When Sounds Are Active Records told me that they wanted to put out an online-only album, I had to think about it. I didn't own an ipod and I had never downloaded music. I was hostile to the idea initially because I liked (and still like) physical albums you can pick up with your hands. But I took the opportunity to broaden my view of music on the interwebs. The thing that made the idea start to sound appealing to me was the question of form that this raised for me. I have always been interested in the relationship between content and form, particularly with regard to media used in music. Before recordings, the lengths of musical works were appropriate to a performance. Chamber music was written to entertain folks at a gathering, opera was written to be performed in a big hall, etc. When 45 records were first introduced, only a few minutes could fit on each side, so songs were limited to that. Eventually came the long play records, allowing the album to be born. Here one could have 40 minutes or so of music, but only 20 minutes per side. And with the CD, albums can be up to 80 minutes now, which inspires some to write hour long songs that they might not have if LPs were still the only way to distribute music. Anyway, I got to thinking about this long history of music and its relationship to different media, and how that influenced what sort of things were written for those different media. I started to ask myself what potentialities existed in the online format? Or, to put the question negatively, what limitations exist for presenting music through CDs or LPs? What advantage might there be in releasing something on the web. The thing I came up with was this: one of the unfortunate aspects of recording is that we take music, which is inherently alive and always changing, and we freeze it for eternity. Instead of shifting and adapting as is its nature, it is forced to stay exactly the same until the CD becomes unplayable. With an online release, I saw the potential for an album to overcome that restraint by allowing continual updates. A remix album seemed the perfect sort of thing to present in that way. Whenever I get a new remix (a good one anyway), I re-approach the whole album and start moving things around to see if this new addition can find a home there. Sometimes that means deleting a song or two. Sometimes that means coming up with an entirely different order for the tracks. Sometimes there is just no place on the record for that new track, and so I save it until the album changes enough to admit it. Because there is no physical medium, there is virtually no cost to manufacture the album. As such, I can change the record as often as I see fit without worrying about the cost of re-pressing the music, re-printing the artwork, re-distribuitng the product, etc. Every few months, I will update this record so be sure to check the date to see if the version you have has been updated. What you hear here is perhaps the 9th or so edition and comes from December 11th, 2010.