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.