'Nothing But Morons'? Confessions of a record collector part 2

My experience of record collecting is not much like this. I go into record shops, ask for Field Mice 10" LPs and endure the scorn of the famed Record Shop Git. 

In fact, much like this:



(Although he is right about those particular bands). I read High Fidelity when it came out and felt that Hornby rather uncomfortably knew me far too well. I went to see the film too, and watched at a 90 degree angle, craning to see what records were on the shelves, which essentially proved Hornby right about us. My sister observed at the end of the film that I was 'just like Rob'. She then thought better of this comparison, having pointedly noted that 'he gets a girlfriend in the end'.

So yesterday, I droned on about record collecting and Walter Benjamin's piece about unpacking his library. Today, I thought I'd point you towards Jean Baudrillard's The System of Objects, and in particular the section 'A Marginal System: Collecting'. Although he doesn't explicitly say so until a long way in to the essay, his concentration on the 'passion' of collecting is derived from Freud's work on fetishisation and sublimation. I'm not a Freud (or Baudrillard, or anything) expert so I won't push this point too far, but the essence is that the object need not be at all interesting or special to raise passion. Baudrillard's very keen to emphasise that while we're all obsessed with 'human' passions, our enormous investment in owning things goes relatively unnoticed.

they become mental precincts over which I hold sway, they become things of which I am the meaning, they become my property and my passion

This isn't use value: I will never again play some of my records, or re-read some of my books. Indeed a few of them will never be read – I wanted them as objects, not as functional carriers of information. Baudrillard differentiates between objects which mediate between the self and the world (refrigerators, spoons) and therefore can't be objects of passion but remain functional tools (although people with Object Sexuality might disagree, particularly the woman who left the Berlin Wall for a fence) and objects which can be wholly possessed, through which the individual constructs their senses of him/herself and a private world. Books and records, for me, fulfil this purpose at the moment though I must admit that my record collecting mania is fading and I'm trying to read more books than I buy. 

Some objects can be both functional and possession, or move from one status to the other (usually functional to possession): for instance a chair which starts off being useful and ends up as an antique with a 'do not touch' sign on it, valued for its rarity, age or beauty. Something like this, for instance:



What is it?



(I took those pictures at Neuadd Gregynog Hall, the stately home owned by the University of Wales). It's an extreme example proving that anything can move from functional to possessive status. It can go the other way too: witness Dublin's mania for demolishing grand Georgian houses in the 1960s and 1970s as an anti-colonialist gesture, now sorely regretted.

Once a thing becomes an object, an extension of its owner's psyche, it is part of a collection, and cannot exist alone, according to Baudrillard.

And just one object no longer suffices: the fulfilment of the project of possession always means a succession or even a complete series of objects. This is why owning absolutely any object is always so satisfying and so disappointing at the same time: a whole series lies behind any single object, and makes it into a source of anxiety.

 I could own one record by The Field Mice, but it wouldn't be a collection and it wouldn't be significant.

Here's some Field Mice:





and my favourite track by their successor band, Trembling Blue Stars:



(They're dedicated to Ben, who thinks my affection for The Field Mice demonstrates everything that's wrong with me, and indie music).

The object becomes important once it is part of a network (Field Mice records, Sarah Records output, Field Mice records I won versus Field Mice records I don't yet own). The last bit is essential but also destructive. Possessing everything is I guess possible, but without the quest, life would be dull indeed. Not possessing everything though: that's awful.

And just one object no longer suffices: the fulfilment of the project of possession always means a succession or even a complete series of objects. This is why owning absolutely any object is always so satisfying and so disappointing at the same time: a whole series lies behind any single object, and makes it into a source of anxiety.

That's what keeps capitalism going: the anxiety caused by not possessing the entire set, the latest phone or the best shoes – desire is always temporarily satisfied and simultaneously de-satisfied. This is the permanent state of the collector. And, says Baudrillard, the same goes for sexual relations. The person you're sleeping with right now is a unique being, s/he/it is one of a series of possession you're currently pretending constitutes the totality of objects you can possess.Your current lover is significant because s/he/it refers to all the other potential, abstract lovers. The same goes for my books.

It's complicated: that's why it's so vital and enthralling:

Our ordinary environment is always ambiguous: functionality is forever collapsing into subjectivity, and possession is continually getting entangled with utility, as part of the ever-disappointed effort to achieve a total integration. Collecting, however, offers a model here: through collecting, the passionate pursuit of possession finds fulfilment and the everyday prose of objects is transformed into poetry, into a triumphant unconscious discourse.

Baudrillard sees collecting as a childish urge, in the purest sense: it gives the child a sense of structure and control in a world which affords the child no power or control. It's illusory, and immensely satisfying. Perhaps it's the same for me: I can fool myself that reading – or just owning – all these books makes me a viable human being, despite knowing that it's a very long time since it was possible to read all the books or know everything (i.e. everything Western European white men thought was worth knowing). There were several candidates: Thomas Young, Athanasius Kirchner, Alexander von Humboldt and a few others (this was of course before Foucault et al. got rid of 'knowledge' and replaced it with 'knowledges', but that's another blog).

But let's take Batman's advice and return to Baudrillard:

The child dominates the world through endlessly rearranging the collections: cars, dolls, worms, whatever. For most of them, puberty puts an end to it, but it re-emerges in forty-something men – known in the music business as £50 Man after his habit of appearing in a record shop and frantically splurging £50 every time. It wasn't like that for me. I read books obsessively but didn't own anything until my mid-teens. Getting to university, I began acquiring books and records on a grand scale. I looked down on £50 Man as a miser and an amateur. As I've detailed elsewhere, Cob Records in Bangor became the equivalent of a drug dealer with me as a desperate, dependent user. 

In short, there is in all cases a manifest connection between collecting and sexuality, and this activity appears to provide a powerful compensation during critical stages of sexual development. This tendency clearly runs counter to active genital sexuality, although it is not simply a substitute for it.

Perhaps the single-sex education retarded my development even more than I suspected, because acquisition has become a depressing mainstay of my existence. I can dignify it by restricting it to goods with high cultural capital, but that's just snobbery. Basically, Baudrillard reckons that collecting is the unsatisfying sublimated expression of unfulfilled sexual desire required by losers (later on he calls it 'a tempered form of sexual perversion'). (My friends can add their observations in the comments box). He uses Freud's terms ('the anal stage') to categorise adult collectors as men (Freudians seem utterly uninterested in women's experiences) who require orderliness and accumulation to make up for what's lacking on the sexual front, with a side-order of defensive snobbery:

It is this passionate involvement which lends a touch of the sublime to the regressive activity of collecting; it is also the basis of the view that anyone who does not collect something is ‘nothing but a moron, a pathetic human wreck’.

I used to tell people about the student many years ago who looked disdainfully at my office shelves and remarked 'You're just like my mum. She reads books and keeps them'. When I said I liked the sound of her mum, the student replied 'No, it's stupid'.  Good god, I would remark: we're admitting students who have no interest in books, knowledge, learning for its own sake'. But according to Baudrillard and Freud, she got it right. She's psychologically healthy because she doesn't need to develop strong attachments to objects, whereas I'm compensating for some lack.

Baudrillard's post-Freudian insight is that the actual object doesn't matter at all. It's the object's existence in a chain or a network of other objects which the collector will attempt to acquire (though objects never possessed are as important as those which are eventually acquired). The collector adores each individual object and simultaneously desires all the others: the objects are the occupants of a harem:

the collector loves his objects on the basis of their membership in a series, whereas the connoisseur loves his on account of their varied and unique charm, is not a decisive one.

Collecting is thus qualitative in its essence and quantitative in its practice…there is something of the harem about collecting, for the whole attraction may be summed up as that of an intimate series (one term of which is at any given time the favourite) combined with a serial intimacy.

This is of course a disturbingly gendered analogy which deserves its own critique at some point, but Baudrillard's point is that the collector maintains a degree of cognitive dissonance: when communing with one object in his collection he thinks he's monogamous, but really he's polygamous and can never stop adding to his collection. In a sense, he points out, being a collector is even easier than negotiating the complexity of human relationships.

Human relationships, home of uniqueness and conflict, never permit any such fusion of absolute singularity with infinite seriality — which is why they are such a continual source of anxiety. By contrast, the sphere of objects, consisting of successive and homologous terms, reassures.

The problem with humans is that they want things. I'm told that they have feelings, and they definitely don't do what they're told. It's very inconvenient. They have, in short, agency. This is what the collector can't deal with. Object are much better: they don't move out when you're not looking, or object to your Marmite-based perversions etc. etc. They lack agency and therefore allow you the illusion of control (an illusion because the collection is never complete). I don't know if this is true, actually. I collect things and manage to maintain cordial relations with fellow human beings. As far as I can tell I'm relatively well-adjusted to the notion that other people have agency which needs to be respected. I haven't hobbled anyone to keep them in the house for weeks.

(don't watch this if you're of a nervous disposition)



For Baudrillard, collecting is a monstrous act of egomania which makes up for the inconvenient truth that humans are hard to bend to one's own will unless you take drastic steps as depicted above.

In the plural, objects are the only entities in existence that can genuinely coexist…they all converge submissively upon me and accumulate with the greatest of ease in my consciousness.

Collecting is the defensive act of the loser:

But we must not allow ourselves to be taken in by this, nor by the vast literature that sentimentalizes inanimate objects. The ‘retreat’ involved here really is a regression, and the passion mobilized is a passion for flight.

And it's hard to disagree when you meet adult Bronies (men who collect and obsess about My Little Pony) or see them stigmatised in the appalling and misunderstood Big Bang Theory, though my feelings about that show can wait for a future entry. Here's a clip from a show which explicitly addresses the tension between functional objects and possessed objects, though its resolution (Sheldon breaks the toy he's persuaded to treat as function, against his instincts, proving him right but still a loser):

In the end, any object in a collection, and the collection as a whole (though that's not strictly possible)  is a mirror, a narcissist's fantasy:

what you really collect is always yourself.

This makes it easier to understand the structure of the system of possession: any collection comprises a succession of items, but the last in the set is the person of the collector.

The series and the collection allow the collector to integrate with his objects in a hermeneutic state of perfection. Even if you reduce your collection to one perfect example, you're still a collector, because, JB says, that object is simply a referent for every other similar object, a realised version of the Platonic ideal.

Most strikingly, Baudrillard asserts that the unobtained object is the most important one in the collection. Its value to you increases because it will (perhaps temporarily) complete your collection. That one missing book in the series, that final Zimbabwean double-A side live recording is valuable not for any intrinsic worth, but simply because you don't have it. And yet you don't really want it. It symbolises death.

One cannot but wonder whether collections are in fact meant to be completed, whether lack does not play an essential part here — a positive one, moreover, as the means whereby the subject reapprehends his own objectivity. If so, the presence of the final object of the collection would basically signify the death of the subject, whereas its absence would be what enables him merely to rehearse his death (and so exorcize it) by having an object represent it.

madness begins once a collection is deemed complete and thus ceases to centre around its absent term. 

If your psyche is completely invested in collecting, what happens when you have to stop because you've got everything? Quite often, collectors switch arbitrarily to other collections, demonstrating that the objects are worthless too them: it's the process that gives the collector meaning and value. John Laroche, the notorious orchid thief, wasn't always an orchid obsessive. First it was turtles, then fossils, lapidary, then tropical fish, collections he took up arbitrarily and dropped arbitrarily. Clearly the fossils, fish and orchids don't matter in the slightest: they're just a way of keeping score.


I don't think I'm that bad. Books are my delight, my leisure and my occupation. Music moves me emotionally. And yet: having these things is a major part of my enjoyment that I can't deny. It's true, though, that these things no longer drive me. When I was young, Cob Records would drip-feed my items I couldn't afford in one go. I happily spent more on books and music than on rent and food, to the extent that my finances were a mess. I'm no longer like that. The completist urge is still there, but paradoxically the easier it is to satisfy those desires, the less I try to. Now I can afford to buy most of what I want, I don't buy them, because the search felt more authentic than the possession. There's no pressure to find the missing Field Mice albums because I can now wave a cheque at a time of my choosing, rather than sacrifice other things to acquire them. Like I say: it's not the object that matters, though if any of you do have any Field Mice 10" and gig-only Stereolab releases, let me know.

Baudrillard knew I'd say that, by the way:

every collector who presented his collection to the viewing audience would mention the very special ‘object’ that he did not have, and invite everyone to find it for him. So, even though objects may on occasion lead into the realm of social discourse, it must be acknowledged that it is usually not an object’s presence but far more often its absence that clears the way for social intercourse.

Ultimately, collecting is a denial of mortality for anxious, ephemeral Man (again, Baudrillard universalises habits he previously noted were a male domain):

What man gets from objects is not a guarantee of life after death but the possibility, from the present moment onwards, of continually experiencing the unfolding of his existence in a controlled, cyclical mode, symbolically transcending a real existence the irreversibility of whose progression he is powerless to affect.

the object is the thing with which we construct our mourning: the object represents our own death, but that death is transcended (symbolically) by virtue of the fact that we possess the object; the fact that by introjecting it into a work of mourning — by integrating it into a series in which its absence and its re-emergence elsewhere ‘work’ at replaying themselves continually, recurrently — we succeed in dispelling the anxiety associated with absence and with the reality of death.

We collect because we cannot stop time, nor death.  Which isn't far from my personal view that on the cosmic scale of things, anything we do is merely whiling away the brief, purposeless time between black nothingnesses. So why not obsess about Smiths records? It's better than committing war crimes or voting Tory. It's not totally grim, says Baudrillard: collecting integrates onrushing death into life, thereby allowing us to live, paradoxically, because collecting expresses and is driven by desire.

While I have my reservations about Baudrillard's argument (and it's early, heavily Freudian work which he superseded), I do recognise many aspects, including this section on book collecting:

Research shows that buyers of books published in series (such as 10/18 or Que sais-je?33), once they are caught up in collecting, will even acquire titles of no interest to them: the distinctiveness of the book relative to the series itself thus suffices to create a purely formal interest which replaces any real one. The motive of purchase is nothing but this contingent association. A comparable kind of behaviour is that of people who cannot read comfortably unless they are surrounded by all their books; in such cases the specificity of what is being read tends to evaporate. Even farther down the same path, the book itself may count less than the moment when it is put back in its proper place on the shelf. Conversely, once a collector’s enthusiasm for a series wanes it is very difficult to revive, and now he may not even buy volumes of genuine interest to him. This is as much evidence as we need to draw a clear distinction between serial motivation and real motivation. The two are mutually exclusive and can coexist only on the basis of compromise, with a notable tendency, founded on inertia, for serial motivation to carry the day over the dialectical motivation of interest.

Put simply: sometimes my desire for completion overcomes my acknowledge lack of interest in a book's intrinsic artistic worth. It's offensive and decadent, especially in a time of deprivation, and yet I still do it.

There's a lot more to Baudrillard's argument, but too much of it is structured by a crude sexual division which makes me uncomfortable, and I strongly suspect I've outstayed my welcome. If you've got this far: thank you. I doff my hat to you. Here's Baudrillard's parting shot for people like me (and you?)

…he collects objects that in some way always prevent him from regressing into the ultimate abstraction of a delusional state, but at the same time the discourse he thus creates can never — for the very same reason — get beyond a certain poverty and infantilism.

So if non- collectors are indeed ‘nothing but morons’, collectors, for their part, invariably have something impoverished and inhuman about them.

Confessions of a record collector part 1

As you've probably gathered, I'm fiercely anti-capitalist and have no truck with materialism and consumerism. I rip visible labels from my garments, ignore fashion and look down upon acquisitiveness.

At exactly the same time, I am a snob and slightly obsessive about certain disposable goods. I have a vintage Moulton bicycle and a modern Forme road bike rather than one I could have bought in Halfords. I've used Apple Macintosh computers for 15 years despite knowing the company's as exploitative as any other, I have a Mont Blanc pen and couple of pairs of Church shoes.

But this hypocrisy pales in comparison with my major consumerist habits: collecting books and records. I used to avoid the word 'collecting' because it reminds me of butterfly-collectors, who kill the things they love, turning vital creatures into stiff decoration. But it fits. I buy books and music primarily for use, but it's true too that I also acquire them for other reasons: to complete a set, for instance, or because of their rarity value. There are books and records in my collection which frankly aren't very good, and others which I know I'll never read, read again, or listen to again. But without them, I'd feel like something was missing. At some point the thrill of finding something rare disappeared, to be replaced by the determination to complete a set: it's well known that a lot of obsessive bird watchers don't care about birds per se, they just want to complete the set. Hence too the particularly destructive nature of birds' egg collectors. The more they collect, the more rare the bird, the more important it is to get the egg until there aren't any left.

It's important to me to buy vinyl records too. Yes, they sound better and look better, but I'm pretty certain that I like them partly because I think they're cool and a minority pursuit, just like the Moulton (which looks and operates differently from 'normal' bikes). There's a cultural cachet to vinyl which will only increase as music becomes entirely divorced from physical media, whether or not the actual music is any good or not: I gain a small amount of cultural capital from my collection. Even more pointlessly, I have CD or electronic copies of a lot of it too, so holding on to the vinyl is mostly sentiment.

This makes me a better capitalist than people just buying branded goods on the high street. My books and records are what I use to define myself in a postmodernist in which the self is a performance of decentred fluidity. This means that there can never be an end point to collecting. Whereas the search for a great pair of shoes ends when I find it, there are always more records or books to collect: I'm always looking for music on the Caroline and Fierce Panda labels, for instance, whether they're any good or not: just like a kid collecting football stickers. Limited editions, side-projects, picture discs, overseas releases: all the tricks they can come up with work on me.

The first thing I do on entering someone else's house is go through their music and book collections or note the absence thereof. I assume it's what people do to me. In fact, just such an experience made me think about this. One of my friends came round to the flat for the first time, after we'd been out drinking. He drunkenly staggered round the bookshelves and then explained that as he's in his mid-fifties and therefore closer to death, he'd embarked on a purge of unread and unwanted books. He understood the performative nature of collecting, but he'd moved onto a new stage of collecting, in which mortality looms large. He started to think about whether he'd actually read these things before he died, and if not, whether they simply served as props in a performance of intellectuality. Yes, this is how we talk about things when we're drunk.

Thankfully, however, we're not alone. Plenty of interesting thinkers have considered the nature of ownership and collection. I've always considered obsessive collecting a predominantly male activity: there's not a lot of difference between tracking down the Belgian release of a Field Mice single and bagging that last bird/registration number/elusive 218 Loco serial number. I do know plenty of women who collect records and books, but don't think I've ever seen a female trainspotter or twitcher.

Walter Benjamin's essay 'Unpacking My Library' (1931) is about how he feels while he unboxes his enormous book haul after moving house. Faced with the evidence of his habit, he tries to explain what it feels like to be a collector. To him, his library is a 'fragments, stored against my ruin' as TS Eliot wrote in another context. The books are the past, and they are an attempt to establish some kind of order in a disordered universe. Yet the collection is also chaotic: nobody can acquire every book, or perfectly order those s/he has. It's bound to be partial and incomplete – even the Catalogue must be incomplete, unless it includes itself as a constituent (and that's a philosophical conundrum I'm going to leave well alone) and it's quickly outdated.

Benjamin talks of the 'enchantment' of collecting: finding the right things, putting them into their rightful order and place. But he also talks of the 'thrill of acquisition' and of ownership – it's a way of imposing the Will on the world in a small way, I suppose. Everything that makes up the collected object has a teleology, a destiny, and for that collector, it's becoming owned by that individual: 'the most important fate of a copy is its encounter with him, with his collection'. This is true of course for me: my collection is unique because the things I've collected will never exist side-by-side anywhere else, ever. Each collection reinterprets the world through the items collected, or as Benjamin puts it, 'renews' the world in the same way that children renew the world by painstakingly acquiring new skills.

Benjamin has a head start of course: he points out that the best way to acquire books, particularly the ones that should exist but don't, is to write them. For the rest of us, getting hold of others' work will have to do. He also admires the collector who borrows books and never returns them: it's a kind of heroic rejection of legal and social claims of ownership, particularly if he doesn't actually read them. This is because this person gets to the heart of the collecting psyche: use is irrelevant to the collector. What does the train spotter do with his list of numbers? Nothing: it's the wrong question to ask. Possessing them is what's important. Not that it's put that baldly: Benjamin phrases it rather more delicately:

To the book collector, you see, the true freedom of all books is somewhere on his shelves.

Finally, Benjamin turns to the collector's unwilling purchase of books. If one must actually buy them, then there are special ways to do so. It's the same for me with books and records. I'd hate it if the rare vinyl I wanted was easily acquired, in a shop or online place. The hunting is the key part: wandering away from the high street to some dingy back room; having the patience to go through an unpromising, disorganised box; checking the serial numbers in case it's the wrong one; braving the scorn of the patronising shopkeeper; abrading one's fingers on the protective sleeve; clutching your find tight lest the hunter next to you pounces on the pile that you think signifies choices and he thinks is fair game. Disappointments too are part of the experience, reminding you that chasing acquisitions requires both emotional highs and lows. So is the judicious disbursement of money, and the saving thereof. What could be more boring than seeing what you want and simply having the cash to hand to buy it? It's having to leave things behind that makes what you do buy seem special. I've heard of people cornering the market in things like rare blues records and it sickens me: just because they can afford to, they've grabbed everything that's out there. There should be some kind of spiritual test before they're allowed to own anything (and I would definitely) ban 'investors' and corporations from owning Stradivarius instruments and paintings destined for the vaults. I might not play my C-Pij 7" very often but at least I appreciate it without caring about what it might be worth one day.

Finally, Benjamin turns to the collection-as-time-machine. Every time he picks up a book he remembers where he got it, what he was like then, the places in which he read them. The text is irrelevant by this stage: the book as object is the equivalent of Proust's madeleine. The same is true of my books and records. It would be, in a sense, dishonest to dispose of those I no longer enjoy because they were once enjoyed by that older version of me. I'm stuck with him, or rather don't want to repudiate his dreadful taste in lo-fi, sword-and-sorcery epics or ultra-leftist propaganda papers. I might not be able to face them again, but I don't want to pretend they never played a part in making me me.

Enough. Tomorrow, part 2: collecting, death and Baudrillard.

A preview of a record I haven't listened to yet.

I got Euros Childs' ninth solo album last week, Situation Comedy. It's on double-vinyl, spread across three sides, in a lovely gatefold package. As consumer fetish items go, it's lovely. Every time I buy one of his albums, it comes with a personal note, which is wonderful, though it makes me worry that he doesn't have enough fans to make personal notes unviable. And this delightful touch is clearly an attempt to remedy the implied impersonality of the exchange too: it highlights one of capitalism's problems. Which made me think about things more closely, as you'll see if you read on…

What's the music like? No idea. I haven't taken it home to play it yet. But in a sense, that's beside the point. You see, I buy most of my music on vinyl when it's available. There are a number of reasons why: mostly for the romance of it. When I started buying music as a fresh-faced, well, fresher, the local shop was Cob Records. It mostly sold vinyl because it mostly sold indie, prog and Welsh-language stuff. Vinyl was cheap, and it was rather conservative way of asserting difference to (from?) the shiny consumer futurism of CDs. Britpop's nostalgic element fuelled the vinyl craze, releasing multiple versions of songs on coloured vinyl at 99p each, all 'limited edition' which just fuelled my completism. I loved the sleeves, the numbers, the little messages on the run-off grooves, the ritual of placing the needle on the disc and getting up to turn over a record. I have at least 20,000 circular oil-based discs in my flat now, too many to play particularly often.

I can't claim that sound quality was foremost for me: I was using a cheap early 1970s record player with horrible speakers connected with cables thinner than shoelaces. By the mid-2000s I'd acquired my parents' 1985 Sony hi-fi but that wasn't much better. I've only had a decent-ish system for a couple of years now. No, in all honesty, I bought vinyl because I thought it was cool, and because it didn't feel as acquisitive as 'mainstream' consumption. Which it is, of course. It's the 'leftfield dollar', as Bill Hicks would no doubt call it: self-deluding hipsters eagerly hoovering up resistance on a pressed black disc.

But at least in those days, I could claim that vinyl was a mainstream, respectable format rather than purely a fetish object. When I unwrapped Situation Comedy last week, I realised that something had changed. The record player isn't just a slightly hypocritical act of lame defiance with which I can live, it really is a betrayal of modernity. Why? Well, I'm used to LPs now coming with a slip of paper bearing a download code, so that I can get the music on my computer and iPod. It's an explicit, if slightly shameful, recognition on the part of musician, record label and listener that the slab of vinyl is meaningless. It's virtually never going to be used. It's a luxury item whose semiotic meanings (time, luxury, conspicuous superiority over those oiks downloading ragged Rihanna MP3s) have completely overwhelmed the format's use-value. That sneaky bit of paper implies that even the most purist music snobs are actually going to dismember the album into its constituent parts and listen to random songs on Shuffle. If not, then at least it's going to be played on the bus, in the gym or used as background to washing-up or solitary self-abuse. Whatever.

What gave me pause with Situation Comedy is that no slip of paper fluttered out of the packaging and it bothered me. Who does Euros Childs think he is? He's written a set of songs which he wants me to settle down and listen to in order, from beginning to end. It's possible to skip songs on an LP but it's a bit fiddly. At the end of each side, you have to get up, lift the needle, turn the record over, put the needle back on the disc and start up the player again. In case that becomes too automatic, Childs has left a side blank, so that if you unthinkingly drop the needle on that side, you'll get a foul screeching noise and the pristine smoothness will be forever scratched.

It's a brave thing to do. Childs has decided that his art is no longer to be the soundtrack for other activities, it's to be an event in itself. The album is available on CD too, of course, or you can download it for free here, but the stand-alone LP implies that for those of us reactionary enough to insist on a heritage format, we'll have to really commit to the experience. Without the download option, it's no longer a postmodern joke: paying close attention to the aural and physical album is our only option. It is, in a sense, an implied challenge to we vinyl fans: face the consequences of what might have seemed an easy choice. Though one could of course argue that offering the MP3s for free is a coded critique of the downloader: buying the vinyl means buying restriction, commitment, time and attention. Downloading the music for free is to acquire something which is going to be pulled apart and treated like junk food. In a sense, paying Euros Childs for an untransferable format like vinyl is an investment in oneself.

Walter Benjamin wrote about this nexus of experience and feelings in 1936, in 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction'. In it, he differentiated between the experience of viewing a painting and viewing a photograph of a painting. To him, every further reproduction distances the consumer from the 'aura' of an authentic piece of art. Into this space, he suggests, is silently introduced an authoritarian dullness: without the immediate experience of the artwork, we're at the mercy of the reproducer's choices and intentions, while we develop an unhealthy reverence for the artist of the 'original' piece of work. A Monet painting, it seems, is only worth millions because we're all overly-familiar with postcard reproductions. Although there are positives to the loss of 'aura', Benjamin worries that by becoming captivated by the process of mechanical reproduction (the wonder of CDs, vinyl, or moving pictures), we're abandoning the ability to enjoy or appreciate an artwork autonomously or subjectively.

To Benjamin, the vinyl record is merely a mechanical reproduction of a real event. It isn't as good, and it has different qualities. If Euros Childs had been around in 1936, the 'event' would have been his performance, and the recorded versions a pale imitation (though the divergence between live recording and the production of music designed to be listened to on any format adds another layer of complexity: some records can never be performed live). Yet the act of listening to the record in other situations would have had a very different meaning to the act of experiencing the live creation of music in a concert hall or studio.

In the 1980s, Jean Baudrillard returned to Benjamin's theme with his notions of simulation and simulacra. To him, postmodern society had interposed layers of imitation between itself and reality, to the extent that 'reality' had been replaced, or even sought to imitate the imitation (Apple's use until recently of paper-and-leather-effect skeuomorphism, I think, betrayed a certain discomfort with simulation, while ironically and accidentally distancing us even further from 'authentic' paper and leather).

When vinyl was the only available format, it was a 'first-order' simulation: a recognisable illusion standing in for the 'real' event, the original performance. The closest one could get, having missed the concert or wanting to hear it again. With increasing technical wizardry, the LP became a second-order simulation, so all-encompassing and convincing that it both pays homage to and threatens to overwhelm the 'real' – such as when the music heard on a record couldn't possibly be performed in real-time. Finally, in the postmodern period, then vinyl record becomes a third-order simulation, in which it appears to be both real and non-real, leaving behind any concern for authenticity and reality.

I doubt they'd agree, but I think Situation Comedy is both a third-order simulation and an attempt to deal with the loss of 'aura' in Benjamin's terms. Because Euros hasn't included a handy download for convenience, he's insisting that the experience of listening to his music becomes more 'real': it demands that I set aside time, that I pay attention to the physical object, to the grooves and the end of each side, that I listen to each song in the order its composer ordained. Yet at the same time, because a mechanically-reproduced event becomes my aim, the musician's original performance disappears completely. I chose not to have a CD, and therefore chose to add the complications and delights of vinyl. The experience was meaningless when only vinyl was available: so to choose it over CD or a download is to insist that the music is actually less important than the experience of the format.

I'm sure that Situation Comedy is a superb album, because Euros Childs' music always is. But what seemed like a slightly nostalgic decision actually turns out to be more complicated than I thought. And not entirely one as anti-capitalist and rebellious as I thought! Will I get the free download and solve all my cultural problems? Maybe, but not yet: having committed to the vinyl and the listening experience it demands, I'll at least go home, drop the needle and pay proper attention first.

Anyway, if you've got this far, you deserve some kind of reward. Here's some Euros Childs, starting with the single from Situation Comedy.





Here are a couple of tracks from Euros's first band, Gorky's Zygotic Mynci, as a teenager. True to form, I have it on 10" vinyl…



My favourite GZM song. Always cheers me up:

A collage of teenage idiocy

To keep me away from F••k Off I'm Fat and similarly awful evening TV, I've found myself photographing my record collection, bit by bit, starting with the 7" vinyl singles. One day I'll even digitise them, as quite a few don't exist electronically. It's a record mostly of my gullibility: faced with the combined opinions of NME and the staff at Cob Records of Bangor (RIP), I bought pretty much anything they recommended.

Of the 250 I've snapped so far (we're just about into the Cs), I can't remember what quite a few of them sound like, while others just make me cringe. WHY did I buy a Cranberries single? Still, no censorship: teenage/early-20s me made those choices and I'll have to live with them. It's rather exciting rediscovering gems like Against Country Teasers, though it's sad too: all those hopeful bright young things who thought they'd conquer the world, and didn't. Sad too when I remember the 400 records I had to sell one summer to pay the rent - it's like a smile with missing teeth. Like Ash's 'Uncle Pat', 'Petrol' and Japanese-release of 'Punk Boy', their best songs. Gone.





Still, I've still a fine collection of lovely ephemera: picture discs and coloured vinyl and hopelessly optimistic 'limited editions', inserts, art prints, the lot. A whole subculture fossilised in my flat.

Anyway, as a collage (see the whole thing so far here), they look rather beautiful. If you want to relive the mid-90s, go to the Flickr page and find (most of) these tracks on Youtube. At least one person has already started this cultural odyssey.

As a taster, here's 'Glass Static', by Assembly Line People Program. Who didn't make it. Their 'Noise Vision' (second row, far right) is TRANS001, the first release on Blur guitarist Graham Coxon's Transcopic label. 

If any of you still doubted my trainspottery maleness, that should do the trick.  

Record/heart breaker

Some Chilean Woman posted this picture, amongst others.

I want it. And I can buy it, here. You should too!