isn’t it funny how quickly we not only adapt to technology but come to embrace it wholeheartedly?my copy of the new j.tillman album, minor works, finally arrived from out of la france and i’ve been indulging myself on my ride to and from work by listening to it. i mean i’ve been listening to the whole album. In the right order. One track after the other. That’s pretty much unprecidented. the funny thing is, listening to it as an album made me feel sort of cerebral.
a bit old school.
very muso.
see, i spend my life on shuffle, and not just my music listening but my reading habits, my working day, my friends and family, my modes of transport, my meal choices. taking a little bit here, a little bit there. and i could blame mtv for the fact that my attention span sees me doing several things at once and none of them particularly well, except i gave up watching tv in 2006. i just like to shuffle.
and really, it makes perfect sense. much as I shuffle my way through my days, apparently unable to commit to one style of dress, or music or a singular political viewpoint – enjoying the lifestyle equivalent of fusion cuisine – its just here that i end up seeing startling links between things.finding sweeping emotional continuity in the tracklisting of my intrinsic ipod dj, marvelling at how not only am i sat in a row of 6 women on the tube but we’re all wearing grey shoes like some gloriously styled advert for multicultural London. I’ll spot an unusually high number of crows on the way to the office, or hear the word haranguing used three times over in the space of an hour. Tiny seemingly inconsequential things but they’re like the threads which knit my life together. And they might seem like a big tangly mess of apparently random things that make me laugh out loud, make me cross, make me think or make me cry but its in the midst of the shuffling that I get to see and be reminded of a singular truth. that God is right there in the detail as well as the expanse. we can’t deal with the notion of randomness because that leaves us floating and subject to absolute whim, it leaves us without rhyme or reason. randomness reduces the universe to a pile of matter likely at any point to disintegrate into a mound of grey pixels at the bottom of our monitors.and another flip side to all this cultural and social cherrypicking is when you take the time to do something properly. to put on an album from start to finish. to read a book in silence. to switch off your phone and devote attention to one singular thing it feels pretty great.
here’s a j tillman track for a lazy autumn saturday playlist
or buck the trend and buy the whole album here.
(review to follow, you lucky people – its just too good not to talk about)