Actively Listening (to Music)

The romanticised view of what happened, that I will probably come to adopt, is that I decided I'd listen to more music, decided I'd get into Vinyl, bought a separates system, and now find myself listening to more music. Bravo, me!

In reality, I was so invested in the Wayfarer hype train as a result of them putting out two stunning records in succession that I went out and bought them both on Vinyl. This was an odd move considering that I didn't have any means to play Vinyl. And so I decided to look into getting a hi-fi set up of my own. This took many months of research and talking to the local record shop owner. He shared with me his "pitch" for why someone should listen to Vinyl on a proper hi-fi set up (he was fully aware of his vested interest in his tale) and it was this: Vinyl forces us to actively listen to the music (because you need to flip the record every 20-or-so minutes) and so you can't really end up grazing the music. The packaging with Vinyl tends to come with a reasonable liner/content that you get yourself fully immersed as you listen.

I was sold going in. And double sold coming out.

So, here I am with a reasonable hi-fi but a pretty limited Vinyl collection so far. Now, the reality is that I'm not going to have hundreds of records overnight and exclusively listen to Vinyl since I have Apple Music and access to my whole listening history.

But I've been able to carve out what I think will prove to be one of the most important parts of this process: the active listening.

I've started following various reviewers and talking to old friends about music recommendations and have found myself carving out time to listen rather than it just being secondary to something else I'm doing (walking the dog, driving somewhere).

There's an experiential element to listening on a real hi-fi that isn't there on headphones. I have some reasonable noise-cancelling in-ear headphones which represented a massive step-up from where I was, but listening with speakers, in a dedicated space, with a decent amp just hits different. The combination of the moving air and the fact that I'm there solely to experience this ~hour of music has made it beautiful.

I've always loved music. I've always listened, but it's become such a passive, mindless activity that I quickly came to realise: I've really missed actively listening to a record.

Here's to a year of new music and headspace.