/ about

well, hc-punx blogspot was for over 10 years one of my loving projects i was into and spent time and effort on, while it was also just my passion for punk music and letting others know - hey, look at this awesome band. it was always an icebreaker when meeting other people who knew about my blog and also liked punk, to talk about some posts and it was always a “hey, you should also check out this band” and i didn’t know about it, and 2 days later i added it to hc-punx

in the past years

things slightly shifted, like… just, that’s life and there was not that much effort put into the blog anymore

recently i noticed - it’s been really long since i discovered new music, like i used to.

this feeling

of discovering music in this way was just lost. over the past years i used more and more spotify and let them handle the exploration of new music, that was at the beginning a very nice feeling, just a completely different way, the algorithmic way. but to be honest, i’m done with this

ai slop, funding arms companies and not paying a single penny to the real musicians who make music with passion. i don’t want to support this anymore.

i want this old experience back

it was this feeling i like, when you discover a new band and over discogs you see that the guitarist also plays in this other band, and that one, and so on. non-algorithm exploration. that’s what i want.

at this point i cancelled my spotify subscription and set up my own music server. something i was dreaming about when i was 13, that i can hear my mixtapes everywhere i am without having to take care of them and share them with others without missing them myself.

in the past it was not possible to do so, but today it’s just a couple lines of code away from you. spinning up a navidrome server, linking my music folder to it and finding symfonium - the music player for android that is what spotify needs to be.

in symfonium you can customize the app the way you need it without missing any features.

the winamp+vlc melted into one app. the feature complete music player.

the same idea for the blog…

so i ended up with the will to start the blog again, but this time independent - not the google blog engine, not google drive storage.

all together here on my own hardware with my own static html blog engine.

ok i didn’t build the blog engine, but the software is open source and that matters.

from today i don’t think i’ll import all the old stuff, maybe there are some duplicates, but i’ll just start from scratch here

A note on music and purpose

all music on this blog streams at 128kbps - perfectly fine for listening on the go. but this blog exists for one reason: promotion and passion.

punk music deserves to be heard. i played in punk bands for years and i know first-hand the effort, time, and heart that goes into recording.

there is something genuinely special about someone holding a physical copy of music you made with your band.

so use this blog as a starting point - explore, discover new bands, get inspired.

and when something hits you:

buy the record, buy the merch, support the artists.