So I've been re-organizing my blackbox and it's taking a while. I kid you not, I had 200 or so artists that I've added recently that I had to go back and listen to in order to put them in the right places. Upon doing so I quickly realized that my organization scheme needed revisiting. Originally I organized music roughly into genres, but paid more attention to mood than anything. I might have put most of the Tortoise-esque stuff into the "quietude" [listen to it | add to your blackbox] folder -- one I listen to when I feel like being pensive or maybe just for when I'm sulking, but by no means did that limit me from putting in Manishevitz or Various Artists - Nordisk SangIt's less about cataloging my taste so that I can find a band again and more about compiling music that will make for good listening in a group.

But it became apparent that I was missing something as I added these new artists. I had trouble organizing everything and quickly found that I was putting music into the "quiet rock" [listen | add] folder as a dumping ground for rock-ish music that was mostly non-percussive. Also, my "grls+gtrs" [listen | add] folder, which is mostly for acoustic female artists might have something that really could fit in both the "quiet rock" [listen | add] folder as well. The "rawk" [listen | add] folder -- which mostly housed music, that for lack of a better term, "rawks" had both hard punk-ish music and poppy stuff and had around 60 or so artists in it (I prefer to have more like 30 or so). I created a "rocketpop!" [listen | add] folder (which has mostly super-happy-poppy stuff like Spoon or Badly Drawn Boy] which divided it nicely (there's an "electropop!" [listen | add] folder now, too), but didn't solve the problem of artists that overlap more than one folder. There was nothing to be done but add these artists to my inbox again and then move the (duplicate) song into the right folder (note to self: create "copy to" option in blackbox).

I'm quite happy with how it's working now. I've got about 25 different folders each with around 10 to 35 songs and they're a pleasure to listen to. Below is a portion of one of the new ones, "space beats" -- just listen, you'll get the idea. I only included some of them here because I didn't want to put 30 artists on the page -- it would be too huge for anyone to view. If you want to, listen to the entire folder or add it to your own blackbox.