Well, no, I blame more than Tower. I blame my friend "TheSloth" over on Head-Case who talked me into getting this Bernstein/Mahler box set:
I can't complain about the price. I've been buying so much stuff at Borders with their weekly 30% coupon, that I basically got it for free. Zero money changed hands when I walked out of the store with it -- it was paid for entirely with my Borders Rewards money.And then, over on AudioKarma.org,
And then at the Tower sale, I just plain stumbled on Frederic Chiu's Prokofiev: The Complete Music for Solo Piano, which I had concluded seems to be the consensus as the best overall interpretation of Prokofiev's solo piano work (I am on a spate of Prokofiev discovery after a recent comment from Rick Wakeman on his Grand Piano Tour that he loves Prokofiev).
I also stumbled upon the Weather Report box and a couple of other smaller cheaper boxes. So what I've been doing is going through them all at once: one disk from one, then one disk from another, and so on. The Mahler/Bernstein box is the single biggest, and the Miles Davis collection is pretty imposing, so those two are ongoing, and in between those, I squeeze in the occasional disk from one or two of the others. Right now it's the Chiu/Prokofiev and Tortoise's A Lazarus Taxon, but that's about to finish so I'll probably pop in the Weather Report next.
So what's it about? It's about music, in all its various incarnations. Classical, jazz, pop, rock, electronica, and..."other". I've decided I love instrumental music, and have made a conscious effort to listen to more of it. It's been very rewarding so far, but I've only recently started on this concerted effort to listen to (and to buy) less pop and rock music, so I'm still waiting to see how this will turn out. Right now, it feels a little schizophrenic, like I can't seem to make up my mind. It's that "frustration" thing -- on the one hand, I am of the opinion that at a high level ,frustration is what makes the world go round, but on the other, the actual sensation of being frustrated is not a pleasant experience.
There's also the office environment. One of the reasons I have leaned this way is because I seem to be getting the most listening done in the office. I put my headphones on (currently the Audio Technica "W3000" -- a pair of L3000 drivers in a W100 housing -- but I'm going to have to return those soon, so I'll probably bring in my actual pair of L3000 headphones in), sit at the computer, and...well, let's put it this way, I know I get a lot of work done when, at the end of the day, I have a large stack of CD's that I've listened to. I know it's not the optimal listening environment (it's not as good as, say, actually sitting down and listening to music as one's primary activity), but...who has time for that any more? I rarely do any more, these days.
That said, I wish I did, and I will try to do so.
*Firefox actually recommended I change "apeshit" to "ape shit". Stupid Firefox. Doesn't it know that I wasn't talking about an actual ape's shit, but rather that elevated state of being known as "apeshit"? That's something completely different.
