My son is eleven,
maybe twelve years old.
It’s 2016 or 17 and for Christmas
I buy him a starter turntable.
From his earliest years,
surrounded by music, he
grows to love it, so I think
he might also, like his Dad,
grow into a vinyl enthusiast.
One day I take him to my
favorite record store and
I say, why don’t you pick
something out. It doesn’t
take him long, minutes maybe
of perusing the stacks
and he comes back with this.
He has no idea
and I have no idea what he’s
bringing home. The cover
art features in black and white
the huge exoskeletal structure
of some indeterminate creature,
there is no track list, no credits,
the name of the artist is
incomprehensible, and the title
of the album, the only discernible
text on the cover, is Heterocetera.
My son has, essentially, purchased
an album of electronic art noise.
Almost nine years later, today,
my twenty year old son is in
the kitchen frying up an egg for
breakfast and I show him the cover.
Remember this, I ask. And he does not.
He is amused by the story,
though, and tells me to give him
the report after I spin it.
I discover through a little digging
that the artist goes by the name
of Lotic, she is an African American
transgender woman, and she lives
and works now out of Berlin.
This record my son chose is the e.p.
she released before her debut album.
Sonically, her music is full of intense
noises and pops, crackles, drum
machines, polyrhythmic electronic
percussion, minimalist melodic
keyboard programming, and strange,
disorienting soundscapes. It’s a
fascinating kind of ear candy,
but I don’t “like” it. I cannot dance
to it or sing along with it. Not
that these are prerequisites.
It just does not speak to me.
I wonder what my son would think
of this music now, the first record
he ever chose in his life, a record
that maybe as an eleven year old
he listened to once or twice and
then forgot about completely.
He still loves music, is a world class
percussionist, but he never did
pick up his dad’s penchant for
collecting physical media.
An enthusiastic music consumer,
he attached himself early to (and
will not relinquish the ease and
convenience and obscene
abundance of) Spotify. On the one
hand, this makes me sad. My first
record buying experience is burned
inside my memory banks as one
of the most significant days of
my life. His first similar experience
was next to meaningless, an
insignificant blip of his childhood.
On the other hand, he’s going to save
a ton of money of the type I spent
on amassing a music collection.
And he will have other, different
kinds of equally powerful musical
memories. Maybe this one:
We are driving together in the
car. It’s 2012. Elbow’s “Starlings”
is on the stereo and when those
horns blast for the first time in that song,
and every time after, my son,
Emerson, in his carseat in the back,
explodes with delight and laughter.
Notes on the vinyl edition: Lotic, Heteroetcetera, Tri Angle Records, 2015, black vinyl.
In case you don’t already know: I’m listening to almost everything in my vinyl collection, A to Z, and writing at least one, sometimes two or three long skinny poem-like-things in response for each artist, and on a few occasions, writing a long skinny poem-like-thing in response to more than one artist. As a poet and a student of poetry, I understand that these things look like poems, but they don’t really sound much like poetry, hence, I call them “poem-like-things.” I’ll admit that they’re just long, skinny essays that veer every now and then into the poetic or lyric.
michael jarmer 