Snap, Crackle and Pop

Introduction

It’s a sacred ritual, but not one so divine that it’s untouchable - it is not sacrosanct, but it is personal, and it does require dedication, attention and consideration to fully appreciate it and believe in it.

It requires faith and devotion, but it is not conventionally religious.

The enigmatic hissing and analogue crackling of the stylus riding the groove of a record demands that you embrace imperfection, surrender to sound and forget your reality - even if it’s just for the length of time it takes for the song to finish.

As a listener to a record, you are the receiver of a carefully curated order of presentation - a flow from one key to the next; a narrative continuum or a musical theme.

This consideration is lost in a playlist or bot-spewed catalogue of recommended audio files.

Really listening is not about the immediate impact of a hook and a chorus - though they play an integral part - it’s about digging deeper than that - down to a place where your mind wanders to as the sound washes over you.

Really listening is the reward of a song growing from dismissal to favourite as it reveals its own depths as part of a whole sequence of a dozen other compositions.

Really listening is the antidote to immediacy; stop. Pay attention. Pause. Focus. Let your mind drift downstream.

In our digitised lives, so few other activities seem to welcome imperfections and fallibilities as boldly and intrinsically as playing a record does. It’s purpose is to steer you off your path; to lose yourself for a moment in its magical and unnavigable tides.

What else can you do that encourages you to get so lost? I can’t think of anywhere else you can go where the goal is disorientation and the more lost you become the more positive the experience is.

Playing a record can be a public activity open to everyone, a focused performance designed for a selected audience, a hymnal for a self-selected congregation or an intensely private, immersive solo experience, broadening horizons and opening minds.

I love the latter the most.

But as much as I enjoy my own company, it’s rewarding to share thoughts about music with someone else too - hence Dispatches from A Vinyl Vault.

I listen to records all the time, so why not catalogue some of those experiences if they inspire me to write them down?

It doesn’t really matter to me if anyone reads my reviews or musings; it’s great if someone’s interested, but a record collection is so personal and a response so subjective, it would be a very high hope indeed to expect anyone else to be as engaged as I am in my own thoughts on my own records.

Nevertheless, if anyone else gets anything out of these newsletters, that’s a good thing.

I write more publicly as an occasional contributer to Louder Than War. Check that out if you’re so inclined, but my work there is also archived here.

Thanks for reading and checking out any of the records and bands that appeal to you.