It was the end of an era recently, as I moved diskant.net off to a retirement home. Having been my first website, almost a full-time job for many years and my main email address it’s been an enormous changeover. It was time though, as not only have all the diskant writers moved on to their own new projects and lives but my relationship with music has changed a lot. While I still listen to music every day, I no longer read any music blogs or magazines, don’t buy many new records and there are only a very few bands I make the effort to go and see live. I even threw out my barely-functioning stereo a year ago and packed away my record player leaving me with just my laptop and iPhone.
But with all the diskant moving, I suddenly missed listening to records so badly. Unfortunately, I still don’t have room for a proper stereo setup so instead I picked up one of these. Yeah, that’s a £30 record player with in-built speakers. As you can imagine it’s terrible. However, it’s perfectly decent for listening to lo-fi indie records, which make up the majority of my collection and it handles 80s pop pretty well too. And for anything else, stick some headphones in and it’s much better.
And so I totally feel like a teenager again. I’ve been playing all my favourite 7″s when I get up in the morning and rummaging through my shelves of albums for things so obscure you can’t even rebuy them as mp3s. It’s been glorious. And then last night, I remembered I’d packed away a selection of special records in to my carry box! So many things I’d forgotten about.
I realise this all makes me sound horribly old, but there’s really nothing like putting a 7″ record on repeat. iTunes just can’t compare. If you’ve never tried it, maybe you should!
