365 Days Project

This particular blog has been defunct for 15 years now. I've decided to revive it for this project. The 365 Days Project was originally a collaborative effort of music shared via WFMU and their respective blog. Their original write-up for what they were doing is as follows:

"Some words to describe the material featured would be... Celebrity, Children, Demonstration, Indigenous, Industrial, Outsider, Song-Poem, Ventriloquism, and on and on and on. The best thing to do is simply listen."

They eventually had over 200 contributors sharing curios from their collections and would post an mp3 daily of music taken off scratchy records, warbly cassettes, old TV specials, CDs or songs and audio that lay hidden of credit from old file sharing sites.

I tried my hand, maybe 20 years ago, at doing my own version of the 365 Days Project, with maybe a handful of collaborators, and gave up after a month or so. I've decided this time around, as my collection has grown insurmountably over the past two decades, to start the ball rolling on my own, and to open the floor to anyone else who wants to join in as the project progresses. Part of the fun of what made the WFMU original 2003 project so entertaining was reading the comments left under each post. Sometimes they were hilarious commentary, or nostalgic reminiscing, or collecting sleuths who offered more insight than the original collaborator had to offer... it was communal. I hope to have a little of that magic here.

I found out a few months ago, that WFMU's "Beware of the Blog" had finally turned from the ghost town it was (they closed down any new posting in 2015) to dust (scrapped from the internet.)

I cannot express how formative it was to who I am today. What listening to Dr. Demento did for my preteen years in the 90s, WFMU did for my teenage years in the aughts, and their blog specifically had opened my eyes to worlds that felt very niche to me as a person. It was something I had discovered on my own. It felt special.

It put me in touch with collectors, it gave me a shortlist of things to seek out and gave a treasure trove of recommendations blogs, websites, events and overall... culture. It was the epitome of cool. No gatekeeping. Just a crash course on Eclecticist 101.

It was something I had used for reference and cross-referencing for many, many, MANY years, and even after many of the links had stopped working, it was still a proverbial Whitman's Sampler of arcana.

So, to come back around before I trail off and make this more long-winded than it already is, WFMU's original 365 Days Project had been an obsession for me in high school, like a year-long advent calendar of musical curios to unwrap daily. They would revive the project again for a second year when I was 21 and steered my record collecting course throughout my 20s.

Hopefully this answers a bit of the magic I hope to capture this year.