The Goo 1
JUNE-JULY 2022 With the now instant ease of locat
ing certain songs I started to obsess (repeat |play) over certain ones that previously I'd liked but hadn't struck me so powerfully before. These included Kirsty MacColl's 'New England' and The Dream Academy's 'Life in a Northern Town'. In this case both were artists I had previously been only vaguely aware of but now I was reading about them online and purchasing more of their music. As well as getting new CDs, I've always been someone who buys second-hand, including from charity shops and car boot sales. It remains something of a compulsion now that I can add them to the pool of music I'm constantly curating inside that deceptively small device. This digging for digital gold has itself come to resemble a kind of random shuffle as you never know what you will find next or where that search might take you. Some artists were even purchased because I knew I would be hearing them in the context of shuffle so I took chances on some popular artists I didn't previously like enough to actually own their music (eg. Madonna, Elton John). Surely one of their songs in isolation won't hurt me! I also decided I wanted to start collecting all the albums from certain artists I was now newly re-discovering (eg. Lambchop, Low, Laurie Anderson, Ann Scott and David Kitt). This meant I could use the individual artist shuffle and just wallow in as much of their music as I wanted. Another thing I thought was very good for my brain was jumping from genre to genre, from electronic to punk to traditional Irish music. This made me hunt out even more nonrock albums and it can lead to some quite hilarious sequences of music, it certainly grabs your attention when Micho Russell starts up a reel after some mutant disco from Arthur Russell! One of the most revelatory things that happened was seeing how some of the Irish bands could easily hold their own against more well known groups. Shuffle might be the ultimate test of any band! This directly led me to starting a website called Abstract Analogue, to initially write some in-depth pieces about mostly '90s bands such as The Last Post, Idiots, Dot Creek, The Sewing Room, The Wormholes, Deep Burial, Capratone, Decal and Sunbear. As I was struggling to track down certain albums I didn't get at the time I noticed that many were for sale from secondary sellers on Amazon for as little as 1 cent. It struck me that unless you were already familiar with the band, there was no other way for you to discover just how good these albums were (none of the groups I covered had yet been included in any 'great lost Irish albums' canon). If you are lucky there is a world of incredible and untapped digital music already sitting in your home and if not you will find it down the road in a charity shop or elsewhere for bargain prices. You could always raid the iTunes of friends but I prefer to keep it personal and more of a challenge. There is of course a world of exciting new music on platforms like Bandcamp that even I am getting used to. You can gradually refine what it is you like but keep adding to the pile is my advice (never throw your CDs away either if you can help it). The shuffle will test you at times but try not to skip or delete things straight away, I give everything a chance to grow on me, allowing the universal randomness of sound to lead the way. Soon you will be seeing life itself as one random shuffle after another. What will be next? ..taking that chaotic route through my lifetime’s collection of music is what really allowed my CDs a second chance. The memories and surprises were constant.. PAGE 37