creative zen's 'zenternet browsing' mix, and MTV2 reminiscing

Long time no see, friends. Hope you're all doing well! Since releasing the follow up to creative zen's touch entitled micro (which you can find here), I'd been thinking about doing a fun mix of y2k, frutiger-related tracks I've found in the last year, and I made it happen. I guess this counts as a brief commercial break "exclusive", LOL 

creative zen - zenternet browsing

"songs i've scrobbled in the last few months"

1. ax14 - Morning dew
2. 486 Paradise - MediaCenter
3. Dreaming Diary - JPEG Flowers
4. General Translator - 歓迎Plasma Lounge
5. chlorophyll - escalator dreams
6. HANAWARI YUMEKO - 世界間のつながり
7. TCR-4 - pay-per-view menu
8. post dive - Dreamcore
9. Brickmason - s e t . a l a r m . 0 6 : 3 0
10. alyzea - dream OS
11. enterprises - lukes birthday party.jpg
12. frutiger pm - frutiger pm
13. Aero Corp - ! ! motivating forces ! !
14. STAQQ OVERFLO - natural logon (3)
15. Agnar - MP3 for Humanity
16. Satin Sheets - OPUS
17. 世纪重塑 - 数字花园Digital Garden
18. climbing waterfalls - condensation room
19. Ghost Enterprise - Deep Web Dance Club
20. Your Bestest Friend :) - FOREVER CONNECTED
21. INTERNET CLUB - MAPMAKER
22. Mr. Roy G Biv - Goodnight

Click here to download the mix.

Kind of related, but I've been thinking back to 2001-2002, the days when my high school bestie's mom would pet sit for a friend of hers who was pretty well off. Their house blew my mind as a person who lived in a pretty dilapidated house as a child. Three floors, a beautiful backyard, and most significantly, a fully furnished basement with a TV, two couches, and a fancy office with two Compaq computers. That basement became our palace. I watched as my bestie, J, flirted with randos in Yahoo Messenger chat rooms who would send her bouquet emotes, and we searched through the family's folders for photos we could edit on Paint Shop Pro; thankfully they were mostly family photos and stock images, nothing too crazy. We watched Homestar Runner videos and went to random flash sites, hoping that we wouldn't infect the family's computers and get ourselves banned from using their PCs ever again. I have a specific memory of watching the banned version of Incubus' Wish You Were Here (in a freshly post-9/11 world, the visual of the members jumping off of a bridge could evoke memories of people jumping out of the towers, so Incubus redid the video with footage from the Morning View house instead), an .rm file that was pixelated to all hell, my stan flag flying with pride. But that's not the point of this tangent. 

This family could afford to have satellite TV.

This family had MTV2. 

I'd heard about MTV2, but us poors with normal cable (saying this tongue-in-cheek, of course) didn't get MTV2 until, like...2004, 2005ish? When more TV shows were taking over the channel, and it wasn't as focused on music as I saw it in 2001. 2001 MTV2 blew my fucking mind, and we basically kept it on in the background at all times, but I most of all cherished sitting on the couch, glued to the screen, watching MTV2's Control Freak. Looking back, why did we never use the computer to vote for our favorites? Maybe I was too mesmerized? Maybe J didn't want to use her email? I know I didn't have an email at that time, this was just before I got a computer of my own. Maybe we were too young to register an account and were too goody goody to lie? (Well, idk about that, I feel like J lied about her age for lols in those Yahoo Messenger chats) But the main reason why I fell in love with that channel was because MTV2 was digging deeper than main MTV was. They were showing videos by more underground artists, videos of various genres beyond what was popular at the time. It was truly my exposure to electronic music. The excitement I felt is something I'll never forget.

VHS rips of that show seem to be few and far between, possibly because of copyright, possibly because the tapes got tossed into a dump before somebody could preserve them 10-20 years later. I did find a brief rip of a Control Freak recording, courtesy of a private VHS-related torrent site that I'm thankful still exists (sadly, they closed off invites around the time I disappeared in 2016). I hope one day, somebody comes through with the ultimate jackpot so I can fully go down the rabbit hole, explore what I wish I could have witnessed for longer than a few hours every few weeks or months. 

Anywho, videos I fondly remember from my brief love affair with MTV2:
Nikka Costa - Like A Feather
Gorillaz - Clint Eastwood
The White Stripes - Fell In Love With A Girl
Daft Punk - One More Time
Alicia Keys - Fallin'
Lil' Mo - Superwoman (feat. Fabolous)
Basement Jaxx - Where's Your Head At
Moby - Natural Blues
Cake - Short Skirt/Long Jacket
The Chemical Brothers - Let Forever Be

Glad I got to experience that time while I could.

Hopefully another post soon with things I've liked lately. For now, take care!

creative zen - touch

 

A loving tribute to mp3 players, which is exactly right up my alley. As many of you know (or maybe have noticed some in my previous blog posts), I have been in full blown mp3 player nostalgia mode for the last few months, reminiscing on how mp3 players have been such an essential part of my music listening history. The same mp3 player I referenced in my Video 2000 post was the same player I was using to fall in love with Vektroid's Telnet Erotika back in early 2011, my go-to album when I was doing everybody's dishes (well, I should revise this: it was either Telnet Erotika or some sort of kindasorta jangly shoegaze album playing), and that same mp3 player was used a year later during my daily walks around the park near my house, listening to things like Seahawks' Tramadol Beach, Outlands' Com Ocean, Whitewoods' Beach Walk, and some of the early pre-coined vaporwave albums. It eventually became flooded with future Fortune 500 releases, and that park was where I first thought of The Music of the Now Age, and I wondered "Will artists even actually send me tracks? I hope so."

But with this album being based in 2005, the year the Creative Zen Touch was brought into the world, let's really go back in time here to my first mp3 player which looked a lot like this (but navy). It was given to me by my bestie's cousin after he'd stolen it from a Big Lots. He had very large Tripp pants, and he had a history of seeing just how much he could successfully smuggle into those pants in one go. My friends and I watched him leave with 50 manga titles from a Books-A-Million once, seeing if he could actually pull it off (still insane that he did, as the bulky pockets of his pants made it stupidly obvious), and we were keeled over laughing in the corner of a cookbook aisle. 

One night, we met a new group of friends at Books-A-Million, and after the store closed, we chose to drive over to the park that was about five or so minutes away. It was a small car, and there were nine of us. The mp3 player-stealing cousin voluntarily chose the trunk, where he and another trunk friend loudly sang Gorillaz' Clint Eastwood to the rest of us up front who were crammed in and sitting in each others' laps, giggling like a bunch of hyenas. One of my friends fell in love with a girl from the group we'd met that night, and they later had a child or two. I always thought that was cute, looking back. 

I'm getting way way way into tangent mode, whoops. All of that to say: the mp3 player that my bestie's cousin grabbed for me has also been linked to many fond memories of my later high school years, finally getting through a very rough depression, developing friendships, and finally ungluing myself from my computer and going out for a change. Cherry Cola by Eagles of Death Metal is forever affiliated with swinging on a swing set behind a Salvation Army gym my class had gone to on a field trip. Alala by Cansei de Ser Sexy will always be linked to me flipping through music trivia books and biographies at Books-A-Million, hoping that music wasn't leaking out through my headphones too badly. Cowbell by Tapes 'n Tapes was never taken out of mp3 player rotation, as that was my go-to cheering up anthem. That will forever be tied to dancing in my bestie's kitchen, the song blaring on her mom's computer. 

Other songs on my mp3 player:

Beck - Scarecrow

Tom Vek - If You Want

Deftones - Knife Prty

The Zutons - Valerie

People in Planes - If You Talk Too Much (My Head Will Explode)

The Thermals - A Stare Like Yours

With only 128MB of storage space on it, I made it work. I think I had 16-18 tracks at most on that thing. It felt like a mixtape I could always have on me, something that didn't require some sort of accompanying player, something I could just immediately fire up and have playing when I needed it. Now, I look at it as a fond time capsule. A 20 year old time capsule. What the fuck.

Enjoy an ode to the impact of mp3 players on many of us in the mid-2000s, and how mp3 players always had an assortment of random songs preloaded upon booting it up for the first time, and think about how these ringtone-y songs have a way of sending someone back in time. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going into my Razr's ringtone settings to make cost of comfort my alarm. 

Download the album at the link below:

https://creative-zen.bandcamp.com/album/touch

Also, new post coming sooner versus later with some cool albums to check out. Talk again soon!