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New Particles, 2015-2023
New Particles began as a weekly list of new releases on Spotify, compiled both for my own curiosity and as a motivation for my work on better Spotify discovery tools. It morphed over time into an obliquely annotated excercise in expansive and/or evasive obsession, and then progressively more and more of a weird private poetic format for cryptic moral reasoning. As of 2023-11-24 it has run for 454 weeks in the margins of 35900 tracks by 13951 artists. If you want to hear what it sounded like, compressed into a single playlist, this is it.
The abrupt end of my time at Spotify, in a massive layoff in December 2023, separates me logistically from the internal tools I used to both make and annotate playlists this way, but is also a useful opportunity for me to reconsider how I allocate my energies. I will have to rethink how I listen, and maybe this is a good time to try flipping my modes out of this increasingly frenetic breadth back to something slower. But even more than that, I suddenly have more time for writing again, and New Particles was a format designed for an hour or two of writing a week. Maybe when I have more than two hours, I don't want to spend two of them this way.
For now, then, I'm going to declare an intermission and go play some Hitsujibungaku songs that didn't even come out this week, and see where they carry me. Maybe the next thing will seem like more of this, or maybe it won't.
- glenn, 2023-12-09
previously: 2023-11-24