Back at the start of the summer I started buying CDs again, with the aim of reconstituting the most missed parts of my long-since-sold-off collection.

I kinda count it as the one thing where Bruce Sterling steered me wrong, though with hindsight I realise I may just have misparsed him. Back in the late Noughties, the advice was to dematerialise your media: why keep literally hundreds of CDs when you can fit them all on a hard drive? So when I moved north from Velcro City in 2009, I did exactly that: ripped nearly 1,000 discs, sold the ones I could and gave the rest away.

It took maybe six or seven years for the answer to the question to arrive: the reason you keep the CDs is because one day that hard drive will die, and you’ll have been skint and depressed and addled by poverty and the pressure of your doctoral research, which means that backing that hard drive up has not been anywhere near your list of priority tasks, and you’ll lose a collection that took a quarter century to gather.

It’s taken another six or seven years to make a decisive break with Spotify, which started out seeming like an incredibly convenient alternative, but quickly became a paradigmatic example of scumbag tech. I killed my subscription in July.

Zero regrets, too. It’s a cliche to say that returning to physical media changes the experience of listening, but that’s because cliches tend to aggregate around statements of the obvious: I listen to more music now than I did through Spotify, it sounds far better, and I pay more attention to it.

(You might be tempted to say “well, of course; your attention increases in proportion to the effort expended on getting access to the thing you’re paying attention to”. To which I would be tempted to respond “yes, exactly”.)

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I don’t know that I’m going to do accessions for all the CDs I buy; that could become as burdensome for me as for you, dear reader.

Then again, I’m often (re)acquiring works of art that were hugely influential upon my taste and thinking, and the temptation to write about them at length is definitely there. I could rattle out a thousand words on any of these three without any provocation at all…

… but I have work to do and invoices to chase, so I’m not gonna do it today.

(Feel free to comment or get in touch if this is the sort of Highly Pertinent Cultural Content you’d like to see, though. I’m guessing that “enthusiastic rehabilitations of Jesus Jones albums” is a writerly niche that has yet to be filled… and if not me, who?)