I did this piece for The Vinyl Factory recently – a relatively easy one for me given my day-to-day listening habits have quite a lot of space for John Carpenter’s work at the moment. Assault On Precinct 13 and The Fog are my favourite soundtracks of his I admit.
In life, all the time, I’m struck that I think most things are good/bad simultaneously. It’s like candy: the initial sugar hit, the flavour, the indulgence – great! But the undercurrent is, sure, it’ll lead to tooth decay, obesity and so forth. It doesn’t mean one should avoid these things, it just means that there’s no avoiding consequences in life and that people’s tendency to divide into good/bad is just plain silly. Most things are both all the time.
A fair example is the work involved in creating things like one of these ‘Ten Of’ lists. Sure you say, it’s just listening to a bunch of music – it ain’t hard. True! And there’s a really deep pleasure involved in sinking so completely into someone’s work. I tend to find that listening to this much of one person’s music in a concerted way over a couple of weeks gives me an expanded awareness of the things they do that make the music theirs, what their techniques and approaches are, where they’re deviating, what makes this piece standout or that piece fit.
On the other hand, it’s not just listening. It’s hours of flicking back, re-listening, discarding notes and thoughts on one piece, thinking more about another. It emphasises that no one is so original that listening to their music so obsessively won’t kill the vibe or point out the bits where it’s a bit the same, or where they’re coasting. It means I can’t bring myself to listen to Carpenter’s latest just yet – I’ll need a break, time to cleanse the palette and digest.
It’s a constant sin of mine: I get into an artist, I hoover up music by them, then I need a pause before returning to them to really ‘get’ the individual joys of a particular record.
Nirvana Legacy 