The Kula is NOT dead. (It's just resting.)

So I just came back from my church's winter retreat and what did I find on my living room table but the new Radiohead album box set I ordered a while back. I can't really say that I wanted the box set, but the guilt from downloading the album for free was too much to bear. Now that it has arrived, I'm very glad for my guilty purchase.

Back when I first stumbled upon the benefits of vinyl, I came to this epiphany about how the act of flipping a record changes the way an album is digested. Since there's only a finite amount of physical space and no way of making grooves smaller without losing quality (ie mono), each side of a record is limited to around fifteen minutes. (This is just a tangent, but the first track "15 Step" may have been titled after this fact.)

Anyway, so here I am listening to In Rainbows on vinyl and it's like I'm listening to a whole new album. In addition to the digestion thing, there's this degree of separation you can hear on vinyl that you can't on mp3s or even CDs. I think it's because of how the encoding on CDs (and even more so in mp3s) takes some sound out of original recording to shrink the size of the file. I'm no techie, but it has something to do with if say a guitar makes one sound that overwhelms the other instruments, the encoder just takes out those instruments because in theory you can't hear them anyway. But as in most things, theory is just not reality.

So yeah, the degree of separation is so great that a lot of sounds I chalked up to be electronic instruments were actually revealed to be guitars. Makes me realize the full extent of their appropriating electronica tropes for the purpose of rocking out.

I wish everyone still had record players and could hear what I hear, but since we don't, a good way to at least get the digestion effect is to listen to the album in the following intervals:

15 Step
Bodysnatchers
Nude

Weird Fishes/Arpeggi
All I Need
Faust Arp

Reckoner
House of Cards

Jigsaw Falling Into Place
Videotape

So there you have it. If you take pauses in between these intervals, you'll notice a clear order to the tracks that I feel is otherwise absent in a straight-through (ie CD/mp3) listen. If you're a believer in the idea of music as a sonic experience/soundscape then you'll appreciate this new way to say hooray.