Despite the ever-rising popularity of vinyl and the resilience of the album format, it’s impossible to tell if there is a corresponding rise in ‘focused listening’ at home - the idea of putting the record on, sitting back on the sofa and just - listening.
It’s really quite hard to do. Harder than it should be. Even if you really love music, it's too easy to have a guilt complex for immersing ourselves undistracted in the 40 minutes it takes to get through an album end-to-end.*
There is a growing trend for focused listening sessions outside of our humble abodes. To learn the habit of listening better, we need to get out more. Every week there are album playbacks and listening parties, sometimes for a modest ticket price and sometimes totally free of charge. These are hosted by labels, artist management/PR teams or brands.
Last Friday I had the pleasure of attending one at the KEF Music Gallery on Great Portland Street. The album was Michael Kiwanuka’s highly anticipated ‘Small Changes’, played through a surround sound setup like I’ve never heard before, in the KEF ‘cinema room’. Listening from start to finish, you can either choose to focus hard on the sounds (the details will blow your senses apart) or just drift off into a trance. I oscillated between the two altered states. The album is brilliant of course, a modern classic. But to be introduced to it in this way really was special. You can sign up for details of future events.
There are a few well established ‘experience brands’ out there that make an event out of focused listening away from home. I’ve written about Pitchblack Playback before, and would heartily recommend it.
More traditional in spirit is Classic Album Sundays. Founded by DJ Colleen ‘Cosmo’ Murphy in 2010, with the intention of promoting the enjoyment of true listening as the age of digital took hold, CAS is still going strong. In her introductions to each intimate event, Colleen often talks about the culture of communal listening - sharing the joy of a record together like we used to, back when there was less of…everything.
I attended a session last week - back at KEF again but on the shop floor this time. It was the funk-electronic classic Penthouse & Pavement, the debut album of Heaven 17 (ranked the fifth best album of 1981 by NME). A playback (on vinyl of course) through ultra high end KEF speakers was preceded by a fun and often fascinating chat between Colleen and keyboard player/songwriter Martin Ware. The two had clearly done this routine a few times before.
My favourite insight here was a reminder that side one of the record was electro-funk, inspired by Motown, James Brown and Chic, whereas side two gives way to hardcore, stripped down electronics. For side one, a then 17 year old black (in Sheffield, in 1981) waiter John Wilson was recruited (from the local catering company) to play bass and rhythm guitar. He turned out to be a prodigy who could play lead bass riffs and funk guitar like Nile Rodgers and Bernhard Edwards combined into one, albeit on cheap copy instruments.
Lyrically the album features themes such as faceless capitalism, fascist politics, nuclear warfare and the cold war arms race and as such is shockingly contemporary not just in the way it sounds. And it sounded fantastic.
Classic Album Sundays makes you realise the amount of work that goes into making an album (all the records played are de facto, classics) by both accident and design. The little insights fascinate and entice the listening experience. The power of context. Most of all it reminds you to listen, both as a fan, an appreciator of the art form - a sort of antidote to the distractions you get at home.
Album listening sessions have been trending up since the pandemic - both IRL and online. Bandcamp has made a success of online album listening parties and these are firmly in the marketing plans of indie releases on the platform. Tim Burgess was bang on trend during the pandemic with his enormously popular “Tim’s Twitter Listening Party” (now ironically on Absolute Radio and as a podcast). Although it’s not quite as dynamic as a radio format, it’s still a joy.
Which brings me to Hangout. Hangout is the latest music streaming service to launch, with music licences from all three majors. There’s too much to say about it here, but the proposition could not be more different from the intimate in-person experience of Classic Album Sundays.
Whether or not communal listening will find a place online is still to be seen. Spotify Jams has been available for sometime, if troubled by glitches. But my sense is that it is not an innovation that’s moved any needles for the streaming service.
So, in myriad ways, listening sessions are in the ascendant, despite all the modern world fractionalisation of social media and busy lives. An antidote to rushing through your life is everywhere around you. If you are yet to participate I would strongly suggest you get involved and start enjoying your music on a completely different level. It’s good for you and ultimately for artists and record makers.
A music habit worth acquiring.
* Try it! I appreciate that not everyone has a set up at home that can open up the possibility for focused listening, either privately or communally. If you house share, when was the last time you sat around listening together to an album?
The Art Of Listening series is also on the Featured Artists Coalition webpages.