You know what Harkive is. That's why you're reading this, unless you clicked on my blog link out of random curiosity, in which case welcome anyway. But I'm not going to explain what it is, just expound a bit on my experiences of the day.
Normally I start the working day with 5-10 mins of a CD in my car. Usually this will be either newly bought CDs or those on the "listen again" pile, to decide whether to keep or get rid. Having bought a huge amount of CDs lately the need to prune is starting to outweigh my natural tendency to keep everything, you know, just in case I want to listen to it again in five years' time.
On Harkive morning, however, logistics dictated that I got a lift with @drelfy. She had Meadowlands by The Wrens on rotation. This album had been recommended and supplied by @realearthmother, one of many people that we have made contact with via Twitter over the last few years. If we're talking how and why we listen to music, the influence of Twitter on my listening habits cannot be understated, but more of that later.
Having been dropped off at the station I transferred to the iPod Nano while waiting for the train. These days I have a 1.5 hour commute to work and therefore have a large amount of time to fill. I tend to rotate between reading a book and listening to music. As I had just finished my latest book (Mike Barnes's biography of Captain Beefheart, in case you were interested) I'm in a listening phase right now.
At times like this, when I've not used it for a while, I hit "Now Playing" on the Nano. This acts as a random album selector, as whatever song comes up, I will select that album to listen to. As a child of the 70s I still think in album-length chunks and don't very often go totally random. Thanks to this, my commute to work was soundtracked by The Notorious Byrd Brothers and {Awayland} by Villagers.
Having a few minutes to spare at the end of the train journey i decided to try hitting the Radio button on the Nano. I rarely listen to the radio and always forget it's on there. It was tuned to some horrendous "classic hits" station and I suffered You're The Voice followed by Nothing's Gonna Stop Us Now before giving up. On removing the headphones I had a few seconds of the tinny, leaked sounds of a fellow traveller's - in this case inaccurately named - personal stereo.
I don't have music on at work, never have done, so it was lunchtime before I was exposed to further sounds. Possibly inspired by the whole Harkive experience I ventured out to the record shops of Croydon to see what was available. It appeared to be Play Sixties Classics in Record Shops Day, and in two shops I variously heard the Byrds (again), Scott MacKenzie and the Mamas and the Papas. I didn't feel sufficiently inspired to buy anything though.
Cut to Quittin' Time, and out comes the Nano again. This time it's my turn to choose, and I'm in the mood to hear some recent favourites, so I play the extraordinary (whether it's genuine or not) Kosmischer Läufer, and Beefheart's Clear Spot.
Perhaps another word here about social media. Both of those albums came to my attention via this method, as does the majority of what has been new to me over the past few years. The former appeared on my Twitter timeline through various sources, the latter via an online album listening group. Discussing music with people online, getting to meet those people, forming friendships, sharing music and experiences, gaining and offering recommendations, has rapidly and sometimes scarily expanded not only my collection but my musical horizons.
Those logistics I mentioned earlier meant that I drove home from the station (a different one as well, but we won't go into that) in my own car, with Disc 2 of Bruce Springsteen's The Promise for company.
Dinner (or supper, as they like to call it down here) is normally eaten in the TV room, but as I was home alone and clearly determined to work some vinyl playing into the day, I sat in the front room with a pizza and Prelude's After The Goldrush album. Unlike many of my ken I didn't go for the wholesale ditching of the vinyl collection in favour of the shiny beast of CD, but neither was I a digital-eschewing Luddite. I just got out of the habit of buying vinyl, but since I acquired a Spillers Records turntable from this year's Record Store Day shebang, I've fallen in love with the format all over again.
Dinner done, I retire to the study to do some of those boring-but-necessary tasks on the computer. While doing so, I catch up on some YouTube links I've had favourited on Twitter for a while, tonight it's Popol Vuh's Aguirre album and a Frank Zappa/Shuggie Otis acoustic jam.
Having said I rarely listen to random (apart from the iPod player in the kitchen which is nearly always in shuffle mode), I decide to stick iTunes on random, to see what comes up. This is in the knowledge that I have to pop out to pick @drelfy up from station and I probably won't have time to listen to a whole album. I get a blast of White Denim, The Clash, Iron Maiden, Stray, The Blue Nile, The Decemberists, Shed Seven, Yuck, Mogwai, Best Coast, Tenacious D, Lynyrd Skynyrd and the Duckworth Lewis Method, before it's time to get back into the car and be reunited with The Boss.
So that was my Harkive day. A thoroughly enjoyable experience. As with all snapshot research, there is a sense in which the event itself affects what you do on the day, and while some of my listening decisions may have been influenced, I hope I didn't do anything wildly different to what I might do over the course of a typical week. Let's do it again some time.
