Everything you need to know about the digital age as regards music is contained in the following quote from Wikipedia: "Gramophone records remain the medium of choice for many audiophiles [citation needed]". Let that phrase roll around your mouth next time you encounter some young scrote playing ‘Closer’ by Ne-Yo on his handheld torture device. Seriously, the only people in the world who enjoy listening to music that sounds like a tin foil wasp trapped in a margarine tub on public transport are either the young and feckless looking to upset commuters and start a fight, or the slightly creepy 40-something middle class bloggers who fetishise them, believing that in doing so this somehow doesn’t make them bald, irrelevant and slightly pederast-y.

In fact, next time you see a group of these ne’er do wells (lazy teens, not wordy paedophiles, the latter only leave the house on the twice yearly trip to take their jism-stiff sheets to the laundromat) standing round on a train platform squinting, slack-jawed in the effort to hear over compressed, tinnitus-inducing sonic arse gravy, you should say: "I say chaps, turn it down would you? The lack of fidelity is putting me off the FT cryptic." Then as they push you in front of the 7.48 to Victoria you can think to yourself: "Well, it’s their loss, they never got to hear Heart Of The Congos on a decent Bang and Olufsen." And then momentarily, while the implacable metal wheel bifurcates your head: "Gosh, I’ve never heard that frequency before. Simultaneously clear and warm."

So this week we wish happy 131st birthday to vinyl. And as I slip on an original copy of Bitches Brew, feeling that satisfyingly heavy click as an inverse diamond mountain slips into a flat bottomed glacial valley of black wax, I allow myself the pleasant daydream of the electronic pulse caused by next week’s nuclear attack on Georgia destroying MP3s, wav files and other assorted sonic detritus compiled from zeroes and ones. Chin-chin!

Here follows the completely random and composed on the hoof 16 Commandments of Vinyl Collecting

Thanks to everyone at Flashback and fingers crossed for everyone at Sister Ray

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