His listening habits had changed a lot since he had first started listening to music and he supposed that was only natural considering how the formats had changed. The change in the media that things was presented with was necessarily going to have to impact upon the way you consumed the product, after all it had changed the way that it was delivered to you.
He started off with vinyl – the dust covered black discs that fossilised his parents youth and spoke to something of him that waited in the future, ready to uncurl from the heart of some bassline, riff, or melody. The seventies: that mutable, drug-fuelled quest for psychic evolution that rewired everything from sonics to sexuality. He was infected with a taste for the seventies ever after and he spent the first five years forming his personality in that decade – unlike a rocket you very rarely burned off your first stage. Vinyl, despite the shape obviously followed a straight trajectory from start to finish: you were given your music and that was how you listened to it. There was a degree more versatility with singles of course but you still travelled a dictated line; you get a grasp on where to drop the needle of course but that represented something of a hassle.
The eighties seeped in through a kind of osmosis. A different pallette that shuttled between the shiny and plastic and the abrasive and harshly real – he leaned towards dissonance but he wasn’t cutting himself off from any avenues just yet. Punk punched right through into reggae; reggae sashayed around pop; pop swallowed the electric, touched up punk; things became mutant. Tapes allowed you to make compilations, to capture radio shows – moving around your music selection was easier with fast forward and rewind. This lead to a period where he began to sift – where he began to work out from all the sounds that he was being exposed to which ones he actually preferred. It represented a growth. The first breakage in the straight lines.
The nineties were the tail end of tapes and a jump cut to compact discs and the lines disintegrated. Albums grew, things became hidden on them. The way stuff was archived and put together became a matter of choice or something random. Then the idea tapes had encapsulated of the mix was embraced. So he danced through the atomisation of the album, the scattering of ideas, and the mercury slide back towards some collected notion driven by taste yet again. And the past was excavated and expanded, given the treatment its creators had always wanted to dress it up in. As choice became bolstered, arrangement became more fluid; genres bled and crashed through each other. And the album again gained prominence – the length of the format seducing both the listener and the performer.
And then the noughties saw MP3s explode and the chop up began once more. Download whole albums, shunt the things you didn’t want into the ether. Compress, chop, produce your own. More fluid, more atomised, more choice, more personality pushed into the shape. The past moved around, laced with the present. Time travel in electronic sonic format. He wondered what the future would be like – how it would coalesce around the aural delicacies people chose to fill their lives with and the formats those tunes would be presented in.
Filed under: Prose, Short Story, flash fiction, literary, update | Tagged: fiction, form at art, literature, paul grimsley, Prose, skull cull, story, tale, update, writer, writing
