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"Le Panasonique", as I like to call it, is perched peacefully atop the dresser, to the left of the bed (if you are lying in it, to the right if you are walking into the room), centered perfectly in the middle of the wall, to the right of the door to the hall, about 2 feet below the mirror that I look into and use to make faces at myself about the music I'm listening to. (I've discovered that I make up a pretty loyal audience...) The speakers aren't part of the unit, which is awkward if you need to move the thing, but convenient for my static usage -- you can stretch them out on either side, which we do, so that the stereo is in the exact center from each of the speakers, which stand about 10" high. Since I work from home in the adjacent bedroom, and I like the way this cheap bedroom "stereo" sounds, I usually take one of the speakers down from the dresser and place it on the floor in the doorway, and face it out so that when I go into the next room, I can hear the music I have decided to play aloud on the stereo.
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Of course, this setup produces two challenges: 1) That I hear the majority of the music out of one speaker when I'm not in the bedroom (and I'm never in the bedroom except for to sleep or to change clothes or fold laundry; I am certainly never in the bedroom solely to listen to music), and; 2) That I have to predict the volume the music needs to be in order that I can hear it in the next room. "La Panasonique" is notoriously unpredictable -- its sound is generally soft, with smoothed, patisserie-ized corners around every noise that it utters (this is a bedroom device, after all, and in the bedroom, we should have music on only when the lights are low and something "bedroom" is going to happen) -- and it takes the dynamics of jazz or classical music a bit too seriously, as if "quiet" means "silent" and "lively" means "the devil went down to somwhere else". So, I always listen to "La Panasonique" too loud, and I curse myself for not learning to be more patient with the impetuousness of sound. Of course, half the time, I can't tell what is going on, because someone on the record is taking a saxophone solo, and since the solo is coming of the speaker in the bedroom, and I'm in the hall, with my ears attuned to the speaker on the floor pointing into the hall, I actually have the volume just right enough to know what I'm missing.
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Now, because new records are the means through which I and my foreshortened sense of the future stave off the inevitable, I hoard them greedily like canned goods in my backyard bomb shelter; I always have at least 25 CD's that I have bought but not yet listened to. (The day I realized I could buy CD's and "save them for later" was a day I believed, for at least an hour, that I had mastered time, like the guy on the Twilight Zone who finds a stopwatch that, when he presses it, stops everything around him, but not him). And these future shares sit in a $1 wire Ikea CD rack on the dresser, between the space of "La Panasonique's" mothership and the traveling speaker. I christen all new CD's on "La Panasonique", such that when I first hear them, it's on one speaker from the other room. (Now, I could bring them into the 2nd bedroom with me, where I work, and play them on my laptop using Itunes, but Itunes is for "tracks" or "files", and while a CD player is certainly not the purist media that a turntable is, it at least factors in the "album" as a default medium of expression!) But I find this "mis-listening" a delight, as the first time I hear a new record, I invariably miss 50% of it. So I'm already forced to relisten, and to factor in my relistening upon first listen, so I can let everything happen to me whilst I listen -- without concerning myself with remembering anything at all of what I hear. And because the music is loud enough to fill the apartment, I can actually think, for a moment, that that record, via the medium of "La Panasonique", is a message from another time and place, from a memory I don't yet have, that becomes part of that space between doorway and hall and room and me. It's an ineffable present, this set-up, for which I am buying a memory at the price of space, estranged, and, yet, wonderfully strange.
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None of the above is within the music I listen to, but it is an effective framing device -- or, possibly, an elaborate method of simplifying my perception such that there is only the moment where I hear something arising in the hall, coming towards me from the other room.
I love the idea of the stero as the mothership. Beautiful writing Jono - thank you for sharing your thoughts. I'm looking forward to the next post. I also plan to listen to the albums you listed, thank you for the recomendations. I've wanted to ask you for years now!
ReplyDeleteHaving returned in recent years to mucho analog via a growing vinyl collection that began anew in the 90s before I even had a turntable, but wanted records perhaps as impetus to actually buying said turntable. The prospect of obtaining a sizable chunk of coltrane or miles collections for $2.99 a pop at some fantastic used vinyl shop in porter square (cambridge, Mass) whose name escapes me was just to good to pass up (one day I would, and many years later now have, something to play them on).
ReplyDeleteI still listen mostly to cds and, have an iPod w/ my whole collection on it, so will get that sucker going in the car through the auxillary input. To have that kind of control, alone, is worth owning an iPod.
In any event, one of my favorite activities is the actual in-store experience of buying USED cds and vinyl. I love flip, flip, flipping through all the racks, "panning for gold" as such.
When I was in the Bay Area last summer for a conference I bought 31 used cds via trips to two Amoeba record stores (e.g., there's gold in dem dar hills).
And it happened in Manhattan during a recent trip to Academy Records: flip, flip, flip, flip and then....there IT is! The Alog cd that I once heard about--mind you, I never heard much of their work, but they are on a cool label, Rune Gramophone, and am elated to now have for $4.99. And bonus: it sounds excellent (I wish I lived closer to a place where I could sell stuff back, but for $4.99 I'll horde it in my office).
p.s. When I fly to cities with used cd stores--I always do the google research/emails to a friend, Darren Bergstein, who owns 10,000+ cds and has probably been to most used shops in the U.S. and Europe--that is to say, I always stuff an old sears duffel bag into my suitcase to haul the precious cargo that awaits !
Ben, that's a brilliant response. I think I will use it as a way to write another post on the magic whereof you speak. Thanks.
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