice, and loving very minute of it. It's like the old MTV slogan (all your favorite music and more), but this time the "and more" is a lot more, and it's all good, and I just wish there were enough hours in the days to listen to it all, over and over again.
