I’d just made two cups of tea when Mark Radcliffe on Radio 2 said he was putting on an Avi Buffalo song whose seven and a half minutes would take him up to the end of his show at 10pm. I was turning around, tea in hand and on my way out of the kitchen as the intro played.
In the first couple of seconds of the song I thought to myself “Oh, I’ll search online for Avi Buffalo when I’ve sat down and I can listen to it then,” but then without thinking at all I just stopped in the doorway, and stood there for about thirty seconds as the dreamy, chiming guitar led into melancholic, sun-dappled wistfulness, like Stereolab created in California. Then I turned back around, walked over to the kettle and put the two cups of tea down and stood there for the next 6 minutes listening to the great song. “Astonishing,” said Radcliffe when it was finished.
Then I took the warm-ish tea through to the living room and told my wife, Kate, “I’ve just heard an amazing song,” and looked it up online. Avi Buffalo have a website here where you can listen to lots of their stuff, but I eventually found their song Remember Last Time on Soundcloud, as an official upload by their label Subpop. Then I listened to it another five times! Six if you count the one I’m listening to right now as I write this!
Whether or not you like the song isn’t the point here. It’s that the online music world is so amazingly extensive and complete and instantaneous that it’s easy to forget how important something so simple as the radio is.
When I was a kid I always thought songs sounded better on the radio, and sometimes I still do. Sound nerds will probably tell me it’s because of compression, or punch, or loudness in modern production techniques, but really it’s because of timeliness, serendipity and immediacy. If you’re in the room when something great starts playing, it;s very hard to break that magnetic pull and walk away from it. And in a car, wow, that’s even better. In a car you have nowhere to go, so when a CHOON comes on the radio all you can do is open the windows and drive faster.
I wrote this because I couldn’t remember a time in the last couple of years when hearing a song has so clearly physically stopped me in the middle of what I was doing so I could listen to it. I spend a lot of time at a computer with background music on headphones while I work, or in the middle of a soundscape of clashing stereos as various floors and departments at my creative agency try to make their musical tastes heard. It’s really nice sometimes to get back to the purity of listening to music for its own sake.