Recycled Goods

As most people who've thought about this at all recognize, it is a truism that most of the really good music that is currently available in record stores is not what we'd call "new music" -- music recorded in the last year or two, still available in its original packaging. Record companies know this, and they also appreciate the fact that the profits come easy from music that has already been paid for or written off, so each year they crank out literally thousands of reissues. This dynamic has reach such a fever pitch that most magazines these days devote whole sections just to keeping track of recent reissues.

Recycled Goods is my effort to help out. This was conceived as a monthly column, Static Multimedia. Michael Tatum edits these columns, and his help has proven invaluable. The original idea was to write a little intro, review twelve interesting (mostly outstanding) reissues, then write a bit of Additional Consumer News. As of the second or third columns, the latter became Briefly Noted, which allowed me to expand the coverage from twelve reissues to more like thirty each month. (Each month stretched out a bit around the end of 2003, leaving a few holes in the schedule.

Note that any links and notes are for my own use, and are not part of the published columns. The Backlog file is a list of records that I have piled up in my backlog. They are likely to be covered in future columns, although there's no guarantee of that. New columns are also worked on in this directory, although they usually don't show up in the navigation list until they've been published.