Additional Thoughts to BenJam's article

Written by Makke

I have some additional thoughts to BenJam's article. The fact that our lives get more and more hectic and stressful not only for stock-brokers and diskmag-editors is nothing new. Nowadays stress is part of our everyday life. What people often don't see is that even when we want to relax we have to be "hectic". Many people sit in front of the TV and zap between two channels, trying to watch both shows at the same time, or are reading a book at the same time as they are watching TV.

I'm asking you, how many people actually sit down and listen to a radio show? Doing nothing else, just listening to the radio show. Not many! Not if they have a TV. Not if they have a computer. Not if they have a magazine. Listening to the radio is something you do while doing something else.

This is why people nowadays can't sit down and just listen to music. This isn't interesting. I mean, you can listen to music while reading the newspaper, watching TV or sitting in front of the computer. Just listening to music is regarded as a waste of time. And I think that the problem with musicdisk-interfaces bottoms somewhere here as well.

Sitting down in front of your computer to listen to some tracked music, watch some half-cool 2d-effect and read the scroller the musician wrote isn't interesting enough. We need to be either fed with entertainment or use some half-entertaining thing such as music to fill the rest of our brain-capacity with something while we are working or reading.

I mean, right now I'm not just writing. I'm also listening to Kraftwerk's "Computer World"-album. I could sit here and just type, but that would be boring. Though people wouldn't find it crazy to just type, and not listen to music. However, if I sat down and just listened to music many people would think that I were depressed or on drugs, because a normal person can't sit and enjoy music as a "stand alone" source of entertainment. That is crazy.

This is quite sad as music alone can be quite relaxing, and many people could use some relaxing. But that's the way it is nowadays. People get so worked up by all the stress that they can't let everything go for a few minutes. They have so many things to do that when it's actually time to relax you have to relax in every possible way. Preferably reading a book while watching TV and listening to one of your favourite records. You don't have time to relax in just one way. You have to hyper relax... and thus you don't relax at all.

So I say, download a musicdisk with an interface. Sit back, relax and hit the .EXE-file.

- Makke/Visuale/Hugi/Trebel