Things I’ve Learned From Writing a Music Blog for Seven Years

Thinking about it now makes me retch but it does echo what I thought Sonic Masala was hoping to become - a presentation of my personal experiences with music and how it made me feel. Thankfully it didn't take long for my focus to change, and the "voice" of Sonic Masala solidified as my interests and predilection for the outliers, the noiseniks, the fucked-up and the ambient from a global perspective really took hold. Some acts contacted me as rank nobodies - Forest Swords, Amen Dunes, US Girls, Civil Civic, Pontiak, Mai Mai Mai, Ensemble Economique, etc - and to see them celebrated in far wider circles still blows my mind - I listened to demos of theirs on cheap-arse USBs.

Jump forward to 2017 and it's been quite a while since I've updated the blog. This isn't the first time there's been an extended hiatus, but it has become more and more frequent over the past year.

Blogs, like music venues, can be fickle beasts. I remember how bummed I was when long running Australian website Mess + Noise froze up, then died an ugly death. Other blogs of import, especially Crawlspace, stuttered and seized. Of blogs listed on the side of the Sonic Masala page, over half are now defunct. Many were simply unable to diversify or to be financially viable. Some couldn't stay up to speed with the frightening amount of new music that is released, or able to shoulder the burden of seemingly thankless hours tapping away and shooting off into the ether pieces that no one might read or acknowledge. I should know - I have hit all of these roadblocks.

Writing a music blog is stupidly easy to start but a difficult beast to maintain. But when Sonic Masala was conceived back in the heady days of 2010 I was living a different life as a teacher on a holiday visa in Britain. But teaching was a mere backdrop and money spinner for all the other shit that was worth my time. Seeing live music was a weekly event (often twice or three times) and it was ridiculously cheap. Drinking was cheap. Drugs…well, they have always managed to push the limits of what you could spend, but you always made (and make) it work.

The idea for Sonic Masala was born over a 3am curry in a Somerset chalet. It was December 2009 during 'A Nightmare Before Christmas', a festival curated by My Bloody Valentine as part of All Tomorrows Parties.The lineup was insane – MBV, Sonic Youth, Lightning Bolt, Swervedriver, Dirty Three, Fucked Up, The Pastels, Lilys, Television Personalities, No Age, Robin Guthrie…and they were the ones I remember.

At the end of the night, after stumbling through a crowd, I arrived back at my room on multiple highs, to fire up the stove to cook a vat of curry that involved beer and God knows what else. Brisbane band Turnpike's Humans Find Patterns LP, was playing on the stereo and during the opening gambit of "Do The Broken" the excitement became too much. It was a no brainer really. I looked at these people in the room, all grinning and gurning, I looked at fellow chef Paul, and said, "We see and talk about music all the fucking time, why not write about it?"

I didn't know what the blog was going to be about though, not really. Paul is a graphic designer so although we did (and I still do, because I am lazy) use Blogger, it had a sort-of polished sheen. At first it was loose. We wrote about music we liked. Most posts were small and concise, while we had longer "themed" articles about albums that have influenced us, called 'When The Glove Fits'. Ani came on board and brought some more electronic coverage to the mix.

I moved back to Australia in 2011, and while Paul and Ani's interest waned, mine continued to rise.

The thing is – writing a blog weighs you down.

After seven years, the perks were great (meeting lifelong musical heroes, getting quoted in their press releases, thanked in their press liners, connections in other cities around the world – and free music and other paraphernalia, of course). But it pays no money. Literally NO FUCKING MONEY. Sure, I wasn't smart about it. Nathan (from Brisbane band Tape/Off and the other half of Sonic Masala Records) came on board, and had the occasional write up from friends, but it was still mostly me. Having others on board to lend a hand or to sound things off of is a huge benefit. I became obsessed with getting a couple posts out a day, minimum. The emails pile up.

I would trawl once and delete from the subject heading alone; then another trawl, taking cursory listens then discarding; then replying to those I liked, and dumping in an overflowing folder that I could never get through. It was an obligation to all of these bands to mention them, and the quality of writing would intermittently suffer. It took hours of my life, every day. At one stage my unread email had peaked at 9000.

And I had no idea how to make it profitable without bringing other people in, or posting banners for fucking Pitbull, so I turned away. Deals with the likes of Drag City to help bolster finances fell through. I ploughed my lonely furrow, unsure who was reading, or who cared. I'd often feel like a guillotine was hanging over my head if I didn't stay ahead of the curve, keep my output constant, reach the desired quota of hits per day. It can eat into your social life. Work does that too, but you get paid to do that, regardless of how shit it may be; so the burden would build resentment. To reach your own set targets you might rush posts, write stuff that is utter hot garbage, just so you are lowering the inbox quotient. All of this is ridiculous, of course, but it is so easy to get swamped by the deluge of emails and expectations.

It started to become too much work. So the love affair started to wane. Other shit got in the way. I moved back to the UK in 2014 and after a while of scrounging for jobs, travelling three hours round trip for that job and trying to find time in between to relax and be with my wife, I started to feel guilty about how much time I was spending on writing for the blog, something that was beginning to feel more like a vanity project.

I also used it as an excuse to not do other things. My other writing projects would sometimes take a hit because I would smash out some posts for Sonic Masala as a procrastination technique. "Oh I can't do such-and-such or meet this deadline today, because I have a post about some obscure noise collective I just need to write." That doubled down on the guilt factor.

Plus, who has time to listen to random bytes of music without some monetary recourse? It gets tiring not immersing yourself in something for a while and letting it seep in; blog-oriented music is of the here and now; what happened last week may as well never have happened. It's relentless, and can almost feel like an unreality – where most people sit down and enjoy music, I was starting to endure it.

Finally – does anyone even give a shit? Most of the emails are from PR robots, or are from artists spamming every music outlet they can find without having ever read anything you have put out. Being a small music blog, I was happy to keep traffic floating above one thousand hits a day.

Writing a music blog can be merciless, fickle, and lonely.

So I stopped.