Records

I love records. 

There's something infinitely magical about round discs that spin around pole in the middle of a motorized circle, with a needle picking up vibrations placed there in the encoding process.

No... not encoding process. What word would you use?

Anyway, thanks to WNRN, I now have a record player and I'm able to finally listen to the hundreds of records I've accumulated over the years. Earlier I listened to a record called Echoes of Merseyside, a stream-of-consciousness-like assemblage of found recordings put together by the Liverpool Echo sometime in the 70's. 

And now I am listening to perhaps the most important album of my life - my first exposure to Monty Python - The Allbum of the Soundtrack of the Trailer of the Film of Monty Python and the Holy Grail. I remember putting this on the record player when I was my a bit older than my daughter's age. 

As I listen back, more than 30 years later, I'm pleased I have a record player to connect back to that time.

My daughter got out of bed a while ago. We had a few minutes chat about the record player. Pointing to my cathode-ray television, she noted that much of my technology is old.

"Is it because you're cheap?"

I laughed. I told her that the old technologies are just as good, and that the important thing is the content, the recording of human experience.

The first album I played on the new record player was a 1958 recording of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the American premiere of a Russian violinist who was 33 at the time. The back of the record cover was a description of the event, and something about the needle translating old vibrations into new vibrations made me feel connected to everything. 

What did my daughter think so soon after I bored her with a Led Zeppelin album that my brother must have bought in 1981?