06
The Emotional Archive
Every play logged, timestamped, stored. The system has no access to context and no knowledge of who was in the room, what the week cost, or what the song was being used for. Just the fact of it: on this date, this track ran.
Annotated weekly timeline
The silences
There are weeks in the data where the play count drops to near zero. A handful cluster into stretches long enough to register — three weeks in Mozambique in July 2014, three weeks in June 2015, three weeks in Germany in August 2023.
I don't know what any of them were. I've looked at the dates. Nothing surfaces. Whatever happened in those weeks either wasn't significant enough to leave a trace, or was significant enough that memory closed around it. The data doesn't know which.
Ed's note: the silent parts could be me just playing songs in the car, or not having internet connection, or many other things. I am not sure and I don't think it matters much. The spikes are more interesting to me.
What the data does have: what came back after. After the August 2023 silence in Germany: Boards of Canada, The Bug, Portishead. A return in a darker register than the departure. After the 2015 Mozambique gap..straight back to Kanye.
January 2011
3 Jan 2011 – 17 Jan 2011
Mozambique · 2 wks silent
Listening resumed in the weeks immediately after and no single thread dominated.
July 2014
7 Jul 2014 – 28 Jul 2014
Mozambique · 3 wks silent
- Mixed rotation of hip-hop and local picks
- High counts without one dominant name
June 2015
8 Jun 2015 – 22 Jun 2015
Mozambique · 3 wks silent
- Kanye West forward
- Hip-hop-heavy weeks
September 2016
5 Sept 2016 – 12 Sept 2016
Kyoto · 2 wks silent
- Heavy return the week of 26 September
- ScHoolboy Q, Eminem, $uicideboy$ leading
- Darker register than August transit listening
August 2023
14 Aug 2023 – 4 Sept 2023
Berlin · 3 wks silent
- Boards of Canada
- The Bug
- Portishead
July 2024
15 Jul 2024 – 22 Jul 2024
Germany · 2 wks silent
Listening picked up again with no single story.
January 2025
27 Jan 2025 – 3 Feb 2025
Germany · 2 wks silent
Nothing of note.
May 2025
26 May 2025 – 2 Jun 2025
Germany · 2 wks silent
Listening resumed across the next fortnight - steady but scattered.
October 2025
20 Oct 2025 – 27 Oct 2025
Germany · 2 wks silent
Short gap; weekly totals normalized again afterward.
The arrival
September 5, 2016. Zero listens. The week I arrived in Japan — properly arrived, connected, settled enough to listen again — and then the music came back at volume. 794 plays in a single week with ScHoolboy Q, Eminem, and $uicideboy$ leading the return. It was shortly after Frank Ocean's Blonde was released...but it didn't hit me the same way Channel Orange did. It still doesn't.
The Avalanches and Childish Gambino had been running through August. Maybe that was the music of transit and anticipation? What came back in late September was heavier. New city, different register.
The week I can't explain
9 Nov 2020 · Japan
1,116
plays in seven days
Top artist: Bruce Faulconer
I have no memory of this.
November 9, 2020. Japan. 1,116 plays in seven days. Top artist: Bruce Faulconer, who is the composer of of the US dub of Dragon Ball Z.
I have no memory of this. I don't know what was happening that week. I don't know why seven days passed with almost nothing playing except AMV-core at that volume.
This is one of the things the archive produces if you look long enough: a fact about yourself that you can't account for. The data kept it, but the explanation went the way of the dodo.
The spikes
The highest-volume weeks cluster in Japan and Mozambique. Of the top twenty weeks by listen count, eighteen happened in one of those two places. Germany has produced almost none.
So what is this arhcive?
So what is this arhcive?
It isn't a diary. It doesn't record what was felt or why. It's just data and you no streaming platform coudl build a good enough recommendation engine for me. This is why I still go crate digging. Digitally and physically.
What accumulates across 17 years and 306,000 entries is something stranger than a diary. A record of where the mind went when it had nowhere it had to be. What was reached for at 2am, in the weeks after something happened, and in the weeks when nothing had.
The silences are in there too, as are the absences. Weeks where the count dropped to near zero. Kept as faithfully as anything else.
Some of them I remember. Some I don't. Both held without distinction. I ascribed meaning to all of this, because that's what humans do. We find patterns and meaning where there may be none.