Reflections

The last month or so has been a real blur for me. After spending two straight weeks on the beach in (beautiful!) Corolla, NC, I had only one week before school started up for the semester yesterday. This meant that I was nearly completely isolated from music for a couple weeks, which means that I am not at all caught up on new releases or what has been happening on the innerwebs. Plus, I totally forgot about our 1st birthday here at ISM.

I’ve found myself reflecting on the past year a bit since I realized that, and it is amazing what changes we have gone through. Some of the first people who were supposed to post never even made one post, the most prolific poster aside from myself ended up deleting almost all of his posts, and some of the cats posting today actually commented on some of those very first posts we made. There have been great moments like the very first published English interview with Omar-S and very sad moments like the passing of legendary mastering engineer Ron Murphy. Looking at the monthly post totals, I can see the ebb and flow of balancing this blog with my school work (which got quite heavy in what is typically the hardest year in EE). We have established connections with many other bloggers out there, developing a family of related blogs that showcase a ridiculous range of music and artists that I find far superior to the coverage of any single website or magazine. Writing here led me to be able to interview Juan Atkins, Mad Mike, and DJ Skurge about the Model 500 live project for Resident Advisor which was an extremely satisfying experience. We didn’t get to do DEMF the way I envisioned, but those are the breaks! Deejays both famous and not have contributed blinding mixes to ISM that contain any number of genres and tracks ranging from obscure to classic. I have seen the end of one of my club nights here in Pittsburgh and the start of another. And of course, we have bought records. Good god have we bought records.

I can’t say whether or not ISM has met my expectations since I never really had any for it. I didn’t think anyone would come to read it at first, but they have and I am quite pleased with the number of visits and with the overall quality of the visitors as evidenced by the comments section. Thanks to all of you guys! Most importantly, I see a change in the coverage of dance music towards more focus on soulful dance music in general and black artists from the US in particular. Is that a result of the family of blogs that have popped up who cover the kinds of things we all do in the way that we do? It is probably impossible to tell. Maybe it was just time for these things to come back around a bit, but at least we were all here to try to do things the right way. All I can definitively say is that it has been a good time doing this and we will be around for a hot minute, even if we do go through some changes here and there like we did this past year.

Now summer is over, I’m back in school, and that chill is in the night air. I love fall, it might be my favorite season. I have a couple mixes lined up to do this week, and some other pieces for RA in the pipeline. Kenny has some more writing on the horizon as well, and it seems as if all the ISM massive is in full effect on the mixes tip. We have a couple more Scott Ferguson mixes lined up, too. I am extremely pleased with the crew we have assembled, and I am looking forward to seeing what we can do this next year…..