Vingt Regards:IX. Apples and Amoebas

Another day, another pile:

Top to bottom:
Linda Ronstadt, Vols. I and II
Theatre of Voices, Litany for the Whale (Cage)
Linda Ronstadt & Emmylou Harris, Western Wall | The Tucson Sessions
Tom Zé, Estudando o Pagode
Billy Bragg & Wilco, Mermaid Avenue Vol. II
M.I.A., Kala
Tashi, Quartet for the End of Time (Messiaen)
Stevie Wonder, Talking Book & Innervisions
Yo La Tengo, Prisoners of Love
David Sykes & the Harmonic Choir, Hearing Solar Winds
Theatre of Voices, In C (Riley)
Thelonious Monk with John Coltrane
Sonic Youth, Daydream Nation (I seem to have lost my copy)
Air, Pocket Symphony
Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison
Sigur Rós, Takk...
Johnny Cash, Love God Murder

A quick pitstop at Green Apple while waiting for a bus turned into an unplanned manic shopping spree. "I'm just going to get what I need at Amoeba and leave" turned into two hours of piddling about. When I was in DC, I had the distinct pleasure of finally meeting Devin Hurd of HurdAudio, and we shared our techniques for mitigating the damage at Amoeba: mine is to hang all of the cases off one forearm, and once I reach the bicep it's time for triage.

It genuinely saddens me to know that people have generally moved away from listening to full albums. At the risk of sounding all High Fidelity, I still feel that settling in with a 40-60 minute statement from an individual artist is simply more satisfying than approaching music as a haphazard collection of tracks. Likewise, I really believe, as I have for years (long before mp3s!), that there's just something different about owning a physical album. Having a cassette dub of an LP was nowhere near as interesting as sitting with the real thing on the floor of the living room, turning the cardboard over and over in your hands. It's hard for me to understand how any music listener could not want to peruse the credits, read the notes and lyrics, memorize the song titles. Maybe I'm exhibiting signs of middle age; maybe I'm hoping against hope. But I'm convinced that serious music fans of whatever ilk will always search out that experience of  going somewhere, hearing the fwap fwap fwap fwap of people browsing through dozens of albums, and having the satisfaction of having one's arm weighed down with the booty of the day. Or perhaps I'm just being an ostrich.

In the meantime, I'm grateful to have Amoeba just down the street, where I can pop in looking for Messiaen and be surprised by The Go! Team playing a free show:

~~~~~~

Vingt Regards / I. Strange Bedfellows / II. A New Era, Indeed / III. Hommage à Paolo Conte / IV. Hommage à S. Bar. / V. They Speak According to the Book / VI. Overheard in New York / VII. In Rotation: August 2007 / VIII. LA Phil's New Housemate

Comments

[patrick]

I agree completely -- I like having the physical object, separate from my somewhat unreliable computers, and there are many things I bought just because I came across them in a music-store bin and I liked the title or the cover or something.

So what is the book between The Rest Is Noise and Dr Faustus? I'm assuming it's also thematically appropriate.

I enjoyed the post on the Herbst event -- it made me regret not going to the Wheeler Hall talk the next night, and me with my newly arrived copy of The Rest Is Noise, just waiting to be signed. . . .