Collection: Staff Picks: Scott

Music doesn't have a single role in our lives. We use it to relax, to get hyped, to experience catharsis, to connect with others, to dance, to transcend our existential woes, to revel in beautiful sonic structures, to empower, to enhance film and television, and to discover the world around us. Music can reflect our current mood or the entire interior landscape of our minds. Sometimes it's an enhanced delivery method for connecting to lyrics that resonate with us. Sometimes the focus is on the exploration of pure texture. Music is a four dimensional time machine. It's a temporal art form that can bring us back in time to a vivid moment associated with the music. We can also experience a captured moment of human excellence that happened before we were born or on the other side of the Earth. Music feeds and defines both the interpersonal and wider social spheres. From long traditions to avant garde movements and pop culture fads, it is often identity-defining and community building. It transmits cultural information and the values of those who make and listen to it. There's a tribal nature in the way so many of us associate with specific music movements, time periods, or subcultures. Music, like literature, is not built in a vacuum, but deeply dependent on existing structures of meaning, from the scope of a basic scale or simple rhythm to the meta levels of intertextuality and the semiotics of sound. In music I appreciate eclecticism and deep focus equally. This collection is populated with a small number of albums that represent defining moments in my journey. Among the countless recordings that I've enjoyed over the years, these are special in one way or another. All genres with an emphasis on the raw, the boundary pushing, the sonically rich, the honest, the abstract, and the ineffable. - Scott Boutin

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