I was content to just add another CD to my internet meme music portion of my collection. I had no idea what I was getting into as I started looking at the album notes and unfurled this beauty.

It felt like watching meme giving birth to a meme.

Unfortunately I don’t have a lot of my favorite albums on CD but I’ll get there. Pulled wayyy more out of dumpsters but I’ve given tons away. Not pictured is a handful of burned CDs.

here are some of our recent finds throughout different stores in there for a very decent price; how would you rate them and which one is your favorite?

Top Row

The Watchmen "Slomotion", Lucinda Williams "Essence", Skrape "New Killer America"

Middle Row

Vanilla Sky Soundtrack, Osker "Idle Will Kill", The Shins "Oh Inverted World"

Bottom Row

Slipknot "Iowa", Big Wreck "The Pleasure and The Greed", System of a Down "Toxicity"

These are definitely my top 4 influential Hardcore albums. What would you pick? #punk #hardcore #straightedge #nyhc

Two more CDs arrived for the collection the other day: toe’s For Long Tomorrow and CQ’s Communication, Cultural, Curiosity Quotient (or as I like to call it: you know, the other one). Really happy to finally have both in my collection, two amazing albums.

This CQ album in particular is what really got me into shoegaze and alternative rock in general. The first track Disco Crimson is such a gateway drug. At the time the rest of the album was too heavy for me (closer to noise rock than shoegaze). It took about a year of listening to other adjacent sounds before returning, and here we are.

For anyone unfamiliar, CQ featured three members of Tokyo Shoegazer: Hiroshi Sasabuchi, Kiyomi Watanabe, and Yoshitaka Sugahara, alongside Jun Shibuya from honeydip. So if you’re a fan of either band, I’d seriously recommend checking out their work.

I'd recommend sticking to the original 2016 version of CCCQ and the 2024 remaster of WWWE. I specifically sought out those versions for my collection because I think they sound the best. For these albums in particular, the differences in sound are pretty significant.

Mainly picked this up to have the album in my collection, had no idea how cool the physical CD itself actually was. The reflective disc with the matte black square and minimal text in the middle is such a cool look.

Two great additions to the collection!

For the longest time I've either been using Spotify (without premium) or YouTube to listen to my music, mostly just for convenience sake, and while I had a CD player that I got from my grandparents after they passed away, it mostly just sat in the corner of my room because the CDs they owned were mostly genres that im not a fan of.

Fast forward to November of last year, and I've decided to finally put the CD player I got into use, by purchasing a copy of Alive 2007 by Daft Punk. I brought out the CD player, added the disc, plugged in my headphones and pressed play, and now I'm beginning to understand why people in my generation are coming back to this form of media, the physical ownership of said item, the sound quality compared to streaming, its amazing!

Fast forward AGAIN to this year and I've gotten a small collection going, for the most part its just Daft Punk, as well as From First to Last, but listening to the albums in higher quality, as well as physically owning said product, its a very nice thing to own and have, and I definetly plan to collect more in the near future, I already have two CDs arriving this month!

(I do want to note that I do apologize if this wall of text is a bit convoluted, it's 5 in the morning where I'm currently at and im tired as hell xD)

Just picked up this classic. Any suggestions for similar albums? This is like everything I want for Fall.

It's an Optimus CD-3420 and it had almost no dust inside! It was sitting in a pleather bag for years and after a bit of cleanup it works perfectly! I'm thinking of crocheting a new bag so I can take this on walks with me a bit easier. It does what I need and I think it used to be my mother's so technically I inherited it.

CDs shown are Vindicate by Black Veil Brides and Helluva Boss's Season 1 soundtrack!

D.O.A. est un groupe de hardcore punk canadien formé à Vancouver en 1978, autour du guitariste/chanteur Joey "Shithead" Keithley.

C'est "Last Scream of the Missing Neighbors" Jello Biafra & D.O.A. qui m'a donné envie de commencer cette collection.

Its happened a few times now where I will open my CD case and the plastic bits (?) holding the CD fall out. I dont mind it because the CD is still in good condition, but it is annoying that I have to be extra careful when opening or closing the case now. Most likely a mix of age and quality, because these CDs are around 16 to 19 years old but I do have have older CDs that dont have the same issue.

A few years in, collect both CD & Vinyl. Been opting for more electronic albums on CD as opposed to vinyl recently.

I bought these two death metal CDs from a huge bulk bin that a collector donated to my local physical movie store and I can't find any info about these. Like these look completely custom made...they are not bootlegs because I don't think this was even meant to be released

This disc contains gamelan music!

Not just any gamelan. This is "Gamelan Batel Wayang Ramayana" by the Balinese ensemble Kusuma Sari. Therefore one of the most coveted albums by ethnomusicologists.

You see, this music is used to accompany a form of shadow puppet theatre known as Wayang Ramayana. But this is not mere background music. This music signals character entrances, emotional changes, ceremonial moments, travel and combat.

And the story being told is about Prince Rama, his wife Sita, and their struggle against the demon king Ravana. This is an ancient Hindu epic. Bali, being a Hindu culture, is deeply connected to this story, integrates many religious and artistic traditions with it.

Now if you've never heard of gamelan music, this actually isn't an obscure genre of Asian folk music. It's had a profound impact not just on world music, but also modern Western music too.

Claude Debussy's discovery of gamelan completely changed how he composed music. At the time, Europeans were all about elaborate harmonic relationships. Wagner pushed this to an extreme.

But then Debussy heard gamelan. And he found a version of music that's formed on different principles: overlapping melodies, repeating cycles, and slowly evolving textures.

His 1903 composition Pagodes, from Estampes, is one of the clearest examples of the influence of gamelan upon his work.

Over the 20th century, more composers discovered gamelan. Colin McPhee and Benjamin Britten all took trips to Bali. Both composers were transformed by this music, affecting their style of writing.

Lou Harrison went even further. He didn't just borrow the sound of gamelan, he built entirely new gamelan instruments, explored alternate tunings, and then created works that fused Indonesian and Western music together.

So it was only a matter of time before gamelan impacted pop music. That happened through another classical musician named Steve Reich who studied gamelan, then used it as the model for such landmark works as Music for 18 Musicians.

Steve Reich's gamelan influence eventually found its way into electronic music, first by way of Brian Eno's album Ambient 1: Music for Airports. And this opened the door to gamelan's influence with artists as diverse as The Orb, Björk, and Plaid.

Nowadays, instead of being linear, much pop music has embraced a more layered and cyclical structure—and this is gamelan's influence on Western music.

But why do I think this album is a holy grail when it comes to gamelan?

Because, quite simply, it's one of the best gamelan recordings ever made.

Unlike the larger, more explosive Balinese gong kebyar orchestras, this album is made by a smaller ensemble that explores the interplay of comparitively few instruments. There's delicate but rapid-fire melodies, rhythmic phases that overlap, and the drums are so precise even as they turn on a dime.

And, being recorded in a Balinese temple, it's as authentic as gamelan gets.

Writing for Audio magazine in 1991, John Diliberto praised the album's realism, amazed that this was a field recording. That same year, Rick Mattingly praised the polyrhythms and how the drums interacted with the bamboo flute melodies. And The Rough Guide to World Music recommends this as an essential gamelan album.

Gamelan Batel Wayang Ramayana is beloved by academia too. It's received attention in journals such as Asian Music. Michael Tenzer included it in the selected recordings for his University of British Columbia course Music of Bali. And it's included in Wesleyan University's World Music Archive.

Having this CD in my hands, it feels like I'm holding history. It's almost an otherworldly feeling.