You, Your MP3 Player, and the Robots That Make it All Work
If, like me, you’re a music lover it’s possible that you’ve purchased an iPod on which to listen to your music. And if you’re like me in other respects you probably love your iPod. I mean what’s not to love about the gadget that Jobs built? It’s sexy looking, easy to use, and it beats carrying around a discman or listening to whatever happens to be going on around you. But if you’re more like me than you feel comfortable admitting you also like managing your music library yourself, keeping your folders neatly named and organized, making frequent additions, deletions and changes, and conversely, hate the iTunes software commonly used to manage the device.
In this case you’ve likely spent many an hour yelling at your computer as you’re forced to manually add, delete and re-tag files, folders, albums and songs that you’ve already spent time organizing just so you can add them to your “iTunes library.” After obtaining my iPod I spent a number of weeks complaining to various friends who’d attempted to coax me into purchasing one for years about this, asking why iTunes didn’t automatically scan my folders and automatically update. No answer was forthcoming, but after turning to search engines (apparently more reliable than human loved-ones) I came across the iTunes Library Updater, a (relatively) simple add-on utility that accomplishes exactly what I wanted iTunes to do itself. It syncs with iTunes, scans specified folders for additions, deletions and changes, and automatically updates your iTunes music library to reflect what it finds.
Watching the program work in the background doing my organizational bidding I’m often faced with visions of frantic nanobots (please note, this is not what is actually happening inside your computer) busily cataloging my digital music collection and carrying the bits and bytes of pertinent data to their proper locations. Like so many animated dwarfs I assumed these robots whistled, or enjoyed some other musical accompaniment, as they worked. Strangely enough, a fresh arrival into my library, the forthcoming album by New Hampshire-based electronic musician Kelley Polar called I Need You to Hold on While the Sky is Falling, turned up sounding exactly like I’d imagined this hypothetical soundtrack sounding.
Polar was familiar to me, as his Chrysanthemum EP had been one of my few secret pleasures (I didn’t blog about it, play it out, or share it with friends) last year. Both tracks from the EP (aside from the remix) are on I Need You…, an 11 track opus that expands on his electro-organic “Symphonic Disco” sound and playfully pretentious New Age-infused songwriting. I hear the influence of maverick Electronica pioneer Bruce Haack, Germanic robo-men Kraftwerk, avant-garde clubber Arthur Russell, architect of shuddering Electro Arthur Baker, and even that of fashionable Synthpop acts like Depeche Mode and Yazoo. It’s strange and beautifully baroque dance music.
And seeing how well organized my library stays I guess it must make the robots happy.
Kelley Polar - “Chrysanthemum”
- El Keter