I am doing that software update thing that always fills me with a luddite kind of dread (what if it, like, breaks my computer?). I restart i-tunes and it’s got this New Thing called Party Shuffle. Oh my god, I say to my wife, Look at that. Party Shuffle. That’s so lame. Party Shuffle. I ask you. Look, it’s mixing up all these tracks that don’t match! Look! That’s so fucking crap.
Nonsense, replies my wife (a sanguine and supremely adaptable lady when it comes to new things on computers, I often think there’s a scientist lurking within her Dorothy Parker meets Bukowski meets L’Trimm brand of creativity, and that when the apocolypse comes she’ll be the one who figures how to set up a solar panel while I’m out trying to scavenge edible insects). Nonsense, she says. Party Shuffle is great. I use it all the time.
Hmmm, I say, thinking in my mean muso head, well, that’s because all your stuff probably has the same tempo. Or something.

Then suddenly I’m addicted to Party Shuffle. Addicted and intrigued. Admittedly, it’s not much of a party round these parts, unless your idea of partying is “Sea Song” by Robert Wyatt segueing into “I’m Going to Tell God” by Mahalia Jackson segueing into “Web of Sin” by Noxagt, but it sure is surprising. I like the extra chance magic it introduces to the musical selection process, another little ghost in the machine that, like the iPod, chips away at the concepts of the Album, the Work of Art, and even the sacred beast that is the Mix CD. It reflects the only way to deal with the mass and morass of music that we have, literally, an RSI-throbbing click away - pluck it from the air, from the ether as it flies by.

I don’t feel any nostalgia for days - 10 years ago now - spent trawling Essex markets for old records, or weeks waiting for Bishops Stortford Our Price to get that Pavement record in for me. I don’t feel nostalgia for only knowing about, liking and having access to a few bands at a time. The only thing I feel a little nostalgic for is the weird directions musical privations lead you to, especially when you’re young and in the burbs or the green belt or the middle of nowhere. I mean those privations that draw you to your battered cassette of Bleach, which incongruously has Led Zep 3 on the other side, over and over again, or that leads you to listen to your mum’s amazing old blues records till you know every word. The privations that, while you get into Nirvana along with everyone else, mean that your secret passions are really that awesome mixtape of Orange Juice, the Velvet Underground, Tom Waits, Nanci Griffiths and Fairport Convention that your much-older sister gifted you, and the occasional listens to Public Enemy in the girl down the road’s front room, completely bemused. That tape of Babes in Toyland that ends abruptly with your friend from Leeds making a revision recording of her French verbs. That isolation that makes you wait by the letterbox from beautifully crafted mixtapes from your friend in Glasgow, which then open your mind to early Eno, Love, Kraftwerk, The Byrds. The choice of only buying ONE single every two weeks - what’s it gonna be? “Bull in the Heather” or “French Disko”?

OK, I don’t feel nostalgic for that, actually. That was kind of rubbish. I was just lucky to be led down some good paths is all. Looking back, when your mind’s that open and you’re that young and with that much time, I feel cruelly denied that I couldn’t have got into more stuff, and I envy those today who can. Even if they do only choose to listen to the Libertines or something, diversity is theirs for the taking and they don’t have to hang around Harlow market scoring Specials 7-inches, and reading about the Boredoms but never getting to hear them.

Your real friends are still your best portals for the right music - well, mine are, at least (last night I was promised a Nick Cave primer by the lovely person who recently turned me onto Scott Walker’s Tilt after years of resistance, and I am so looking forward to it), but the way we listen now, whether it’s to Booty Bass and British Sea Power like my wife, or to - hmm, let me see, what’s on now, oh dear, it’s “I’d like just once to see you” by the Beach Boys, damn, I was hoping it would be something really cool - is beautifully encapsulated in Party Shuffle. This ’surface’ control of our media and our aesthetic, which we’re lucky to have, whether it’s an illusory opiate or not, is combined with a device that makes me realise how out of control it is and we are. More and more, when I think of my musical world, it’s not lined up on a shelf, special spines displayed and handled with love and care. Instead, it’s worlds plural now, or not even worlds, just places, little vistas flickering in a dark landscape. Not even places, just machines that fly overhead - and you can hear their radios if you listen. It’s no longer a library for you to collect and contemplate. It’s more like a country to walk through, following leys and digging for treasure if you want, or just admiring those pretty IDM trees if you so choose. As the musical landscape becomes newer, so it becomes ever older, hermetic, magical, charged and silvery (the whacked-out American hippy voice that lives in my head drawls sarcastically, dude, Party Shuffle is like the fuckin’ tarot…. I banish said voice, but only after agreeing).

It’s no wonder some of us become ascetics in the face of this, making simpler music than ever before (while others, like my wife, jump into the new like happy ducks into the Regent’s Canal, accepting that this is to be loved and assimilated as much as it’s to be explored, which is why the music these people like is often so comfy, but that’s another story) and romanticising history and “authenticity” and handiwork the way the Arts and Crafts movement did.

Making simpler music, yes, and crafting it with love and awe, somtimes. But then sending it into the electronic ether, because, really, that’s the only place it should ever have gone in the first place. It’s just that we were waiting for the machines to catch up. Oh, the seriousness of such musings are not in keeping with the subject I’m musing about, this I know. I mean, it’s just Party Shuffle. It’s just i-Tunes. It’s just a Macintosh gimmick. But it’s music, and music’s never just music. Not at my parties.