Ride That Ridm: A New Session on Mixcloud, or, A Note On Vinyl-only Sets as Erfahrung

Whenever I record a set I go writing down the names of the tracks to remember what I played- this can be a challenge in real time as you don't want the track to end before you can cue in the following one on the other deck! — Whenever I record a set I go writing down the names of the tracks to remember what I played- this can be a challenge in real time as you don’t want the track to end before you can cue in the following one on the other deck!

I‘ve written here before about what it means to me to spend some time playing records and recording them the sessions to share later (also here). Taking the time to select, play, listen to and later rearrange and make recordings of my playing/listening sessions is for me akin to meditating, attentively watching a good film, reading a good book for pleasure or doing research.

In an era when streaming threatens becoming the default way of buying and listening to recorded music, the time and other resources spent on building and listening to a physical record collection feels like an act of resistance, even when we all know that today there’s a crazy vinyl revival going on and with people who don’t even own a record player buying vinyl apparently in great quantities.

“Experience” is an over-used term. Ever since those now-distant days of me working on my PhD dissertation (Priego 2010; self-archived 2014), my understanding of “experience” has remained heavily influenced by Walter Benjamin’s discussion of the German terms erlebnis and erfahrung (both can be translated into English as “experience”, though they have different connotations). In a paper included in the 2005 edited collection Walter Benjamin and Art, Diarmuid Costello wrote about erfahrung and erfahrung:

the former is experience conceived in the minimal sense of merely living through, or enduring, the present moment; the latter has density to distinguish us as individuals, while embedding us –as individuals– in the wider field of shared understanding.” (Costello 2005:179)

In my dissertation I wanted to posit that the experience of (reading, creating, collecting, publishing) comic books was akin to the Benjaminian erfahrung, not merely erlebnis. I think the same applies to all artistic practices and objects, of course, and this includes music. Arguably the experience of listening to music should or could be platform or materiality agnostic. As with comics, I don’t think it really is, as the materiality of the physical object determines and imposes on us a particular relationship with a “wider field of shared understanding” through a specific historicity and temporality, which in the case of records (and arguably of printed comic books too) is defined by their finite physical constraints and their own material conditions. The end of the track, the side, the record, is the end of that ‘stream’- there is no automated continuum.

Anyway, all I really wanted to do was to share my latest set:

Ride That Ridm vinyl-only by Señor Priego, hosted by Alcachofa Sound Arts on Mixcloud.

If you click play and listen throughout, thank you. Headphones recommended.

References

Costello, D. (2005). ‘Aura, Face, Photography’, Benjamin, A. (ed.) Walter Benjamin and Art, 164-184. London and New York: Continuum.

Priego, E. (2014). The Comic Book in the Age of Digital Reproduction. University College London, PhD Dissertation, 2010. https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.754575.v4