sangsara.net

Tag: Vinyl

  • Week 1.26

    Week 1.26

    There was no New Year’s Eve hangover and if we’re being honest, there hasn’t been one for many years. We read in bed until midnight with the usual Mediacorp countdown broadcast left on in the background — “Are you readyyyyy Singaporeeeee?” and many more examples of amateur MC energy.

    Last week I should have mentioned that this new buying and enjoying of analog recordings is really related to themes I’ve been touching on over the past year. How imperfect translations (and in this case, physically vulnerable reproductions of music) can carry more emotional value, along with how friction — the thing we spend so much time trying to iron out of our products and services — actually adds tactility and affordances that the human mind kinda likes. When everything works perfectly, when the surfaces are too seamless, the mind only gets bored and seeks trouble.

    Me getting into music ownership again is definitely a form of seeking trouble. I posted a couple of times on Instagram about this new hobby and Stacy pointed me to a record sale going on this weekend in the basement of The Adelphi, an old shopping center mostly known for its hi-fi focus. I stopped by and bought three LPs that already bend the rules I set out for myself last week.

    One of them was Beth Gibbons and Rustin Man’s 2002 masterpiece, Out of Season. I gasped out loud when I came across it in the crate, and immediately pulled it out so no one else could buy it first. That thrill, and the experience of browsing the mall’s other record shops afterwards, was a nostalgic return to the days I would spend hours in CD stores after school. Yesterday was probably the first time in 20 years that I’d set foot in a local music store — after the iPod and streaming quality got good enough, I simply stopped. I’ve definitely missed it, even though it’s logically ridiculous to be buying when I could just tap ‘Add to Library’ in Apple Music instead.

    In one of those stores, I ended up having a long and wide-ranging conversation with the shopkeeper about record collecting, hip-hop, local music stores we patronized in the 1990s, HK films, and the celebrities who’ve now become Singapore citizens. I told him straight out that I was a beginner when it came to vinyl, and that his inventory was too hardcore for me: audiophile collector’s editions starting at $150 and up to $700 for a 90s pop album I saw, but he didn’t seem to mind. When I described my journey back to buying physical music after 20 years, from having the idea a few months ago to getting a turntable for Christmas, he laughed. “Die lah.”

    So where do things stand since last week’s initial purchase of 9 albums? I bought five more records and… inherited around 20 more (!) from my parents. There were some real gems, like Bowie’s Heroes and The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. My mom found them in a drawer where they’ve sat untouched since the 1980s, and my dad told us a few stories as he handed them over. One of them is a signed copy of Ralph McTell’s Streets of London, which he got directly from the man in Glasgow one time. He was a sailor then, and one of his shipmates was friends with McTell. They met up with him at a pub when they pulled into town, where McTell got a hero’s welcome and free drinks all night. He wrote my dad an accompanying message on the sleeve, one that would be considered racist by today’s standards, but was meant as a compliment along the lines of “I didn’t know you Chinese guys could drink”.

    The others I bought in shops this week: Lorde’s Solar Power, Maggie Rogers’ Surrender, Oscar Peterson At Carnegie, and Eric Dolphy At The Five Spot.

    There’s one more record that I’d love to have someday, and that’s J Dilla’s Donuts. I’ve started reading Dan Charnas’s Dilla Time, a journalistic biography of the late producer and his lasting impact on modern music, and Apple Music’s extensive catalog of his posthumously compiled beats and finished songs is keeping me company while I do. So the vinyl can wait.

    I’m totally stopping here for the time being. It’s a pattern I know too well, getting caught up in the building of a collection and neglecting the part where I actually enjoy it. The collection soon becomes a backlog. An albatross. Don’t call it a new year’s resolution, but I’ll be trying to spend more time with the things I’ve got. Unfortunately, I’m beginning to feel that maybe the B&O speaker isn’t quite good enough…

    Anyway, I thought I should list the albums of 2025 that I enjoyed the most, so here are ten picks I can stand behind.

    Ps: We stumbled upon a BOOK•OFF pop-up at The Heeren. I guess they thought to try selling some of the more popular weeb items from Japan at even more inflated prices? Unfortunately nothing much I found interesting. Part of the appeal of the -OFF shops is the crate and junkpile digging, looking for gold in a giant closet. A corner of curated items isn’t the same thing.

  • Week 52.25

    Week 52.25

    Merry Christmas! For my main gift, I received a turntable, something that I’ve been very conflicted about wanting for awhile. Apart from the fatal hipster embarrassment, I know that the urge to repurchase all my favorite albums on vinyl is a road to financial ruin.

    Back in February, I was on the lookout for a CD player to bring home from Tokyo, but decided against it because digital streaming is identical, if not superior in the case of lossless and Spatial Audio, and I couldn’t see many instances where I would bother to get up and pop a CD on instead of just call out a request to my HomePod. And HomePods don’t accept Bluetooth or line-in audio, so I’d have to use my Sony soundbar or buy a third speaker for the living room. Too much hassle!

    But vinyl, goddamnit, just barely dodges the killing blow of that logical argument by having a different value proposition. One, the physical LPs are more collectible, more beautiful, more mentally stimulating in a world that wants to turn itself into ephemeral bits. People say that intentionally putting on a record for close listening deepens your connection with the music over just tapping a link. Two, the audio characteristics of an all-analog reproduction chain are surely different from digital. So if you can, why not have both options for home enjoyment? Three, it’s just kinda cool?

    So I asked Santa for an Audio-Technica LP70X, which has the option of Bluetooth output. I briefly considered buying one of those Marshall speakers to pair it with, but the idea was so cringe I couldn’t face it. Besides, that would nullify point No. 2 — why bother if you’re going to digitize it? So I hooked it up to an unused B&O Beolit 12 speaker (which has unceremoniously served as a stand for our bedroom HomePod mini for years) via RCA cable instead. Voila, money saved that can be used for buying records!

    But first, guardrails were needed. I decided that I would only buy absolute masterpiece, timeless, desert island discs. No new pop/rock stuff that wouldn’t benefit much from the analog format. And that my collection would 95% focus on jazz. The exceptions are things like LUX and J Dilla’s Donuts, maybe.

    After some laborious rewiring, we got it set up on Saturday and played some records that Kim bought as souvenirs many years ago. Radiohead’s OK Computer was one of them, and while I suspect much of it is down to the different speakers’ sound profiles, the analog version is bassier and warmer. When the HomePod plays a lossless digital version of the same song, it has an incredible immersive quality, so clear and bright that the band could be in the same room. A film camera versus iPhone’s computational photography. Room for both.

    Anyhow, it’s been wayyyy too addictive browsing records on Amazon — and the ones that ship from Japan are usually much cheaper than the US versions. Here’s what’s on the way but please recommend me your faves!

    1. Miles Davis – Kind of Blue
    2. Vince Guaraldi Trio – A Charlie Brown Christmas
    3. John Coltrane – A Love Supreme: The Complete Masters
    4. John Coltrane – Blue Train
    5. Chet Baker – Chet Baker Sings
    6. Ornette Coleman – The Shape of Jazz to Come
    7. Bill Evans Trio – Sunday at the Village Vanguard
    8. Bill Evans Trio – Waltz for Debby
    9. Sonny Rollins – Saxophone Colossus

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    While we’re out here talking about physical artifacts and meaningful rituals, I want to point out that this final post of the year is also the 287th weekly update on this blog. About five and a half years of regular writing — all because I started one week with no idea how long I would keep going, just the hope that it would help me to write more often than a couple of times a year. Today, this weekly blogging of things that captured my attention has become my most meaningful routine, and produces a living artifact that I find quite valuable.

    Writing is thinking, and so putting time aside to articulate your feelings and actions, and reflect on the patterns within them, might be the best way to understand and recalibrate your own life. You don’t have to blog in public; journaling works too. Several times a year, I find myself reading an old post that I’d completely forgotten about, and recognize that something happening with me in the present began with something further back.

    Mark Curtis, one of the co-founders of Fjord where I once worked, has just started a Substack called Full Moon with a partner, and in their latest post suggest that everyone should start a habit of “externalizing their thinking”, because a personal archive of written thoughts and ideas has new applications with today’s LLMs. Having such a corpus can be an asset, and not just for training a soulless version of yourself who goes to work for the corpos while you stay home and watch vids. One thing generative AIs do well is find patterns across large amounts of data, and so with journal entries they provide a means of browsing your own brain over time.

    No stranger to this idea, I assigned Claude to read all 51 posts of the year so far, looking out for trends and threads that I might not have seen while posting in real time. What came back had a hint of that AI voice, but contained a helpful synthesis of several threads. Let me explain in my own words rather than simply paste the results.

    There were several recurring themes and obsessions, for instance deaths and funerals earlier on in the year, and it linked those to some musings on age and mortality when I started to feel old around my birthday, and when I recently said I should watch my purine intake for fear of developing gout.

    It suggested that I was doing something meaningful by making plans to meet up with people during this sabbatical, and that keeping in touch with ex-colleagues and helping grade college students’ presentations was part of staying connected to design culture and “keeping the ladder down”. There were also many words dedicated to creative experiments; chasing after the beauty in imperfections, from film grain to mistranslations; and of course, AI concerns.

    From that overarching theme, I ended up musing about the vulnerability of the junior designer pipeline, the commercial pressure to abandon not only proven methods but our values, and the dissonance caused by being a regular user of AI tools while knowing they come at some unknown but surely high cost.

    It also provided some insights into how I spent my time, calling it an attempt at presence over productivity. I certainly didn’t do any work I didn’t care about! I recall saying in Week 26.25, as I revisited my CliftonStrengths profile, that my natural inclination is to hate keeping busy and productive for the sake of it. I recently wrote something down in my notebook that sums up that energy: “I take tremendous joy in being able to do quite a few things extremely well and yet choosing to do none of them.” Perhaps underachieving is my passion.

    More acts of presence: I went overseas for about two months out of the year and chose a slow “daily life” approach over hitting up a flurry of tourist attractions. I deleted a bunch of games off my backlog — if it doesn’t spark joy, I decided, then I don’t have to finish it. I fell into a Japanese curry “research” rabbit hole in the first half, and now it’s sardines. I managed to make more time for reading, and am now starting on my 52nd book of the year, which is quite a nice achievement even if some entries were short stories and novellas.

    The last book I read was so good that I’m making it recommended reading for everyone who comes by here.* Make Something Wonderful: Steve Jobs in his own words is a free ebook by the Steve Jobs Archive, collecting in chronological order various speeches, emails, and interviews he gave. It’s not so much about Apple the company as it is about his views, spirit, and character that famously evolved between his ouster from that company and his triumphant return.

    I read it on the plane back from China, and maybe I was coming off an emotionally taxing time, but I had to stop reading several times because my eyes were tearing up. Don’t discount the beautifully cosmic coincidence of an adopted boy landing in the right family at just the right time in Silicon Valley. The result was that the whole world now enjoys thoughtful personal computers anyone can use. In another universe where the Mac never existed, there’d probably be no Windows either, and likely no smartphones as we know them.

    If you’ve ever heard him speak, you’ll hear his voice in all of these snippets. He had a way of keeping the forest in view, and often framed smaller moments (and even human life) against a vast span of time: what we’re doing here as a species, how it matters when we make things for each other, and thereby why we must carefully choose where we spend our time.

    *I’ll take this year-end opportunity to say thanks for reading, whether this is your first visit or you’ve been here all along. I get messages sometimes, and it’s always gratifying to hear something was a useful tip or interesting to someone else. Happy new year!

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    I almost forgot. My seventh BLixTape playlist is done! Add it on Apple Music.