Why I’m here.

Get ready for some seriously self indulgent musical ramblings from someone who just really likes music.

So the chances are you’re here because I’ve guilted you into it. Sorry not sorry. I just want somewhere to write all the shit I think about music, and I figure Succinct Six Songs (SSS) was a great place to start.

Now I can tell you, this won’t purely be playlists and musings on 6 songs, but it’ll have plenty of those. I came up with the idea several years ago, when I plagiarised Zan Rowe’s Taking Five on Triple J. I loved the idea of getting guests in once a week to have an hour of music and talking, all set to a theme. I also love alliteration, so I figured, I’d work on Six Songs that Succinctly convey a theme. I also wanted to have an ironic name, being that Succinct Six Songs is a mouthful, and it would annoy people to say it.

After working on playlists for probably a year or so, I got together with some friends and tried recording a couple of episodes. It was meandering, but we’d never tried it before, and it was back in the day when everyone had a podcast (though has that day really ended?). I’d like to say that when we weren’t going off on tangents, we were decent, but it was never going to last long. We all ended up going different places, some overseas, so it fell by the wayside. There’s also the itty bitty issue of there’s no fucking way this would be a legal podcast, and Soundcloud would probably take episodes down if we kept it up. Mind you, we never did this for money. We did this for a love of music.

And what better way to say you love music than making a mixtape for someone? I get such a thrill, working out what flows well to the next, sometimes abrupt endings can be the best transitions. Sometimes following an acoustic piece with a bout of industrial rock makes both pieces all the more powerful (as seen in The Downward Spiral by NIN). Whether it’s 6 or 16 songs long, a playlist can be a powerful thing.

A playlist is setting yourself a challenge. Sure, you can grab 200 songs, throw them in a playlist, and hit shuffle, and that can be perfect for a situation, but other times, it comes off as sloppy. I’ve tried, several times to make all encompassing playlists of music I like to shuffle at parties or social events, but it never works. Sometimes I wanna throw some NIN in there, sometimes it’s Abbe May or LCD Soundsystem. Even if I try to limit myself to no more than 2 songs from each artist I wanna feature, the damned thing easily blows out to 13 hours long.

Now from all that, you’d think I’ll just be posting shit about playlists, and that’ll easily be the bulk of my content, but I’ll also be ranking bands albums (and EPs), as well as more in depth album reviews. And who knows, I’m sure I’ll find other things I wanna do here, it’s just a matter of wait and see.

Cheers, Alex.

~(#):>