Last night, after everyone and everything around me had retired for the evening, I did the same. I decided to fall asleep listening to music, a pastime I’ve been regretfully neglecting, as I tend to stay awake as long as possible – having found that these late hours are my most productive, and then crash swiftly and thoroughly.
Instead, tonight, I turned off all the lights, closed my curtains, turned on my phono preamp before I brushed my teeth to let the tubes warm up, and listened to a record as I fell asleep.
I was immediately taken with how much I enjoyed such a simple act: I loved everything about it. I loved the way my dusty old receiver’s bright pale yellow backlighting illuminated the furthest corner of my room, and the way that it’s glow caught a small edge of the record as it rotated. I loved the way the sound filled the room after I found the perfect volume and tone settings for the record I listened to. I listened to George Winston’s December; a record which is often overlooked, by an artist who is sometimes though of as elevator music – completely unfairly. That record is not earning me any Indie cred, but it did afford a very enjoyable listening experience. December was recorded directly to a 2-Track Studer tape machine. No digital process was used in any stage of it’s recording, mixing, or mastering phase: true analog, and I had forgotten how good it sounded on vinyl. The bass notes rang so clearly when George played them, reverberating through each corner of my room free to move as they pleased – no other noise but the occasional car passing on the street to compete with.
I was amazed at how easily I had forgotten why I love listening to music on this medium so much. Listening to a record is an aesthetic experience : feeling the vinyl, placing it perfectly on the mat, cueing the tone arm, dropping the needle, seeing the record spin, watching the meters on your reciever dance. It’s an experience that is completely lost in the cold and robotic act of playing an mp3. Find data, select data, click data twice, adjust speakers to an audible volume, and listen to degraded and compressed audio – so far from how the original recording was intended to be heard, as a series of 1’s and 0’s are decoded by a calculating machine that is protected safely inside a pretty plastic casing, so human eyes don’t have to watch it work.
Over time, music has been packaged more and more conveniently for consumption with little regard to the contents the packaging or the format held. The 8-track, the cassette, the compact disc, and finally the mp3: invisible, completely lifeless, taking up no matter, weightless, and without a physical appearance. I hate the mp3. I hate what it has done to music in that sense – not in the piracy killed the radio star sense, which I am completely on the other side of, as evidenced by my writing of an mp3 blog, but let us keep the discussion of how the RIAA would like to destroy the community music creates for another day – in the sense that there’s no soul to a series of invisible data which creates a soundwave. There’s no experience, just instant results. It got me thinking, if we don’t even have time to listen to music – an art comprised almost entirely of soul regardless of genre – why do we even listen?
Hard to Find a Friend will observe radio silence for the rest of the day in observance of this personal revelation. You’ll find no mp3’s at the end of this post, as that would completely defeat the purpose of my little essay. Perhaps the blog itself does, but I can’t send thousands of you pieces of vinyl a day, though I could if I would. I hope you listen to the music I post here on a day to day basis with the deepest attention you can muster. That’s why it’s there – for you to experience, and decide to love or hate. My hope is, and has always been, that this site would provide an opportunity for others to experience music which has moved me at some stage of my life, and subsequently support the artists who gave us both that exhilarating feeling. If I’m simply adding to the noise of your day with a series of weightless and matterless words (we’ll get to books later) then I sincerely apologize.
I encourage you to go buy some vinyl tonight at your local record store, and duplicate my experiment when you have the time. Your senses will thank you. Also, for more explanation of why I love records, read this post from a long time ago and the comments it brought (especially “Tyler”). I don’t hear people get that excited about how great their 256 kbps mp3’s sound.
David Bazan has announced some downright exciting news here, recently. You all should be well acquainted with my fondness for Dave’s music by now, (this site is named in honor of an album which he named after a Tom Petty song) and thus you can imagine I’m pretty excited about the prospects of David Bazan : Alone at the Mic, a DVD in which you can basically spend a few afternoons with David, watching him play songs (old and new) in his Home Studio, drive around Seattle in a Ford Bronco playing and singing (like a Minstrel), being interviewed on his front porch, and other things of a generally fun and personal level. Think of it as stalking someone, but with HD cameras.
Hard to Find a Friend - A Music Blog 