A couple of decades ago, I found myself in the same boat as Internal Exile, struggling to cope with the dizzying abundance of music in the digital age, finding that the music meant less and less to me as I bought more and more, sprinting towards an endlessly receding horizon. I bought records and CDs so voraciously that I barely had time to listen to them once, just enough to check that they played all right, before I was back out the door to buy more. To this day, I remember very little about the music of that time. Song titles, album covers conjure nothing, no lingering frisson or echo in the memory.
Rather than surrender to the flow, I forced myself to slow down, to try to listen to records until they etched an outline in my memory. It’s been a long process, gradually weaning myself off that impulse to consume, embracing repetition in the hope of re-enchantment. That enchantment remains elusive—I’ll never regain that teenage obsession that led me spend entire mornings in bed, flipping a C90 cassette of Aqualung and Morrison Hotel over and over. My relationship to music now is more like an addict in recovery, a little burned-out and constantly self-monitoring for fear of relapse. I wiped the music library on my computer in 2015 and started over; in the decade since, there are only a half-dozen albums that I’ve listened to more than ten times.
But even that limited repetition is enough to enrich the music, to give me the time to dwell in the grain of the sound, to build some personal context around the music. Sound is voluptuous, but context is meaning. Everything I thought and felt while listening to an album, whatever I read or heard that led me to it in the first place, the conversations about it with friends, all that accretes meaning around the music like nacre around a nascent pearl.
Seeing the music performed live only becomes more important as the years go by, vivid nights in dank clubs, reeling from the volume, the intoxication of the crowd, the unflagging magic of hearing this music at the moment of (re)creation. The debriefing session in the pub afterwards, the lingering reverberation of the experience in the days after. Listening to the recordings again, reconfiguring their meaning in light of the performance.
So the notion of gluing a record to your turntable resonates strongly, even if it’s as bathetic a choice as Underwater Moonlight. Listen to it until you know it inside-out, like it’s the only record you own, the only record ever made. For all I said that I don’t remember much of the early 2000s, I recognised the jacket image at the top of Rob’s post immediately, remember where I bought that double-disc reissue on Matador, can hum a few bars of “I Wanna Destroy You” and “Old Pervert”. However little that is, it still means something to me.
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