I like the ritual of playing vinyl and how that ritual can extract a different type of focus from me. I like the manually of being in touch with the materials and objects. I like looking at the turntable work and the vinyl spin. I like witnessing the outlandish subtlety of the tonearm floating along the groove. I like the cover art I can hold in my hand ... a digital image doesn’t accrue history and change in its journey through time like my album covers do; instead they inhabit an abstract realm ungrounded in the physical world. I like the programmatic imperative of the LP side, of one thing following another, of (over?)determined sequence which must be physically intruded upon and intercepted to upset. I like the needle touching vinyl and introducing ’anticipatory sound’ then tracking the groove and reproducing music. I like being forced to get up out of my seat to flip/remove/replace/insert and being forced to give myself over to the process instead of distracting myself. I like the inscrutable struggles that inhere in relating to the mechanical nature of TTs and analogue ... it’s like a relationship and shifts around. I like locating the hole. I like looking at vinyl after it’s cleaned gleaming. I like the goodies and posters that come with albums (I still have my DSOTM poster with green infrared photo of the Great Pyramids of Giza). I like the labels, the colored vinyl, the smell of papers. I like the surprises (I once took my parents Panasonic TT receiver and speakers outside into the backyard on a bright summer morning while laying out catching some rays ... at one point the sound started becoming weird ... the vinyl had softened in the sun and was melting and drooping over the side of the platter as it played like Dali’s soft watches). I like that you have to be there. HERE. Not just anywhere, the music is where the TT is not where you are. I like the moments bodies have hit the ground hard and the needles jumps. I like flipping through the stacks in record stores and how one gets their flip finger tuned up and dialed in ... where else in life does one get an opportunity to exercise their flip skills like that? I like how moving heavy stacks of albums reminds me how cumbersome and recalcitrant the material world is and that I have to relate to it and cannot escape it. I like how the embodied actions of spinning vinyl can, at times, have a nostalgia wired into them which sometimes connects with the music being played and with memory and which all on occasion align themselves in a manner that elicits felt emotions that are not summoned simply by the sounds alone.
I don’t like that TT drive belt salesmen can retire rich after a career selling $30 rubber bands.
I don’t like that TT drive belt salesmen can retire rich after a career selling $30 rubber bands.