Five Albums To Remember The Art Of Music
I’m on another music kick right now. It’s always there, but it’s been in a higher gear since the middle of March. Given circumstances elsewhere, I’ve been looking to new music in new places this year, be it directly through artists’ websites or intermediaries such as Bandcamp.
It may not come as a surprise, but for these artists, it’s all about the album. While the industry would rather you rent your music so they can push you an algorithmically generated background noise to gather more listener-hours. Instead, my kick has been in the delight of an album, a long-form piece of art that has been abandoned by the voracious streamers.
Leveraging The Cause To Find A Cure
My return to cassette tapes pretty much guarantees a return to the album format and the tight 25-35 minutes per side that dominated my teenage years. Ebay has a really good selection of second-hand cassettes, although I’ve tried not to rebuild the same collection beyond a few choice cuts… after all, there’s a thriving search tab in Bandcamp for cassettes to find new album releases.
Not everyone is going to have the patience to go back this far in musical history; it’s not trivial to service a Walkman or be ready to pick up a portable CD player to get back to the album experience. Yet there is a more accessible halfway between the streams of today and the sequential listening of yesteryear, that, curiously, will cost about the same as a single month of streaming.
It’s the iPod Shuffle.
Turning Your MP3 Player Into An Album Machine
One of my main considerations was switching to a standalone media player. Having to reach for something other than my phone to listen to music has made it a more active and involved process.
The irony of picking the device that did more to unbundle album culture to rediscover it is, of course, deliberate. Other tiny MP3 players are available and will likely offer more flexible USB connectivity and expandable storage via SD cards. You don’t need much in the way of storage; 512 MB will be more than enough, and as long as you have play and skip buttons, you don’t need a display either.
Now, grab the album you want to listen to and gather the audio files for the tracks. You’re going to join these together into a single MP3 file, in the best way you know how. For me, that’s the free audio editor Audacity: drag and drop the files into the app, select all the tracks, align them end to end, and export as a single media file. There’s your album, all wrapped up in a single 50-minute-long MP3, ready to copy over to your player.
No easy way to jump to your favourite track, no easy way to skip over the slower number, just the single file to play, pause, and start again from the beginning.
Enjoying The Music
Your smartphone’s audio player can play albums; it can carry far more of them, and you can find any of your single tracks within moments. Jump onto a streaming service, and the Universal Jukebox will find a track not installed locally…but not before suggesting you listen to these mega-pop-star payola-powered releases or a raft of AI-generated remixes.
This little project is about breaking away from the complexity of choice so you can fully explore your music. You can still load up your MP3 player with a significant collection of albums, but I’m taking a different approach. Every Monday, the Shuffle gets cleared, and I deliberately choose five albums to listen to for the rest of the week. That means multiple listens to spend time with the music and appreciate everything going on.
It’s not for everybody, but it works for me.
Photo: Four albums and an iPod Shuffle (Ewan Spence).
