Friday, April 17, 2026

Record Collections and Time


...I realized something about record collections. I've long understood that what they represent, in aggregate, is time, and if you look at their spines you're looking at a visual marker of potential time, roughly five LPs per inch, at forty minutes per, so each linear foot equals nearly twenty-four hundred minutes or forty hours of continuous listening duration. When a  collector is young, what their collection represents to them is boundless possibility, the optimism of time unspent; as the years press on, the collection comes to suggest something different, the inevitability of the unfulfilled, potential time that will never be realized. I will not listen to the bulk of my records again. I console myself: there they are if I need them. (John Corbett, Microgroove: Forays into Other Music, 2015, p. 428)

I'm working on it... 

 

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