Reasoning why, you are, a presence still

A quivering fear, imagined as a flake

Of my mechanism of grind

Staying a drooped mouth, middle world

Stasis, ‘I wouldn’t do that’

GET...AWAY...FROM ME.

Why I listen to Records. Pt. 2. A Tragedy

One afternoon about 3 months ago when I was tidying and generally reshuffling my room I saw this thing in the corner, I poked it a bit, plugged it in and then put on a record and everything suddenly became new and clear – ‘like a diamond bullet’ ,the full melancholic potential, the reaching thing I had been looking for – the fusion of everything that had been left behind – the Overman of objects, the yea-saying thing. *

What I realised was that my record player housed the very thing that technology (science) tries to eradicate and makes it part of its very experience; I’m not insinuating that my turntable is somehow special, but it was the basis of my realisation.

So thus the three main reasons I listen to records are:

1.       Atmosphere

2.       Randomness

3.       Tactility

The main soul and spirit of the record lies in the atmosphere it creates which comes from that sly extra component, the very excess of the sound, the hiss, the cackle, the imperfection. This is the otherness, the danger, the threat of terror in the dark that rotates the experience from a pleasure into a bliss. 

The two co-exist together in a beautiful harmony and this is what makes playing records tragic and affirmative. Like a Greek tragedy death and life combined in an inevitable beautiful downfall. The very faults and flaws are part and parcel of the experience itself. The transient nature of the record, and it’s deteriorating quality, makes every listen more meaningful, like being embraced by a lover who each time is slowly slipping away, eventually leaving you with nothing but a trace of a wondrous memory.

The hiss and the crackle creates atmosphere, an intangible spatial re-arrangement, something the flaccid whirr of the CD or the pause between tracks on an MP3 cannot do. The whole room is a potential between the melody and the slow breath of the Real beneath the music.

The randomness of the record player has two distinct situations. There is nothing more marvellous than when a random scratch or piece of erroneous material on the vinyl can create any number of new configurations of meaning.  This is something I heard the other day, when the needle got stuck on a scratch:

Da da da da ...the same...

                ...insane...

                ...pisshead...

                ...biscuit...

                ...kiss it...

                ...Michelle...

Now, I don’t know who Michelle is and if she would ever kiss the same insane pisshead biscuit, but this wonderful dissonance of parts is a potential forged from repetition of the same, an utter randomness territorialised, it reveals the world as the infinity that it is. It shakes you from that worn-out throne woven of straw and expectation and launches you in with the hoi polloi of new possibility, you become an amazing new flux of potential. Its small, but it is there.

Secondly, there is nothing more pleasing than going to a nearby charity shop and finding the most ridiculous, obscure record you can find and taking it home and actually listening to it; these aren’t songs you will find on the internet, with a 30 second sampler. Freed from that mass ocean of likers and commenters you are a pioneer rediscovering a deserted cabin in the middle of the frozen waste, the rescue party, turning corners on the immanent plane of chance.

A record is an object, a corporeal corrugated touchable thing, the music, the abstract indescribable, Dionysian intoxicating ungraspable, is in the folds of the vinyl that feel like undulations under fingers, music crystallised – you can feel it before it happens, it gives a sense, a tactile relationship to its fragility. CD’s are notoriously untouchable, a flat surface, and mp3s are purely ethereal, an illusion of a presence far divorced from our actual realm.

The record is touchable, it is an entertainment in its operation, when the record is played, you can see the mechanism working, and there is a visual dimension as well as the vibrating waveform agreeable to our paltry human senses. You can see the viscosity in our perception that creates the vibrations that disappear into parts unknown and up into quivering brain transcendence.

CD’s are hidden away, Mp3s are hidden away, lacking in a vital perception in the feast of musical experience. To see, to feel, to touch all are necessary, they are all experiences that tip the turntable into a slower more leisurely endeavour, a testament to idleness and the mulling over of strange, stupid and profound things; An antidote to speed.

I’m not saying that all other musical experiences are subordinated to the record player; I’m not privileging presence over absence (logcentrism). I’m just trying to describe my singular assemblage from all the facets of my experience, to show that a record player is for the connoisseur, a slower more loving, thoughtful and pleasurable occurrence. 

So that’s why I listen to records.

Pt 3...

* The irony wasn’t lost on me that only after the object had been discarded did it suddenly become a possibility, an immanent affect. 

Why I like listening to records. Pt.1 A Comedy.

A normal house party scene: groups of bodies coagulated into corners and narrow hallways, scattered glass bottles and aluminium cans, the shift, the sway and the rumble punctuated by the occasional shouty cretin.  Then there’s me, drink in hand, staring at a familiar unrecognisable contortion on the face of the person I have found myself talking to. After exhausting all the rigorous and deft questions, that are destined to be posed by 2 drunken objects looking for a potential connection in the fug of bodies, it happens without fail when these words are spoken: I listen to records.

‘Yep, the vinyl ones, the big black disk things.’

...

‘No, I’m not a’ wronged up DJ who pops beats in a phat style’ and what is that odd hand gesture you’re doing?’

Once they realise I simply play these ‘things’ just to myself, for no exterior gain, for no promise of bitches or bling, I’m always treated to a raised eyebrow and a tone of voice that manages the synthesis of both suspicion and wonder; a bewildering moment which I think neither of us know how to deal with in an increasingly inebriated social interaction.

There is something incomprehensible about refusing what is seen as the best and as the apex of cultural capital. Society has progressed, eliminated the need for flawed technologies already perfected by our new form of speed; who wouldn’t agree, no one wants to be a Luddite? Yet, there is a certain attraction to refusing to accept what is most readily believed and records still have an ideology of cool; there is always a glut of renegades queuing in East London on Record Store Day to get their hands on a piece of the cool; a retro injection of the intangible past excitement of something with substance between their grubby consumer fingers.

So where do I stand?  Am I a badass maverick or a tragic wanker clinging to a set of slowly dying ideals? I like to think I’m a bit of both.

I’ve had a record player for about 2 years; it was one of the first things I bought after something terrible happened to me, basically I slipped between that crack on the plane of instinct. I tripped and disappeared into that dreadful aperture commonly known as a full-time job, responsibility and a disposable income – I know, I know but I was naive and incredibly stupid and I gave to all those voices that were telling me that’s where I belonged – this is relevant by the way. 

So I tried to fit in and become fully at one with my ‘final destination’ and to create a distraction from that dull ache in the belly, that comes from the unknowing participation in a system of futile accumulation, by starting to buy stuff; fantastic misrecognised, ideologically soaked stuff; I needed it to tell me who I was, in the absence of a soul, I needed stuff.  I entered into the role slightly askance but I pushed on my magic cloak of pretence and hoped no one would notice. My record player is a relic of that time.

Therefore, it came to pass that I defied all can be gained instantaneously through the internet at a quality much greater than the crackle, hiss and skip of a turntable system and this is why: I had a very clear image in my mind of a warmly lit room with a singular desk in the corner upon which was a small lamp. Its glow produced a beacon and a halo to my head, which was visible as a silhouette arched over a laptop (or typewriter), while I was tapping away on a piece of sublime prose or poetry; there was a glass of whisky by my hand, from which I would sporadically take a gulp then shake my head and gaze at the ceiling. In addition, for some elusive reason, there was a layer of cigarette smoke floating through the scene, even though I don’t smoke and would probably be choking, but anyway it was there. The record player sat on a cabinet to one side producing the sweet sound of a 1930’s music hall, leaving me a fibre shaking between its intangibility, and thus completing the scene. 

It’s a vaguely hackneyed picture, which I find obviously aberrant and must question what it was doing in my head – looking back now I can see that it was one of them, a solidified form of my alienated desire, an abstract idea foisted upon a solid object; an ideology, a commodity. Not one I had created, not a glorious convulsion of the absurd, not a collection of parts seeped with personal meanings, but a prewired template taken wholesale from some Unconscious Cultural newsagent.

This is what its evil little voices said: hey, hey, MG, guess what? You’re tired, you lack inspiration and all you can think about is the ever flowing ructions that ooze from that suit strewn abyss [the evil voices are known to be particularly obscure]. Here, look here, some things, ooooohhh yeah; you see this thing here [points to record player#], you need this, you need this because of this [gestures towards an ethereal image of the aforementioned whisky scene floating before my face, shimmering]. Oooooohhhh yeessss, this thing will make you a better writer and a more romantic, deep and profound person with all the time you need, look, look at this image of the future, this is what you will become; yeeesss [pats me on back and takes money from my back pocket – I put my hand out to the image and it immediately turns to sand].

Of course, now that I have stopped rowing on that infernal boat, I realise that all those cacophonous voices were ever saying was simply: ‘We can make the absences you feel, the qualities you lack, into the glorious presence of fulfilment’. A futile wish; they get you when you're down. What they* never mention is that they are the ones that have stolen the enjoyment you don’t have in the first place; it’s basically a blackmail which lasts FOREVER where you must pay in order to get back a bit of what they stole, and what you do get back is now useless. Oh the irony.

So I fell for it and I found myself with this thing in my room, an object consumed, and another failed ideology kicked to death by its diversion past the boot of capital, it faded and disappeared into the banality of the room, a forgotten potential. There it stayed, ensconced within its dust blanket, until something wonderful and unexpected happened. A rediscovery.

TBC...

# Yes, the voices have arms.

 *As a quick side note, I do realise I have displaced that inherent lack, that we all must accept and take on our back in order to enter into the Symbolic realm (society) and therefore not slip into the bliss of psychosis, onto work and capital, but that’s my particular want you may choose your own object, you decide who 'they' are.

Handwritten.

Anon

[TQ] is the reason
We speak of watercolour pale
And the swimming joy of
A sublime hole
That raises and pulsates
Your being with unspeakable
Hues
Purely, innocently
And when the time comes
When her breath
Mingles with ours
In a moment
We jump like toads
Into the void
And our lives are complete.

Lightning in Berlin (unfinished)

Laughter like reality weeping through galleries, restaurants, parks, rooms and the night in rain 

Smoking through the distance of open windows swinging dangerous to heads 

Forked electrical skies falling around beer drinking sheltered cycle watchers, wowing 

Colourful and profound prongs fail to art as the separation, the lack, the terror is all we feel, The Wall, is always the Wall

Drenched legged water followers, tipping themselves down streets delirious from glassed intangible feet 

The Queen arrived in late night framing of our mirth, dancing like jesters in the hollow room of seriousness, then falling into night time

Berlin, pockets of everyday horror stepped over, looked upon but not seen, weeping from it’s fleshy miserable underside. We see the concrete, the whole, we are invisible tourists missing the tears of the soul.