Record Reconstructor

  Dashboard! I've spent the last day or so trying to decide how to open this discussion, and I think I've settled on this - next Tuesday I'll be going, on my own, to see Nine Inch Nails perform live in Manchester.  This gig comes a quarter-century after the prospect of seeing Nine Inch Nails live was what compelled me to purchase a ticket to the Glastonbury festival in the year 2000.  I believe in the power of live music even if I don't love what has happened to the culture around it and the commodification of it in the last few years, but rarely do I go to a gig alone;  live music is an activity which yearns to be a shared experience.  I think Nine Inch Nails are one of the most important, creative, revolutionary musical acts that has existed in my lifetime, but I can't in good conscience bring someone to a NIN performance sight-unseen, without them having time to acclimatise to the scalding heat and relentless assault, the frigid stillness and sparse desolatio...

Dashboard! It's still a song lyric even if it comes from a sesame street song, that's just facts. Using these kind of thematic gimmicks to select albums to listen to has been strangely critical to making this whole project work for me.  Generally, people like patterns and structure, and when faced with the boundless breadth and depth of All Music Ever Published, it would be easy to drown in the infinite choice available to you.  So by making a choice to pick some kind of stupid thread to tie a bunch of albums together keeps me floating on the surface of the available options rather than being dragged beneath them.  I once read author Steven R Donaldson say that creative endeavour flows easiest when you take two different ideas rattling around in your head and find a way to combine the two.  I'm not sure this qualifies as 'creative endeavour' as much as it is 'low grade mental breakdown' but the principle applies here also. It started with another online fri...