The New Analog: Listening and Reconnecting in a Digital World

"He’s basically talking about how we hear music now: the platforms, the equipment, the cultural environment. He’s a very unique thinker. He’s in a band called Damon & Naomi and was in the legendary indie-pop band Galaxie 500, so he’s writing as both a practitioner and as a theorist. Although it’s advanced, it’s very comprehensible. It’s one of those books that makes your brain fizz for a few days after you’ve read it. He applies the distinction that is made in the studio between ‘signal’ and ‘noise’ and does it in a philosophical way to talk about what’s valuable about what we’re hearing and what’s not valuable and how one crowds out the other. Totally. But something else that I liked about his approach was that it wasn’t just pessimistic. It’s very easy to write an op-ed damning Spotify. I agree with many of the charges against it, but Krukowski recognises, as anyone sensible does, that you can’t put the genie back in the bottle. It’s more pragmatic than easy polemic. It depends how long the review is and how far in advance you have the music. Typically, if I’ve had an album for a while, I might have listened to it 60 times by the time I come to write a long review of it. But if I’m writing a 250-word review of it for The Guardian ’s weekly music section, I might just have heard it three or four times at my desk. But however I’m doing it, the end process is always the same: if there are lyrics, I will annotate them and pick out familiar themes, then I do an annotated listen, listening and typing ideas about the different sounds and segues in quite a stream of consciousness way. Then I see which songs might fit together in a discussion or that you can thread into a compelling argument. “It’s one of those books that makes your brain fizz for a few days after you’ve read it.” In terms of casual listening, I have a record player but because of where it sits in the house, I tend to listen to a particular kind of music on it. It’s in the living room so it’s usually quite relaxed or background music. It has a specific function. I still have an old iPod that is creaking on, thankfully, though I have found that, especially since iPhones got rid of the headphone socket, I have been using wireless headphones on my commute and been forced to listen to Spotify and Bandcamp. I try and use those service for discovery. Once I’ve listened to something a few times, I usually buy it because I like to have the mp3. I don’t trust the cloud not to wipe all my music someday."