Forever Looking For a Place to Be

Suzanne Ciani—The Seventh Wave (Sailing Away) ( 1982 / Electronic New Age)

Hello internet pals of music. Today we’re reflecting on movement and “collecting” with an electronic music pioneer.

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He wasn’t a collector, he just had things.

Some of those things he had been lugging along through a variety of lives, and if he were to look at all of his things all at once, he would recognize many versions of himself that seemed to have existed congruently, but not simultaneously.

Like a series of self portraits. A parade of selves. Across two countries, across three cities, across a million lifetimes.

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When someone has no grounding of home, they can come and go, and they get to hold onto a fluidity of identity. In that sense, they’re protected from the world: less rigid, less vulnerable, less knowable. But a collection of things of taste…it betrays the defenses.

Within a small room he had a room full of interests, passions, brief obsessions—the physical examples of a curious and scattered brain. Who would he leave it to? Who would want it? A storage space as liminal self.

The value of a collection isn’t measured in money, it’s measured in memory. A collection isn’t about the things collected, it’s about the person that collected them.

Can you get that sense from looking through someone’s digital library? Someone’s streaming account?

He wasn’t a collector, but he had things, curious interesting things.

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