this past week or so i’ve been re-doing my room to make it easier to work in, roughly separating the two weird spaces in my room into “storage” (which includes my bed) and “inspiration” which includes books, records, zines, comics, posters, pictures of friends, and a very clean desk that folds down when not in use so i can’t really stack things on it. also the folding down desk makes room for dancing around to music and doing daily exercises, which contribute greatly to my mental well-being. also finally enough floor space to re-org all my records, which i had moved a few times and effectively shuffled.
categorizing records is always (to me) interesting and fun, and it’s just nice to flip through and remember what you’ve got and how much of it, and to put like and like together and examine the differences, to mark progressions, etc.. as far as putting them into ultra specific categories, that can be fun, but if you’re at all discerning, i think you’ll find it also impossible, as many things fall in multiple categories, and anyway, i’m not the sort to put a record back exactly in alphabetical order. ok, let’s be system sally for a second and look at our motivations, styles of use, and solutions.
• partying and taking care of your records.
take good care of your records. unlike cds or hard drives they are archival and will last pretty much forever, and can be played without electricity, on equipment you could probably build yourself if it really came down to it. protect your records by putting the records themselves in paper sleeves, the covers and the records together in polybags (with the opening on top so they don’t slide off when you put them on the shelf), with the record next to the cover but not in it (to reduce ringwear on the cover). don’t go through every record and put them in polybags right away, though– having decided on this system, put them into bags (which you keep next to the records) only after you listen to them. in this way you can see at a glance which records you don’t ever listen to. you can do whatever you want at this stage, maybe after a year reevaluate the records you haven’t listened to– would you buy them again for a dollar? have a section for records you’ve listened to and realized you don’t really care about (elvis costello). when this section is sufficiently large, bring them all to armageddon or mystery train, to trade for records that you like, or are at least somewhat promising.
• organizing records
it’s easy to think that you want a place for everything, hyper organized by fine genre and then alphabetized, or along a continuum (for example, a metal section that is slow on one end (abutting drone) growing to super fast on the other end (abutting breakcore and glitch)). don’t do it! these sections are fun to put together but hell to maintain, and life is to live. save these ideas for mixtapes. unless your collection is pretty homogenous (all 12″ singles form the past 8 years) or you have sufficiently large collections of any given category (i have a surprising amount of barrelhouse piano records featuring men in arm garters and women in satin underwear), don’t alphabetize and just try and keep loose neighborhoods of categorization (children’s, comedy, pop, weird) that you just flip through to find things in. searching and not finding is a bummer, but flipping through a certain amount of records is fun, and helps you remember what you have, and be like “oh, maybe i want to listen to this instead!”. in the words of the poet, serendipity, baby!
my largest section is “pop”, which takes up probably 4 feet of shelf space, and which i might break down and re-cat. i’m trying to get rid of a lot of this, because sufficiently popular music (i think) will last pretty much forever and is almost immediately located on the global illegal file sharing library system. there is no reason for me to have, for example, a madonna record, when i could download the whole thing faster than i could locate it in the stacks. of course, certain pop music i like to have on vinyl for sentimental reasons, or to have the covers, or to be forced to listen to in album order. that’s fine. but remember- moving with a ton of records sucks and who knows what the future will bring? not me. or, me, but only a little.
if you have less than 3 shelf-feet of records, just organize your records by how often you listen to them– put the last record you listened to on the left side and shift everything else down. this should be enough. i have a buffer zone into which i put the last records i listened to, then, when it’s full, i shuffle these back in. it’s a nice thing to do on a sunday after watering the plants, and it’s nice to look back and say “this was my week”.
• tapes
on the topic[fine] but off topic[course], here’s a really nice thing i do when listening to records: tape a single song off the record onto the next available space on a blank tape that you always keep in the tape deck. label the tape “music as it is heard” and put the date you started it. when you fill up both sides of the tape, write the date you finished it. in this fashion you make a nice and sometimes pretty weird semi-biographical mixtape without even noticing it, and you interject a little critical thought into every time you put on a record– “what’s the standout song from this record / for this moment / to follow that last record?”. if you listen to the same record over and over again, you don’t have to keep putting on songs from that record. but if you revisit a record further down the line, feel free to include another track, or the same track again, or just a snippet. also, keep a piece of paper tacked to the wall with the tracklisting on it, and include some information that you don’t think is going to be immediately useful– write down the song title, the artist name, the record title, and then (for example) the year it was released, or the country/region it’s from, or the label it’s on. seeing all this together at the end is always interesting to me. i got this idea from “true metal according to jeff vol 1″, an excellent mix tape jeff scheaffer made me in exchange for cdrs of the ginsberg box set. he put the country and year after each song, which proved to be most enlightening. when your tape is done, make a few copies and xerox the liner notes. give these out as random presents, or in barter situations (“do you want to drive to the show? i’ll chip in for gas and give you a mix tape”). you might think “tapes, how gauche”, but tapes allow you to do lots of stuff that you could do on cdr but wouldn’t, a sort of creativity that is a few levels away when you’re burning mp3s to a cd. also mix tapes rule over mix cds because they are linear: you have to listen to the whole thing in order, which gives you more opportunity to appreciate tracks you might hear once on cd and then just skip past. also, this linearity makes juxtaposition more interesting– a cdr is just a folder with files in it, a tape is a journey. oh, and even though lots of people don’t have tape players anymore, lots of people still have them in their cars so it’s still game on.
• my categories
ok, to bring back to the stated goal: to talk about records, i’d like to
say my categories: pop, jazz / classical / electronic, bought new, comedy, children’s, spoken word / instructional, curious, hokey, barrelhouse / ragtime, other lands / percussion, 10″s, 7″s. these categories are in two larger categories that might be labeled “every day” and “reference”, and using the polybag method, the entire collection is also split into “recent listen” and “possibly never”. “other lands” contains the stripper records (via the bellydancing records) but that might all get moved to “hokey”. pop contains rock, hip hop, punk, bubble gum, etc., with no distinctions, although i may breakaway a 12″ section, as these are sometimes hard to find (unlabled spines). “other lands” is pretty dubious and maybe should just turn into “exotica / false hawaii” and “percussion / stereo demonstration” (which would be a good place for sound effects, currently neglected in “curious”), then piece everything else out to jazz, pop, and hokey (which currently could also be called “white identity 1950 – 1970″).
• other organization schemas
abel had his cds organized by spine color, which i found maddening but was pleasant to look at and worked for him and resulted in strange bedfellows (if i did this, go go’s “vacation” would neighbor richard pryor “that nigger’s crazy” in the “rainbow” section). maralie was talking about putting her records in chronological order, which is very interesting– to see what came out the same year, and to think about what that year was like, but maybe this would be better as a list on the internet than a decent method of finding furious five “it’s nasty (genius of love)”. give up, maralie? it’s 1981, next to kraftwerk “computer world”, black flag “damaged”, AC/DC “for those about to rock…” and both “give the people what they want”s (jimmy cliff and the kinks). better just to read the wiki year by year. anyone else got a good system for this?
. plus the new one, which if you get you are honor bound to not discuss with me the last four issues (i own #10 but refuse to read it). also contains a few pages of gary panter art (which i’m sure is incredible but i haven’t seen it yet because that’s issue 7): 
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