The Act of Listening

Am I the only one who feels uncomfortable being intimate with someone in silence? Is that weird?

http://sickmouthy.com/2011/03/10/why-i-love-devon-record-club/

I'd love to attend one of those, but like your blog mentioned... I've tried doing the same in bed and it's p much impossible past the twenty minute mark. I mean it's kinda surprising to me that I can sit for hours upon hours just watching a movie, but deprive me of one of my senses and I become restless.

I have a near 40min commute every morning tho (on the bus) so I get a lot of my "just listening" done there. Apart from looking out the window, my head's totally in the music.

I think lying in bed trying to do anything (aside from the obvious!) is inviting sleepiness to take over.

We didn't know how DRC would manifest, whether we'd listen intently and quietly, or talk, or ignore the music altogether. So far we talk about it as it's on, what does it remind us of, what bits we like, or not. We've been through some conversations about listening and about how taste is formed several times now, and I'm wondering, now we've been through one whole cycle, if we'll step past that and into another phase.

Do you talk in between tracks..during..etc?

All the fucking time!

Over songs, through songs, before songs, after songs...

Because these three of us, two might talk and one listen, or we might all shut up occasionally. It varies.

I'd have to try for myself, but that would almost kinda be rather annoying to me. Like watching a movie and having a dude comment on everything that comes to his mind, especially if it's a film class ("notice the contrast between the scaffolding and lighting in this image? what does it say about henry's charac - FUCK YOU)

Then again the whole idea of a listening club sounds prime for some MST3K-esque humor if you intentionally had a horrible album listening party.

I think because of the characters we are, the talking was always going to be a big part, especially to start with; the key thing is that you can get a sense of an album's aesthetic and feel, and go away and investigate further, listen alone, etcetera. I've borrowed and bought records directly because of it. As I say, we've only done one cycle so far, so it'll be interesting to see how it develops, how we interact when we're back at my house for the second time this Tuesday.

I listen most of the time at work, with my ipod, to keep me focused and so I don't hear the retarded dribblings of my co-workers..
I even did this in school, especially doing homework, it always helped me focus on tasks.
Work has been slow for me right now, so I've been howm a lot the past couple of weeks, staring at my computer, doing much of nothing.. LAme, becuase I could have the itunes on shuffle, but I forget to pull it up-like right fucking now!!

I will soon be moving into a new apartment I think will be more sound-insulated, which means I can start listening to music at normal volume and bass levels again, so I'm kind of excited about what this will do to my listening.

I can't listen with headphones on all the time, it's just not the same.

I've been on a listening diet, due to circumstances.

We still talk a lot, btw.

We have a record club too http://www.edinburghrecordclub.co.uk/

Only one round so far but we've posted a few features and random lists. Second session is scheduled for this weekend. It's a great concept and I'd encourage other ILXors to think about setting up one themselves. It's a great way to learn about new things, to share your own interests and to y'know actually listen to music with other people for a change.

. . . and yes, we talk as well! Too much for my liking. ;-)

That's is a great idea! My friend has a book club in Austin that I've been jealous of, but I don't know anyone who has a record listening club.

Yeah, it's great fun. Finding people can be hard though. We only have a core group of two at the moment but hopefully as things go on and people hear about what we are doing we will gain some new members. That's the plan anyway.

There's two other groups at the moment. Sick Mouthy's excellent Devon Record Club http://devonrecordclub.wordpress.com/ which was the inspiration behind our club and Bristol Record Club http://recordclub.posterous.com/