New technologies are helping us reach out to one another in these troubled times. And what doesn’t make the list is just as important as what does
For many of a certain age, their teenage years were largely spent in their bedrooms – “a world where I can go and tell my secrets to”, as the Beach Boys sang on In My Room, but also where you’d sit patiently taping songs off the radio. Then with these recordings – a clunkily captured pick of the hits from the Top 40 first, then later the best of that week’s John Peel shows – you’d have made a compilation cassette tape; this you’d swap with a friend who shared the initiate’s understanding of the other rooms – cathedrals! catacombs! – that this
music could unlock.
Now I find myself sitting in a room, still making compilations: playlists on Spotify, dipping into the seemingly endless reservoir of music there. Seemingly endless, but then where’s Don Covay’s It’s in the Wind when you really feel the need for it? I could go on, but right now the question for the latest compilation I’m making, which will be called We Can Make It! Vol 2, is whether to make the 15th and final track I Am Sitting in a Room, Alvin Lucier’s 1969 masterpiece.