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Fluxblog » Blog Archive » Fluxblog Interview With Mark Richardson!

A little late posting this, but Matthew Perpetua at Fluxblog interviewed me about Zaireeka last week, it’s up over there now. It was a lot of fun and I think it turned out pretty well.

From talking to him elsewhere (he writes for Pitchfork, and other places), I get the sense that Matthew has a pretty good radar for when people get sentimental about changes in how we experience music (i.e. “You had to work harder to find out about music before, man, kids now have it easy,” etc.) And in my Zaireeka book, I talk a lot about how part of what makes the record so interesting is how difficult it is to experience. The hoops you have to jump through creates scarcity, not to mention, you need to experience it with other people who are also interested in jumping through the hoops. So there is automatically a social element to it too. And I touch on headphones a bit, and how (most of my evidence here is anecdotal) the percentage of our music-listening time spent alone, with our ears covered, where the music is the only source of sound, has gone up a lot in the last 30 years. Researching that part of Zaireeka, I wanted to write an entire book just on the nuts and bolts of how music is experienced and how it’s changed over the years. It’s an endlessly fascinating subject for me.

Anyway, I was glad that Matthew connected to what I was talking about in that part of the book, and recognized that my interest in how the unique context of Zaireeka informs the experience isn’t an indictment of current modes of music consumption. It’s a great time to be following music. And when you want to take a break from downloading mp3s and listening with your headphones on while surfing the web, Zaireeka is there waiting for you. Just gotta round up some friends and do some planning.