Like so many, in the 2010s I was drawn to the platform Tumblr and its flexible integration of text with image, video and audio (the latter primarily through YouTube and Spotify). I began keeping this digital diary, of sorts, in May 2012, and abandoned it in December 2019 as changing corporate ownership of Tumblr eroded its functionality. A number of its posts about sound turned up in my first nonfiction book, The New Analog. Some of the listening recommendations led to longer articles for other publications. But much of the occasional writing remains locked in this format.
Digital is a fragile medium and difficult to archive. Ironically, all the Spotify links I used on Tumblr have been lost, so I replaced them here with YouTube links. YouTube, on the other hand, has proven surprisingly resilient; nearly all the links I posted at the time are still available. (In some cases I have replaced them with newer uploads of the same or similar material.)
Originally published as the Tumblr blog …
