It has been a while since I have written anything on here that I have really been happy with. The end of 2006 was pretty full on for me personally and I found myself becoming distant from my normal activties and just submerging myself in mostly folk records to sooth my fragile mind. It is amazing how healing this music can be for the soul when your mind/heart aches...
I had one of most amazing musical/listening experiences with my girlfriend Carla at the start of this year. I had bought Carla the new Joanna Newsom album on vinyl for Christmas and although Carla didn't own a record player at the time (that soon changed, he he) I knew it had to be bought and held in the hands to fully appreciate the sound and beauty of such a special album. Shortly after receiving this gift Carla came over to my house one late afternoon, and as I opened the front door she was holding the record in her excited hands with a massive smile on her face....
That afternoon/evening we sat on the floor in my room, hardly speaking a word to eachother. As the sun went down we just listened to the record from start to finish, clutching the record sleeve between us and reading the lyrics on the pages as the songs played. For a while time stood still and we were lost in the richness of the sounds that poured into our ears. When the needle finally stopped on the last song it was dark outside and Carla an I just sat there smiling at each other knowing we had just experienced something truely special....
After that night I thought to myself "this is how I want to listen to music more often!"... just to set some time aside in the day/night when Im not doing anything else but giving my whole attention to the music I am listening to. To turn off my phone and the computer, close the door and just play a album from start to finish on my record player without being distracted from the world around me. I think, for me personally, sometimes music can just become the soundtrack to my life, I listen to so much of it that it just becomes part of the backgound for my day to day activites, almost like becoming sonic wallpaper that just exists in each room I walk into.
So since the starting of this year I have decided to buy less, and not more, music. I want to try and give more time for each album I purchase and listen to it in the most purest way possible... and for me I find this experience to be most true when I listen to music on vinyl. It really is the closest possible way to hearing music a artist creates as it was intended and sounded when he/she plucked their guitar or sung a word from their lips. Buying and playing a album on record is such a physical experience, from the moment you open the record sleeve to placing the needle on the groove and hearing the sounds that come from it, it makes you become involved in the listening process in the most human way possible. It is a truely grounding and beautiful experience that everyone should experience at least once in their lifetime.
Funnily enough after having this revelation I came across a interview a few weeks later with Joanna Newsom, in Arthur Magazine, that really cemented my feelings about listening to music this way. Read on...
On listening to music;
Newsom learned a lot about listening to music from her boyfriend Bill, for whom vinyl recordings are as much an invitation as a storage medium. “The way he listens to music is one of the most endearing and sweet things I’ve ever seen,” she says, taking a sip of her beer. “He takes off his shoes, sets them down and gets comfortable. He kneels or sits in front of the record player, lifts the cover, reverently chooses a record, puts it on, closes the cover and just listens, start to finish. Whenever I go to see him and we listen to music like that, I register in myself how much better it feels than other ways of listening, which are like rushing to eat a meal because you’re super-hungry. You need to eat, just like you need to listen to music, but it never feels good if you do it like that. So I am trying to set my life up in a way where I don’t have to listen to music anyway other than putting on a record and sitting and listening.”On Analog;
The hoary debate over analog vs. digital recording usually grinds through its fated moves over issues of technical fidelity and sensual perceptions like “warmth” and “sharpness.” But the wrangle also has a more intangible dimension, one that’s emotional, cultural, almost metaphysical. Analog and digital aren’t just different ways of handling sound – they are different metaphors about how we mirror and model the world. The term analog comes from analogy—the undulating grooves on your vinyl LP (and, more complexly, the magnetic fields captured and reproduced by the metal filings on magnetic tape) are very much like the material undulations of sound waves in the air. Digital comes from digit: an abstract numerical representation of a single slice of flowing sound, sampled at such a rate as to closely approximate a continuous wave. Analog hugs more tightly to the ways of the earth, with its flows and inevitable physical decay. Digital, which hypes the eternal life of the perfect copy, tends to dematerialize and disincarnate—just compare an MP3 or DJ software to an old 78 or a pedal harp. Faced with the dominant empire of the digital, some people don’t just choose to make or listen to more analog recordings. They choose to live more analog lives.
Full interview over at
Arthur Magazine with Joanna
here.
