“I bought my first record player when I was in high school. There were these weird junkyard / thrift shop places on the side of the highway near where I grew up in Florida, and from time to time my friends and I would stop and rummage through them. I found this bulky mid-century sort of radio / record player unit for like five bucks. It had been sitting outside for who knows how long, but when I plugged it in, it worked! So I ordered some of my favorite albums at the time on vinyl – the Fleet Foxes self-titled album, For Emma, Forever Ago, and Our Endless Numbered Days.“
“I could only listen through headphones, so it was this great introduction to all the ways that the vinyl could expand your interaction with music. Feeling the texture of the packaging, reading huge lyric sheets with amazing, detailed artwork; turning the sleeve over and shaking it to see what else was in there—it felt like opening a birthday card. Getting an additional 7” was like finding a folded $20 in an envelope from grandma.
When I got Seven Swans on vinyl a few years later, I was thrilled to find that a 7″ came with it that had two songs I hadn’t heard before. There was something about that—hearing music from an artist I loved that I could only listen to on vinyl—that changed the game for me. The sense of discovery was so different from finding the songs on some blog in a dusty corner of the internet. I was interacting physically with the recordings. For a kid who did most of his growing up in the early 2000s, this was novel and exciting—like discovering some ancient secret the modern world was hiding all that time.
In the last 5 years or so, I’ve been getting more seriously into contemporary classical music and electronic compositions, so I try to find classical music I haven’t listened to yet on vinyl and approach it that way for my first listen. Classical vinyl is usually accompanied by a lot of great writing about the work in the packaging, which broadens that experience of sitting down with an album and giving it proper time and attention. A few years ago I picked up a copy of Bryce Dessner’s St. Carolyn by the Sea / Johnny Greenwood’s Suite From There Will Be Blood. It was my first time listening through St. Carolyn by the Sea, and it was such an amazing experience to read about Dessner as a composer and then listen to this masterful work of his. I got to see “Lachrimae” performed live at his Music Now Festival in Cincinnati that year, and it was really cool to have interacted with that piece in the two most meaningful listening formats. That shifted the way I approached orchestrating for my own work in a way that may not have been as powerful without the initial experience of hearing it on vinyl.
Among my very favorite records now, though, is Suzanne Ciani’s Bluchla Concerts 1975. It’s this otherworldly live recording of an early Suzanne Ciani performance in New York at a time when synthesizer music was this new, exciting medium. One of the best things about the record is that it comes with this packet of paper that is stapled together (like a school research paper) that gives detailed instructions on how to perform the pieces on a Buchla synthesizer. It’s like you’re watching Ciani reinvent musical language in real time. She’s very much shooting from the hip. It’s wild to hear how complex the music was, too—her work from the ’70s makes it feel like synthesizer music hasn’t come all that far in the last 40 years. Listening to that on vinyl and reading the booklet is an opportunity to interact with the past in a tangible way.
I think that’s one of the things that makes vinyl so important—music as we experience it in our culture is a relatively new thing with relatively little history to grasp. It’s so important to how we understand ourselves, but unless you’re talking about a live performance of orchestral music, we don’t have much of a heritage beyond the last 100 years, when recorded music became possible and accessible. Our history of music is tied to a history of technology. The technology of the record player is a crucial part of how we place ourselves in this history. It grounds us in the scope of modern music, and contextualizes our movement into the next chapter of music’s history as we try to make sense of what’s next.”
—Thad Kopec
Thad Kopec’s The Shadow and the Caster is in stores now.
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