my love for my new, old walkman

I recently recovered a box of tapes from my brother's loft a good 5 years after I put them up there, in what looked like it might be the last resting place before landfill.

That landfill has recently claimed a large mass of low quality plastic with the magnetic footprint of low quality comedy abutted with long forgotten weather forecasts.

My rescue of the tapes was primarily to scour those largely unindexed reels of Chrome Dioxide BASF C90s for some old band material to digitise and play on my ipod, but something about the ahem, user experience, made me wonder about the medium and our attitudes to stuff these days.

In order to actually play the tapes, I bought a Sony Walkman, for just over 20 UK pounds.

So, to unbox, what do you get for that these days?

The Walkman unit has a tape player with rewind and fast forward functions. It has bass boost. And there is an FM and AM radio. And a case. And some earphones.

First up, the tapes. I put in one Duracell AA battery, stuck a tape in and bingo, I am back in 1995, as the great Tallgroove jam away. The sound quality is very good given it was recorded on a Bush tape recorder, in the corner of an LS6 bedroom, using the last available plug socket.

The real magic here is that the tape played. It had not been touched for 5 years and sat patiently in a box as Windows Media Player, iTunes, Winamp, Sonic Stage (yes, I used that as my main player in my Vaio days) and various phone based music applications and tools went through hundreds of builds, moving to and fro around DRM issues wrestling with limited hard disk space, then limitless lossy rates, sluggish store interfaces and the death of Woolworths on the high street. The tape sat patiently, and as soon as it was called for, continued on without missing a beat.

It was not so much an attention span issue, but a surprisingly interjected U2 song which made me first reach for the next track function. Ah! A flaw. I have to "Fast Forward", where the unit forwards, but not that fast.

The Walkman can not send and receieve emails. And I can't play Peggle on it.
On the plus side, I do not need to upgrade the tape playing mechanism and spend hours on blogs trying to identify why version 10.1.4 behaves slightly more idiosyncratically than expected.

The world a tape transports you to is flawed, but curated. Not necessarily always curated with the first compilation for new girlfriend level of detail, but with songs cut off, DJs plugging the Radio 1 roadshow, and traffic updates from days before the M25. Quite a few of these little addenda add the colour to the compilation.

12 songs slid into an iTunes playlist does not cut this level of affection. And what if you only want the reprise of I Am The Resurrection on one compilation, but are looking to fill space on another?

And then you have the attention issue. Track 2 sounds a bit iffy, but rather than skip straight away, the peril of fast forwarding past track 3 means you are more likely to stick it out rather than instantly dismiss material as incorrect from the off due to 200GB more unindexed music on various other portable hard drives.

A case in point, I listened to two Seal songs just in case the me of the 90's had recorded a few chords in the middle of whatever came after Kiss from a Rose on Seal 2.

As well as the tape, you now have the radio. Imagine now, having an untethered free data source with content readily available in any country of the world. Apple would charge you crazy amounts for bandwidth for this service!

So what have I learnt from this... Imagine the prospect of checking your work email on a Walkman back in 1997. Did you really need to? You probably knew all the phone numbers off by heart of the people who you called most often so didn't need to Sync your contacts. Or you had a little book that you kept relatively safe.

There as something of a commodity about a tape - it captured that moment in time, the addenda mentioned earlier, alongside those live gigs taken from the radio, the first play of Love Spreads, and of course, the lovingly crafted adolescent compilation tape.

Eternal love was up for grabs if you could just cram as much appropriate material into that 90 minutes. You could dictate the whole flow and mood of the tape without there being the option to skip over to Facebook and see if any other suitors looking for fun and feeling groovy.

Quite what the end game with my Walkman remains to be seen. The initial novelty will no doubt fade, but then I can  choose to either store the memory in a box in the loft, or tape over it.

2010: The Lepki Musical Review of the Year

In a predictably highbrow twist, in a year where the impact of being featured on the X Factor could recycle a flagging career, being featured on a BBC4 documentary led to a glut of plays on the only chart that matters - The Lepki Chart.


Neu burst into Lepki consciousness in 2010, years after their influence seeped through countless Stereolab albums. Masters of the sparse 1 chord marathons, Neu featured on BBC4's excellent The Birth of Krautrock documentary. This view of the genre also led to the discovery of Faust, Popul Vuh, Kluster and a renewed appreciation of Kraftwerk, and only the second ever David Bowie song to make an impact (A New Career in a New Town finally toppled Lets Dance as the most played Thin White Duke song).


BBC4's Dennis Wilson documentary followed the Karen Carpenter story, and both detailed the lives of ultimately doomed figures from the 60s and 70s. Pacific Ocean Blue provided a soaringly inconsistent but occasionally magical backdrop to the spring, and the drum breaks on the Carpenters All I Can Do will surely come in for plundering when LTJ Bukem launches his long awaited return from DnB exile.


Bradford Cox ended the year as the top composer, with his double whammy of Atlas Sound and Deerhunter. The bands have a definite common thread of dreamy sonics.





All of this material is from before 2010... 


Looking at the iTunes play counts, an intriguing thing becomes apparent when looking at plays by year.
The 80's were shit.
1983 only just managed to register as one listen through the Final Cut was deemed to be a necessary requirement for a Pink Floyd completist. 


Probably the best year for music ever was 1970, as tunes from this year are still being played in their droves. Os Mutantes A Divina Comédia ou Ando Meio Desligado, Pink Floyd's Zabriskie Point, and Doris's Did you Give The World Some Love Today were all released 40 years ago. Blimey.

As the years roll by, it is in 1997 that music really starts to have a decent significance again, and this is largely down to Broadcast and Yo La Tengo and the release of various David Lynch soundtracks by composer Angelo Badalamenti. These artists are yearly mainstays.

My Gig of the Year would have to be Broadcast at the Royal Festival Hall a gig the Guardian called "Hypnotic, lulling, yet faintly unsettling". I would have gone for loopy myself with all sorts of swirling patterns and trippy visuals.

Less exciting was Rufus Wainwright who played a solo show in Sadler Wells on a boiling hot evening.

Oh and Screamadelica live was excellent too. Musically superb, though the sound was a bit crummy in places, right by the speaker.

Most Played Artists of 2010 - by number of tracks played

Yo La Tengo 642

Atlas Sound 541

Angelo Badalamenti 522

Pink Floyd 360

Iron & Wine 336

Broadcast 322

Stereolab 296

Broadcast & The Focus Group 280

Deerhunter 275

The Aliens 234

Caribou 221

Leonard Cohen 206

Massive Attack 198

Os Mutantes 198

Quantic 179

The Velvet Underground 125

The Beta Band 124

Dennis Wilson 111

Fleet Foxes 110

XX 102

Sparklehorse 101

Lou Reed 94

The Bees 94

Neu! 94

Rufus Wainwright 90

Spacemen 3 90

Animal Collective 89

Neil Young 88

MGMT 88

When looking at the most played artists, you need to go all the way down to Caribou for the first 2010 album in the list.

"electro heavy, slightly disintegrating melodic trance packs a punch of intruguing non-resolution."

Melodic and largely acoustic music was flavour of the season, with Iron &a Wine springing in from nowhere with their 2007 album The Shepherd's Dog accounting for most plays.

Early days of having a child in the house meant gentle songs were the preferred accompaniment.

Doris - Did you Give the World Some love today baby is a lovely timepiece from the late 60's which is a little bit of European Motown. I think of Doris Svennson as a cross between Aretha Franklin and Janis Joplin, with a little bit of Cardigans/Carpenters thrown in.





Finally, the Dark Night Of The Soul was the token melancholy album of the month, with the Sparklehorse collaboration heavy piece of work mixing up catchy lyrical hooks with moody menacing nightmares.

You can listen to highlights on Spotify here...

Overall quite a good year, and due to the continued appropriateness of the music, I would give IRON AND WINE my artist of the year award.

The Lepki Chart - Autumn 2009 iTunes Play Counts

Spurred on by finding some The Farm on my iTunes... DELETE DELETE... I have put together the long awaited LEPKI CHART for Autumn 2009.

• Atlas Sound Logos burst onto the scene in September, racking up 130 track plays in little more than 2 months. The band look likely to overtake Fleet Foxes in the 2009 chart, as the bearded harmonisers struggle to maintain their pre-Glastonbury momentum.

• Perennially popular Yo La Tengo released a new album which includes a mixture of sticky and now overplayed songs. Some slower burners should make their way onto the work playlists and maintain the Hoboken trio's continued presence at the top.
• Luna by The Aliens has now become 2009's most played album, while the Neil Young Premium playlist draws songs from a range of albums, as do the Velvet Underground.
• As Spotify becomes a useful sample source, it is timely that a new "artistic impression" is launched, with the inaugural award being shared by David Bowie's A New Career in a New Town and Can's Vitamin C.

• Nirvana, Tosca, King Gheedorah and some lower quality Ian Brown songs have been and gone without troubling the scorers.
• Blur drop out of recently played artists table.

Autumn Most Played Artists (Sum of Tracks played)

Atlas Sound 130

Yo La Tengo 112

The Aliens 69

Angelo Badalamenti 68

The Velvet Underground 57

Radiohead 56

Neil Young 54

Pink Floyd 52

Broadcast 51

Stereolab 45

Broadcast & The Focus Group 40

The Beta Band 38

John Wyndham 37