This week I started my end-of-year clear out of my apartment.
It’s a routine I got into a couple of years ago.
Getting rid of surplus stuff, selling, gifting, dumping. Surprising just how much stuff you can eliminate when you put your mind to it.
Appliances, clothes, shoes, books. Books especially I enjoy disposing of. They’re as heavy as bricks and I can’t see the point of having them take up space once you’re read them. If you’re sure you’re not going to read them again, why not get rid of them. Sell your books on Amazon if they’re in demand, otherwise give them away or recycle.
I find it helps to free up your mind as well as your living space when you get rid of stuff. Reduces the clutter and simplifies your life.
This year I’ve decided to go a step further and get rid of all my audio CDs and also my DVDs. I’ve just invested in a 2 Terabyte external hard drive. I know from personal experience that external hard drives aren’t infallible, in fact I’ve had a couple fail on me in the past.
Ideally you should invest in a RAID drive system. That’s a hard drive storage unit with more than one drive, so that in the event that one drive fails, you have a copy of your data on another, but they’re much more pricier as a result. There aren’t many of them around on the market either for the consumer sector. That could be a good niche to get into – RAID systems for the consumer market!
Anyway, external hard drives still work out much cheaper than buying DVDs and all the faffing around and time spent writing them. So I now just have the external drive – and no more DVDs or CDs. I’m getting rid of the whole lot, together with the DVD player.
Amongst my collection I found some old techno CDs from the Berlin Love Parade. I used to live in Berlin and the Love Parade was an annual music festival held on the streets of central Berlin back in those days. I went to the Berlin Love Parades in the late 90s and early 2000s. That was the best time of all for the Love Parade in my opinion both music and atmosphere.
In later years the festival was held in other cities in Germany. Sadly the Love Parade came to an end in tragic circumstances when a number of people were crushed to death in the heavy crowds (reaching over 1 million attendees at it’s peak).
So I couldnt’t resist giving my official Berlin Love Parade CD sets a final listening to one last time before finally saying goodbye to them.
Here are a couple of my favourite tracks from the 2001 Love Parade. I don’t know whether they are your kind of music, but anyway, here they are. Some great German techno.
The memories come flooding back…
Commercial Breakup – Bizarre Love Triangle mixed by Lexy and K-Paul
The Nightfly by Blank and Jones. Remember being in the centre of Berlin when this came on, it was greeted with a massive roar of appreciation from the crowd…
and Sonnendeck by Peterlicht (sun deck)
The words “wenn ich nicht hier bin, bin ich auf den Sonnendeck” mean “If I’m not here, then I’m on the sun deck”). Cute video about a rebel office stool and a pot plant who quit the office (like me!)…
The Bizarre Love Triangle remix by Lexy and K-Paul was derived from this version by Commercial Breakup:
- which was in turn based on the original more discordant version by the post-Punk band New Order (for me, one of England’s greatest ever indie bands) in 1986:
Bizarre Love Triangle by New Order, 1986:
and here they are again some 20 years later performing the same song. I love Barney’s dance…
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Written by kevin
Topics: Kev's Diary