CDs

When I left New Zealand in 2012, I gave my CD player to one of my students. It was a bright red portable one. Since then, I really haven’t listened to music other than the random songs that come out of Spotify/Pandora when I go to the gym, almost never. During the pandemic I realized how inconvenient and complicated it has become to watch TV or to listen to the radio or a music album. Yesterday I received an Air Mail package (yippee!) from Escorial street in Barcelona. It was 8 colorful CDs from 3 different contemporary Catalan musicians #manel, #antoniafont, #amicsdelarts, and I realized the extent that streaming digital music misses out on the full album experience. Streaming music is like only looking at a tiny fragment of a painting or reading just one page of a book. … No more plastic that gets broken. No more wifi glitches or commercial interruptions! The CDs came in a little matte colorful hand-size books with playful art work, and inside of that there’s a smaller book with more artwork and the song lyrics. The songs are related to designs and textures. Tactile poems (a tactile experience) and visual work. Is it nostalgia or just a more expansive experience? Probably both!