CONFESSION OF SOUND (OF CONFESSION)

spinning: "every good girl." curve.

it's always interesting to see the way someone else arranges their music around them. one boy i knew briefly awhile ago on a bulletin board i frequented was trying to build some method of storage so that he could have his vinyl, CDs, cassettes, and even 8-tracks all together, mixed up in whatever order he felt was appropriate. i have no idea how he'd go about doing this without a whole bunch of wasted space, but it's an interesting premise. particularly if you're keen on keeping your groups together and they Span Formats, no matter what other order you might be keeping them in.

and you and i also have a very similar relationship to memory. although i think that might be why i don't have my collection woven into order in quite the way yours is; instead, i took an extremely logical path and organised them via boring old name, descending into chronology within name (via format). although that's rapidly falling out of usefulness, as i also decided long ago to conserve space (insofar as that's even possible with my collection) and therefore stuffed all my jewel cases away in boxes in the attic; my CDs are now in big, thick binders which are purpose-built for freaks people such as me. along with liner notes, because i honestly couldn't live without them. ^^

vinyl is ordered similarly, although all records are securely within their proper sleeves. there's something more holy about the vinyl, and in particular the sleeves---the artwork seems more true than with a CD, for lack of a better word. so even if i had some other way to store them, i wouldn't. even though 78s work in record albums, i wouldn't do that to my 33s. or 7"s, for that matter. it just doesn't seem right.

cassettes, well---those are just a mess. i ought to sort through them---i probably have nigh on 500 or so, and most are unlabeled. or worse, they're cryptically labeled ones that i must have once thought i'd remember if i saw the words "hyperbliss teakettle orange," or something equally frustrating. (i did it to myself, i did---and that's why it really hurts...--;;;)

i found another box of cassette tapes a few weeks ago. even including some that had broken, and had sent reams of plastic with magnetic bits stuck to it flying off their spools and out of one tape deck or another. certain ones of those, i remember painstakingly taking a jeweller's screwdriver to and taking apart, being exceedingly careful to note which tiny screw went where---never minding the fact that it (usually) didn't really matter. and then i'd very carefully cut out the bad part with a razor and attempt to splice it back together via the tiniest of slivers of invisible tape placed carefully on the wrong side. it was in this way that i could usually manage to enjoy those tapes at least a little while longer, if i had the patience.

some tapes had been shoddily manufactured, even for the medium---and some had just been played (quite literally) to death. and some which had been incredibly precious to me, i never could quite give up. instead, they became part of my (already riotous) wall decorations in my room in my mom's apartment. uncrinkled audiotape makes interesting streamers, and precise razor cuts yield proper amounts and interesting angles at their ends---and more importantly, helps to coat fake wood-panelled walls (which were in actuality probably particleboard of even lower quality than that found in Sauder office furniture) with a thin, protective veneer of personality. the aural lining of my cocoon made external.

(hrrm, what was that about memory? XD)