EOTR 2013 - its not just about the live music...

The main reason I go to festivals is almost certainly quite apparent; it is to listen to music live and also to take photographs of that. It is not the whole story however, and this issue was thrown into sharper context at EOTR when I was asked how (festivals aside) I came across new music to listen to...
The truth is that I hadn't really thought about that in the "business-like" sense that this question implied I might. That was something of a shock. My first thoughts were "it just happens" and then "much of it finds me", but neither is a satisfactory answer to the question, although to me it might appear to be that way.
Indeed this is the point when it occurred to me that this is exactly how I had seen it. The truer answer, in so far as I have thought it through, is this. Listen, talk to people (I'm good at talking - like I need to say that - but I can listen too) about everything and anything they have to say, remember stuff and the apparent links between them. Then just go explore...
This is no real answer either, if only because of its generality, but I'll attempt a little more detail in a forthcoming post.
The other thing is to watch not just the acts but their audiences and indeed the festival milieu in general. At festivals such as EOTR you have already selected yourself to be part of a somewhat like-minded subset of the population, even the festival-going population! By that last comment I'm thinking that the EOTR subset of festival goers would be rather different to that at, for example, Leeds/Reading and it would be interesting, at least to me, to know more about that kind of social phenomenon. I expect it either has been, or currently is, the topic of several Ph.D. theses or research papers.
I'll leave that to someone else, as it all sounds like hard work, but please feel free to send me links to any such research because I'd love to read someone else's thoughts.

Here instead are images from EOTR 2013 that don't actually include any artists performing but are of other aspects instead. There are five such images, presented in the the order that they were taken between Thursday evening and Saturday evening. The caption with each is just a snapshot on my thought at the time that I took it. That has reminded me of another issue - always take a pencil and paper - a combination that can survive wet conditions although this was not a necessity on this occasion.

'Home for the next few days'

'The shadow audience at the Garden Stage'

'Sunshine always makes things better'

'Waiting for Warpaint'

'Watching Joe Gideon and The Shark'

You can add your own thoughts too [all comments to this blog are moderated by me - so at the very least you know I have read them] and start a cloud-thesis...

Interwoven threads. Or just a tangled mess?

This is a fundamental question, one that long predates this blog, and it is a multipartite one. Each is a simple question, at least in isolation and on the face of it, that I have asked myself but as a whole the answer certainly is not remotely clear to me...

Here are some of the questions:

Why do I like music?
Why do I like the music I do, but not that which I don't?
Why has my taste in music changed, particular in the medium - long term?
How are these things related, if indeed they are, in any logical sociological, psychological or even physiological way?

They are not easy to answer, although I would like to try and do so and happily share my answers. Now ask those, and many other such related questions, in combinations and permutations, and the whole thing suddenly becomes almost infinitely complex.

My first comment is blindingly obvious; that I do not know the answer.
That actually matters more for perhaps we are not supposed to know the answer as, regardless of all the huge progress that has been made on our collective science and psychological understanding of the human brain that which we now know, or think we do, still does not register on the scale of that which there is to know.

Two albums, one evening, and I just don't see a problem with it.

Who is to say that I should not listen to bombastic Canadian pyschedelic rock and then immediately follow it with an album of lo-fi acoustic melancholia, if that is what I wish to do?