I came across My Analog Journal through an associate of the editor’s and I. The mixes move between styles seamlessly, and the quality of his taste in music is matched only by the mind-numbing access to vinyl you could never find yourself (or ever know the value of it if you did). Here's a set at the top of my list:

I take a simple approach to these sets—if it grabs me, I willingly fall down rabbit holes of the respective artists (for instance, Nubya Garcia is a gem). I search out his or her work, listen to clips until I'm swayed to purchase an album or two, and then enjoy straight through. The album remains for me the complete form of a musical artist’s expression. A song rent from its album is like a character ripped from their story.

But this is the majority of what we engage: curated or personalized feeds and playlists, cut and spliced from the overwhelming quantity of content available to us. The DJ is properly venerated as curation evolves into the most valuable art of our age. Entire genres of music are built on the quality an individual DJ can bring to composing pieces sampled or plundered from other sources.

More than once I drifted off to this My Analog Journal set, laid back on a blanket in the summer grass, listening to funk from urban Japan in the 1980s and thinking about the blue sky we all share:

Ironically, the first track of this set is Tatsuro Yamashita’s “Sparkle,” which is sampled by future-funk artist Engelwood on his album Pastel Beach, which I recall the editor visited on the terminal post.

And so, I’ve ostensibly curated for you two music sets by a superb vinyl curator from the UK, who happens to highlight 1980’s japanese funk which was sampled by a Wisconsin artist who was reviewed on the terminal post.

It's curious how momentous a role “curation” plays in our present day. We find curation in the places we least expect it, but how do we decide to who we trust to be a curator? And oh—are journalists simple curators of facts?

That's something to think about.

Maybe I’ll write an essay on it.