EDIT: whoops, this was already posted here -- sorry BorgoPo, I relied on the hubski url filter to my detriment.

hubski metalheads, I'd tag you if I knew who I was talking to. I'm not one myself but I definitely identify with the below. You?

While this abundance has fulfilled my metal dreams, it has been accompanied by a strange sense of deflation. To some extent this is because dreams fulfilled are almost always disappointing. There are also good reasons why abundance does not necessarily satisfy. The ease of finding what was once obscure takes away the pleasures of anticipation, of discovery, of searching things out. The fact that metal music is no longer found exclusively in physical media removes much of that precious ‘aura’1 that can accompany physical art objects. Demo tapes were exciting and mysterious objects because one had to ‘work’ to track them down. In the 1990s, I remember hearing rumours that there was a Pakistani metal band who had released a demo, something that seemed impossibly obscure and exotic at the time. I tried and failed to track down their tape, but I did track down others from faraway metal lands like the Phillipines and Peru and there was always a delightful frisson when tapes from distant lands finally arrived in the mail. Today, there isn’t much frisson to googling something and finding it. Stripped of the aura, rare and obscure metal recordings become much more mundane.