>>Nostalgia For Infinity

So, yeah. It’s been a month since my last proper update here on NFI and this has given me plenty of time to think about what I want to do with the blog. I’m still not 100% sure; I’m a fickle man and I tend to drift between my hobbies, moving focus from one to another every few months. But all the same I think this short break has given me the confidence to accept something I’ve been deliberating over for a while.

I don’t find writing about music very fun any more.

Quite possibly I burned myself out by trying to pump out so many reviews. 172 reviews over the course of two and a bit years is a lot, especially when you consider that they tend to be 500-1,000 words each. Call it an average of 700 and that’s 120,000 words, which is the length of a fairly chunky novel. Most of those reviews were pretty hard to write, too. It usually takes me a while to figure out an angle to come at a record from.

This is not to rule out my writing about music ever again. PRs and bands are still sending me stuff and on the off chance that I’m struck by a desire to write about a particular thing, I will do so. In the future I may even get past my burnout and start enjoying it again, as I did with writing about books. Hell, if I ever find myself going the freelance writing route, it might even be a way to earn some money for my writing. But now we’re getting into pipe dream territory and there are plumbers and goombas everywhere.

NFI as a music site ain’t dead. Like old punks, it just smells that way.

I do have a few things coming up in the near future. I’ll be posting my picks from 2011′s fine crop of music soon and I should also have a short review of the late 70s punk rock doc’ Shellshock Rock for you too. I may dabble in quickfire shortform music roundup reviews; I still listen to loads of new records every month and I like to recommend things to people. I will continue to post things here, though they will be more intermittent.

For the most part, however, I’ve decided that I want to focus on what I find most fun, namely writing for Arcadian Rhythms and playing music with my band, Wrecktheplacefantastic. Writing about games has turned out to be an immense source of pleasure and has generated more interesting conversations than any of my writing about music ever has. Similarly playing music in front of people, getting up on stage, travelling around and meeting people, writing and learning new songs, hitting the studio – all of this is also a lot more enjoyable and creative than writing about records made by other people. So I’m going to focus on these things and get better at them… or at least that’s the plan.

Put another way, the route to happiness is to do what you enjoy most. Since I no longer particularly enjoy writing about music, I’m no longer going to force myself to do so. Since I enjoy doing other stuff instead, I’m going to go and do that. The only real source of sadness is firstly that this feels a bit like the end of an era, and secondly that I feel like I’m letting down the folks who read my reviews regularly (I know there are a few of you out there). I hope you find something to like in my other projects.

Okay, that’s only, like, a part of it. A few well-deserved beers and whiskies will be involved, but actually now that I’ve run up to the end of the old era of reviewage I’d like to take a brief holiday from NFI. This will probably only last a week, perhaps two at the most. Once I’m back in action you can expect to see my favourite records of 2011, perhaps some of the usual introspective navel-gazing, and a state of the nation address in which I finally explain what I’d like to do with NFI in the coming year. SPOILER ALERT: it’ll probably be less posts overall, but they’ll be better quality or longer.

In the meantime, I hope yr 2012 has gotten off to a good start. It’s a year with a lot to live up to, huh? 2011 was such a nice, inoffensive, pleasant year all round.

* = 2/3 reviews a week, and towards the end I really started running out of ways to say effectively the same thing in a different, exciting way. I had fun trying, though!

Okay, okay, so the title is a little more melodramatic than it needed to be. I really couldn’t resist the temptation to reference one of the first music reviews I wrote here on Nostalgia For Infinity. It felt entirely appropriate.

As the astute will have probably gathered from the above, I’m wrapping up my music reviewing. It’s been an absolute blast over the last couple of years, not only in flexing my writing muscles and thinking about ways to articulate my feelings on a ton of different records, but also in listening to some fine music, hearing some fantastic new bands (a number of whom have become firm favourites) and chatting with some great people from various bands, labels and PR companies.

At the time of writing I’ve got about 130 record reviews (albums, EPs, singles and splits) up on NFI, with a bunch more queued and about 50 more records that have been sent to me that I’ve yet to write about. And if your record is among these then don’t worry, I’ll be honouring everything I’ve been sent up until today unless I really can’t think of anything to say about it, which going by past precedent is unlikely as I am an opinionated and rambling son of a bitch. If you’re a fan of reading my record reviews, they’ll still be going up regularly (two or three a week as usual) pretty much until the end of 2011.

I won’t be accepting anything more for review, however. The submissions page has been updated to reflect this.

I have a number of reasons for hanging up my guitar-shaped novelty pen. The first, and most important, is that I want to focus my time and energy on other projects. I want to spend more time getting better at guitar and writing songs for my own band, Wrecktheplacefantasic. I also want to turn my efforts at writing elsewhere; not only a renewed focus on the younger project that is Arcadian Rhythms but also getting back into writing some fiction. Not only that, it would be nice to have more of a social life again. I’ve been hanging on in there – I do regularly enjoy a pint or four and a sprawling conversation with friends – but you’d be surprised how much of your free time music reviewing takes up. I can’t remember the last time I spent a day off from the day job that didn’t involve a few hours of writing-related activities of some kind.

A slightly more shameful reason is that I’ve increasingly found myself with a sensation that I’m beginning to repeat myself, which I suspect is the inevitable result of writing in-depth about a lot of music that faithfully follows in the footsteps of what inspired it. Now, it should be patently obvious from my prior body of writing that I am quite far from having a problem with this. I am not an innovation-or-bust critic and have always tried to engage with music on its own terms or to at least explain why I couldn’t. However, whilst I am quite comfortable with holding this opinion I’m less comfortable with repeatedly restating when I’m supposedly writing about a particular collection of music. It becomes a little dull to essentially repeat yourself, even if you do have an excellent soundtrack at the time.

Anyway, those are my reasons, and I figure I owe it to my readers and my, ahem, suppliers to explain them rather than just stop replying to emails and allow the post schedule to decline as so many blogs and review sites do.

For the record NFI itself will continue going strong (I will inevitably write about whatever I’m up to and continue to post original material here too), and I may even decide to write about records or shows that I have something in particular to say about, but they’ll be sourced by yours truly and written on my whims.

That’s it… goodbye. For now.

Yep, between June 12th and 27th I am away on holiday so if you email, leave comments etcetera expect to wait a while for a response. Especially because I’m straight back to work when I return and will be jetlagged, overworked and stressed to uberfuckery for at least a few days.

However I’ve also racked up a bunch of reviews for the entire time I’ll be away and then some so don’t worry, there’ll still be a thrice-weekly dose of my wittering on about music and records appearing here on NFI.

Take it easy!

Chock full of additives and artificial flavourings: Nostalgia For Infinity!

I’ve started posting the occasional piece on Saturdays in addition to the usual Tuesday/Thursday review schedule and Sunday link round-up. I’ve got a buffer of two months of reviews now and have decided to step up my posting schedule.

There are a few reasons for this, the first of which is that there are some records I’ve been wanting to write about but have been sitting on for a while, the second of which is that I’m being sent more material for review these days, and the third is that I’m considering posting more opinion-style pieces about this and that (e.g. the I Live Sweat highlight I did a few weeks ago).

With that said I’m pretty busy these days between the day job, writing reviews for NFI, writing for and running Arcadian Rhythms and playing in Wrecktheplacefantastic, so please forgive me if I miss a Saturday or two. Those Tuesday and Thursday reviews are going to keep on coming the foreseeable future, though, you can be sure of that.

And yes, in case anyone wasn’t aware, it is just me who writes for NFI. A one-man band if you will. Oh, and I still write about books and film occasionally, just less often these days…

As always, readers: thanks for reading!

Here’s what you’ve all been waiting for: the 2nd part of this 2-part blog post in which I gaze at my navel and discuss the epic history of some stuff I did in 2010. Part one is here.

Other writing & projects

It was a very quiet year for fiction. I wrote one flash fiction story (here) and worked on a few unfinished short stories. It’s a shame to have let this lapse but equally I think it’s been beneficial to let those fields lie fallow for a bit. The itch to write stories is returning, and thanks to thinking rather than doing I have some ideas on how to improve my weaknesses as a writer of fiction (chiefly that my characters tend to be of a type or flat, and my prose lacks descriptive character and colour).

» Read the rest of this entry «

A bit late in the day for my 2010 roundup but hey, I’ve been busy.

I’ve split this post into two parts to break it up a bit; if you’re wondering where the other bit is, be patient. I’ve scheduled the two posts an hour apart.

Music writing!

Over the course of 2010 I posted reviews of (in chronological order) Nothington, French for Cartridge, Victoria & Jacob (twice), Rolo Tomassi, Throats (twice), Antares, Blacklisted, Bomb the Music Industry!, Bull See Red, Growns Ups (twice), Stegosaurus, Sundials, the Menzingers, Deftones, Boy Mandeville, the Black Keys, Dirty Tactics, Static Age, Campaign, Off With Their Heads, Victor! Fix the Sun, Junior Battles, Everyone Everywhere, Iron Chic, Frontier(s), Ghost Robot Ninja Bear, Come On Gang, Bastions, the Holy Mess, Pianos Become the Teeth, RVIVR, Banquets, Fake Problems, Charles the Osprey, Mixtapes, Direct Hit!, Bangers, the Border Surrender, Daughters, Young Adults, Let’s Talk Daggers, Jackals, Museum Mouth, Go Rydell, the Great Explainer, Castevet and Candy Hearts.

» Read the rest of this entry «

Apparently September 2010 was Nostalgia For Infinity’s busiest month ever, with 2,500 unique hits over the course of the month. Cool! Thanks for visiting and reading, visitors and readers.

I didn’t know people reviewed blogs, but apparently they do! A reader has reviewed me on Scribnia:

Shaun Green manages to put literature, gaming, punk Rock all together to somehow turn this into a blog. It hosts or points at his fiction, book, music, game, film reviews, info about his musical projects, and other general bloggery. Honestly when i saw the name Nostalgia For Infinity, I thought what a terrible name. I still dont know what im reading about, Shaun Green either has something orignal and unique or completely horrible. I find his book reviews to be much more interesting than reading about his music reviews, but still nothing amazing..

“Still nothing amazing” smells like a tagline to me!

For what it’s worth, I’ve considered splitting the different strands of content into separate blogs in the past, but others persuaded me against it. I’m now fairly comfortable simply writing about what interests me. I can only hope that a few other people share some of my interests and enjoy reading some of what I write. Thanks to the author of the review above for sharing their views!

Oh yes, and the name of the blog is a relic from back before I learned to use WordPress. It’s a reference to some of SF author Al Reynold’s novels. The other names I considered were Haste Killed Creativity and Muscles Burning Alcohol and Nicotine because holy crap did I love Against Me! at the time.

Hey, loyal readers and random googlers (I hope you find the BioShock/Gor slashfic you’re looking for). There’ve been a lack of reviews recently for these exciting reasons:

1.) My band is recording a second demo tomorrow. TOMORROW! So I’ve been busy practising our newer songs, installing new tubes in my amp (turns out that balancing the power tubes in a DSL100 is pretty easy, even when you’re drunk) and restringing my guitars (ugh, replacing strings is for when you break them, at least in my book). EXCITING.

2.) I’ve had a promotion at work at the same time as a friend / colleague has left so I’ve been pretty preoccupied with plugging gaps in dayjob-world.

3.) I’ve been kind of inclined to spend my free time chilling out with films, videogames and friends rather than writing in a darkened room. Not that I have a problem with the latter, but it’s more like work than blowing off steam.

4.) IT’S THE SUMMER <3 <3 <3

I’ll post up the occasional review as and when the mood takes me & will be back with three more levels of experience and a +1 Something of Whatever in the near future. I may also have other cool stuff to share, e.g. a friend and I are going to collaborate on an indie game… I’ll provide writing and “ideas” and she’ll do the hard work. Awesome!!!

If you want to follow something I’m doing in the meantime, check my twitter or tumblr thingies.