What am I doing and why?
Having undertaken the weary and wonderful task of categorising my entire music collection (across all formats – CDs, pc-based stuff and vinyl) I’m going to listen to it all in alphabetical order and write a log of this time.


The grammar of albums and music is being lost bit by bit, pick n’ mix n’ piecemeal. When albums were pressed onto wax or shellac, we would listen to them in their entirety. From having read memoirs by George Martin, I know about the though that went into where each song goes in the running order, to construct “a novel” instead of a matchbook of singles…which of course hit a peak with Pink Floyd, Kate Bush etc, with the side A and side B of each record being approached as a first and second act in an opera, or movements in symphonies.

Then the CD became (I guess) the kind of beginning-middle-end Caulfield-style long rush of On the Road or similar – to just keep on driving but to construct the drive around peaks, troughs and witty juxtapositions. And now we put ipods and everything on shuffle and are just constantly looking to be surprised by something which is roughly the same as the rest, the surprise of position and not of content. Justin Timberlake next to Johnny Cash next to Jesus Christ. How much postmodernism and consumerism converge here, I don’t wish to comment on. But I know I’m always looking for new music, to find something new or to write something new myself, and I know fine well there’s a wealth of music on my shelves that I largely ignore. So. A No-Exit of sitting down with my friends, the CDs, LPs and computer files I have used and abused when I needed them, which I have taken and made work exactly the way I want them to for a party, to create a mood, to cheer myself up, to take me out of myself or to research styles, patterns and chord changes for my own musical gains; they’re now going to sit me down and do the same to me.

The rules are: No spoken word, No individual songs that don’t “belong” to an album, No compilations, No original work of me or my friends. No skips. No shuffles.