shuffle perilous
i am in a room where i have to fold and bind books for my letterpress class. it is the last day of the class (sadly) and we’ve all got beers around and it’s getting sort of quiet as we embroil ourselves in our respective bookbinding duties, like a big glorified assembly line. and then the bomb drops: “i wish we had some music in here.” okay, so i offer my iphone, playing music on the little tinny ipod speakers.
hand it off to someone and say “you put something on,” because i am terrible at picking music that has generally broad appeal and would probably just put on some 60 minute japanese noise piece. after some fumbling, all of radiohead’s discography is put on, on shuffle. fine, okay, people like radiohead. but eventually it is very much not contributing to the vibe of the room; you don’t stab holes in a signature with an awl while “exit music (for a film)” rips your heart to shreds, and so someone picks up my iphone, and puts it on all-playlist shuffle. i listen to an extremely eclectic range of music that varies from indie power pop to complete batshit inaccessibility, and everything in between. the first thing that comes on is stars of the lid, which does not upset anybody.
i go to the bathroom and come back to “actionist respoke” and half the people in the room have these very interesting facial expressions where it is kind of like those time-lapse 100000fps films where you are punched in the face and your skin ripples outward from the impact point. this is precisely what i feared: it went from the nice pretty modern classical to some germans doing stuff that is (ahem) singularly distinctive. it’s all very dire; this thing, this situation, will not stand. clearly i must play triage and so i rush to the iphone and hit track right until it is not playing ricardo villalobos mixes, or fennesz, or some just ridiculous sheet of noise with an unpronounceable name.
this is the problem with shuffle for me: usually, more often than not, as if by clarivoyant premonition, shuffle will seek out the stuff you don’t necessarily want to hear, bumped up against other things. there is no flow and context, because it’s random. obvious, right? but people still seek it out. and it’s not an adventure, it’s bracing and weird and awkward, like (actually!) giving a speech in your underwear.
and then like 1h later someone asks me to play music “that we can jack to.”
