By the Time You’ve Finished Reading This Post, You Could Have Listened to At Least Half of Short Music for Even Shorter Attention Spans
Could I put on my English professor hat and draw comparisons between the songs on Short Music for Even Shorter Attention Spans and the incredibly compressed language of Ezra Pound’s poetry? Sure I could. But I won’t because then I’d be going on for far longer than any of the songs on the collection. Instead, I’ll just give you the facts:
As a kid, Mike Huff of Bees! was smitten with a Fat Wreck compilation of punk songs called Short Music for Short People. With that compilation in mind, he and the other fellas in Bees! started kicking around the idea of recording some 30-second songs for their next album. It turns out, however, that writing and recording short songs can take just as much time and effort as recording long songs. Just ask Ezra Pound.
Then Mike started talking to Greg Kane of Unlucky Mammals at a gig. Greg was into the idea, and it occurred to Mike that putting together a compilation of 30-second songs would be a lot less work than recording a full album of them. So he put the wheels into motion.
The result is a surprisingly wide-ranging collection of tunes that runs to about eight-and-a-half minutes in length. Here’s the lineup: Andrew Mann, Bees!, Danvers, Fataday Korngor, Hello Whirled, If You//Say So, Joshua Curry, Kai Rush, Monda, Party Nerves, Scoopski, Scoot Hennessy, The Daylight Savings and Loan, The Mack Brothers, Unlucky Mammals, and Voodoo Planet. Full disclosure: I’m on there too.
Perhaps Scoopski captures the spirit of the compilation best in the first line of his tune, “30 Seconds (I Love You)”: “What can I say in thirty seconds to get it through your head?”
If you want to know the answer, check the compilation out on Bandcamp where it’s available as a free download.