swandive swansong #2

musical time capsules; cecile believe; samantha james

(Note: This is an partially abridged, partially expanded cross-post of my music newsletter swandive swansong. You can read the whole thing here.)

thinkpiece fragment: Winamp Generated PlayList

A good method of time travel is to go to your choice of search engine and look up the phrase “Winamp Generated PlayList.” (The capitalization is optional but enhances the ritual.) Browse the results and depart the modern world.

I imagine that many of you experienced that old world in person. For those who didn’t: Winamp is/was (more on the slash later) a music player from the early/mid 2000s that really whipped the llama’s ass. The app was famous for its openness to visual customization — hundreds of artists released skins ranging from minimalist to stunningly elaborate — and for its panoply of Easter eggs.

Winamp was also lightweight, unlike much music software nowadays (see: iTunes, or Spotify’s HTML5 Chromium app.) Because of that, I still use it. I even use the same skin, handed down from one Downloads folder to another, that I chose as an adolescent girl who loved the color pink:

As mentioned, the tech landscape has changed a lot in the past year, let alone since the mid-2000s. Those changes have not always been for the better. Enshittification abounds. The techno-optimism of the Web 2.0 era has become untethered from the ideals it was optimistic for. And much of the music software from the 2000s has since been bought up and contorted into grotesque new forms. Napster — from whence a lot of people’s Winamp playlists likely originated — has turned to “metaverse artist experiences.” LimeWire — another place people got their mp3s — is now an AI spigot. And Winamp is hawking NFTs now.

Traces of the old Web remain, though, if you know what to look for. One Winamp plugin allowed users to generate shareable lists of their music libraries. These took the form of boilerplate HTML files, with a header like this…

319 tracks in playlist, average track length: 4:14
Estimated playlist length: 22 hours 32 minutes 23 seconds
(300 tracks of unknown length)
Right-click here (link) to save this HTML file.

…and beneath that, a list of the tracks in their collection, with artist, title, and other metadata reproduced exactly. (No downloads, though.) These lists were designed to be shared, and people posted them to personal Angelfire websites and now-defunct forums and anywhere else one might deposit a HTML file that they once right-clicked. Many of those shares have undoubtedly linkrotted off the public Web—but not all.

What I find fascinating about lists like these is that they represent a form of social music curation that’s basically the same as, say, creating a Spotify playlist; and yet simultaneously so, so different. On the major streaming platforms, music is presented in neatly organized, marketable genre packages, with metadata that is manicured and curated (albeit imperfectly). YouTube, the once-heralded participatory outlet of the masses, surfaces record label-sanctioned uploads before all else; you have to arm-wrestle the recommendation algorithm to get to the messier stuff, the pitch-shifted bootleg uploads and MS Paint lyrics videos and AMVs. Even without the mediation of software, people have grown accustomed to presenting their best self, their public face, their mixtapes carefully chosen to win you over.

These playlists, however, usually comprised every audio file in a person’s whole music collection. They present an accounting of, if maybe not the entirety of a person’s musical taste, a broad swath. They're still forms of social presentation, but they're unflattened, unfiltered, unretouched, un-grammable hang zones: time capsules of the music that truly moved people.

There’s a lot of potential for crate-digging musical discovery here. The choices of tracks are period-appropriate in the way that only actual artifacts of an era can be, preserving all the specificities that nostalgia smooths over. Here you can find complete lists of radio hits—the ones everyone remembers, and the ones most have forogtten. You can find deep cuts and rarities and live recordings and taped radio shows and podcasts from the time when the word “podcast” referred to the iPod. You can find songs posted on some mp3 blog or in some remixer’s collection that have since become lost media. You can find lots of Internet forum humor, Dr. Demento offcuts, and mistagged stuff that isn’t actually by Weird Al.

You can identify, in statistically significant numbers, songs that were bundled with Windows XP and other such software: songs that largely lie buried in people’s memories. The one that lies in my memory is a trance mix of electronic duo Madison Park’s “My Personal Moon." Improbably and delightfully, they’re still making music after all those years; “Saving You, Saving Me” is pleasingly Everything But The Girl-like.

You can also get fascinating glimpses into people’s musical worlds. Some playlists reflect their creators’ distinct tastes: Eurodance, videogame and anime OSTs, classic rock. Some playlists are the product of hardcore stans preserving everything an artist has committed to recording.

Other playlists are wider-ranging; those are my favorites. Somewhere in the world, a person enjoys both the Decemberists and trance remixes of iio’s “Rapture.” Someone else has amassed a large chunk of the Nightwish discography, a large chunk of the Bryan Adams discography, and a sprinkling of relatively obscure tracks by relatively forgotten boy band O-Town. Someone else has listened to both Anne Murray’s “You Needed Me” and The Nunzio Poop Song, and found enough value in each to download them to their hard drive. I find that wonderful and, dare I say, relatable.

To close this out, here’s a partial selection of some files from some Winamp Generated PlayLists.

• Green Day-Warning (SONG FROM NEW ALBUM!!)
• their dead.wav
• RARE and EXCELLENT Naked Fringe - melloryl window TOOL NINE INCH NAILS TORI AMOS SISTERS OF MERCY APOPTIGMA BER.mp3
• Portis Head - Massive Attack
• USHER--Upped By ManuS - 05 U Got It Bad-USHER--Upped By ManuS
• bigdick63.mp3
• Mix 99.9 - MP3'd by thegia.com - Yoda - Everybody's Free
• Veruca20Salt20-20Born20Entertainer20full20on20rock20edit
• FINAL FANTASY RARE STUFF - FF7 - EXTREMELY RARE PRELUDE (1)
• Natalie Portman - (on SNL)
• m Punk Covers - Spider Man Theme
• burn to cd - Someone To Call My Lover Janet Jackson Hex Hector Dub
• Comedy - Donald Duck Orgasm
• Metallica - Motorbreath (Live 1983, Dave Mustaine on Vocals who went on to form Megadeth - EXTREMELY RARE!!).mp3
• Mozart - MOONLIGHT (TECHNO REMIX)
• (unknown) - the poo poo song
• posthuman

the pulse of nowish: cecile believe

The clear emotional standout from SOPHIE’s posthumous album was “My Forever” with Cecile Believe: the singer-songwriter, formerly Mozart’s Sister, who was the voice of much of Oil of Every Pearl’s Un-Insides.

Cecile Believe also has under-appreciated solo work, including this year’s artpoppy Tender the Spark. I’m genuinely surprised more outlets haven’t reviewed it, given its SOPHIE connection and also its quality. My favorite cuts: the glitchy R&B track “Blue Sun” and the nocturnal, grinding, coolly confident “Blink Twice.” Some of the best late nights sound like this.

the vaults: samantha james

One subgenre — sub-mood, really — of music I collect for the aforementioned radio stream is called “chamber of frosted glass.” Here’s a representative track from it: an immaculate, glistening chillout track from 2007. I’m probably not the only person who’s burrowed into calming music recently.

bonus: more playlist titles

Email newsletters have a length limit. I don't. So, exclusive to the crosspost, here are some more things people have listened to and maybe loved.

• Funtastic Power! - 300 This is Sparta (EXTENDED fun times mix)
• trance (0:19)
• One Tree Hill S2 CD1 - 17 Black Eyed Peas - Lets Get It Started.mp3
• 08 Christopher Field - Gothic Power Remix (Lotr The Fellowship Of The Ring Trailer)(Good Quality!!)
• GROOVIN'!!S
• No Doubt - Kick Ass Remix (Don't Speak)
• Bagpipe tatoo - Bagpipe tatoo - Bagpipes - The Edinburgh Military Tattoo - Pipes And Drums-Amazing Grace-Fanfare Trumpets-Fanfare Militaire
• Allison Hannigan - Now there's something you don't see everyday.wav
• Midi Converting Stuffs (222:47)
• yousuck

footnotes

1. Google is hit or miss for this — one search returned only 3 legit results, while a search a few days later returned the real stuff. Bing is more reliable but more likely to index results on Angelfire and geocities.ws that are more representative of the period but have since been infected with browser-hijacking adware (as opposed to the browser-clogging adware that makes up the modern Web). Of the less enshittified search engines, Wiby returns no results while Marginalia does. 🔼
2. Soulseek is still largely unchanged. So, I think, is last.fm. 🔼
3. whose single cover is interior design #goals 🔼
4. There’s a bit of a selection bias here: the musical tastes of the sort of people who would generate an HTML file and post it to an Internet forum. 🔼
5. an absolute classic, do not @ me 🔼