How John Olson of Wolf Eyes listens to music

The man behind American Tapes on scheduling listening to avoid burn out.

From indie venue OCCII (circa 2015):

I have a schedule for listening to music — I only listen to one style a day. I kind of isolate myself for one style rather than just listening to a bunch of stuff on random. That way I feel I get more out of the music. So Mondays are reggae days, Tuesday is usually jazz or German stuff, Wednesday is usually Indian music, Thursdays I just listen to organ music or classical music, and Fridays is metal, Saturday is sometimes Velvet Underground and then some more metal, and Sunday is DJ Screw day.

How did that start?
Well, I’m a really insane record fan. So I would listen to the one thing, and just get completely obsessive over it, for weeks on end, and I would get burnt out of it, which I thought was a waste. So changing it up every day gives a jump start — it’s shock therapy for my brains — so that I’m starting from scratch everyday. And every day when I return to a certain style — like every reggae on Monday — I find something new. I feel like I’m getting more out of the music this way.

I do a weird version of this where I only listen to handful of records at once for days. Truthfully it’s a productivity method so I only listen to things that I’m working with in some way (releasing, promoting or reviewing [which is really just the act of trying to understand what I’m listening to] so right now I’m only listening to Abilene (releasing), Cages (promoting), the new Human Impact and Skream (both reviewing). I find that this allows me to listen deeper and also that it puts pressure on me to get something done so that I can stop listening to it. As an example I probably listened to my Sorts mix 40 times between mid-December and March 1st when I posted it. I definitely absorbed it but also felt like “Dear god, I need to finish this post so I can take a break from this”.

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*I made some minor edits to make this more concise

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