Let the music, vinyl, CDs, cassettes, play: Close listening comes to Edmonton

The guitars twang. The vocals crackle. The music just fills the room.

Local musician Everett LaRoi is celebrating the release of his new album, the Dept. 9 Sessions, a collection of heartfelt songs. But he’s not actually singing at the moment. He’s standing and listening.

“It sounds better than the studio,” he says.

He’s in one of the listening rooms at Audio Ark, a high-end hi-fi shop on 124 Street. Rather than have an album release party at a bar, he’s playing two sets out on the sales floor. One of the listening rooms is reserved for people to hear his album through a sound system that is geared towards audiophiles. And, in another room, a video of he and his band playing in the studio is piped through yet another to-die-for sound system.

By now, iTunes and Spotify have been around long enough that a generation of young listeners only know a world where vast catalogues of music are available to them 24-7. They never had to go to record store after record store to find that elusive Pavement EP. They never knew what it was like to bring an album up to the till and be judged by the clerks.

But, give the kids everything they want, and a funny thing happens — they end up longing for CDs and vinyl. Last year, global physical music sales totalled $2.1 billion US, their highest number in a decade. In, the U.S., CD sales were up 16 per cent. Vinyl sales have grown globally for 19 straight years, and, heck, you can find cheap turntables at drug stores.

And maybe the most stunning comeback of all is the cassette. Sales are doubling on an annual basis. For smaller artists, they are a cheap way to get the music out; for established artists like Jack White, Snoop Dogg and Taylor Swift, cassette releases are… cool.

We can only hope a new generation of kids use mixtapes as love letters for their crushes. A generation ago, the mixtape, 90 minutes of carefully curated music, was a sonic love letter. Most of the time, it didn’t work.  But it didn’t stop us from trying. Spotify lists aren’t the same.

So, with the resurrection of physical media, there’s new interest in listening to albums as entire works of art; we want the heartbeats and screams that litter Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon, the reverb-to-the-max of My Bloody Valentine’s underground classic, Loveless, the Biblical stories that litter the Pixies’ Doolittle, and the Blues-rock perfection that is the Rolling Stones’ Let it Bleed. We want it from start to finish. We want to care about our music again. We want to know where and when songs were recorded, just who that woman that breakup song is about, and why a sequencer mistake caused the beat and melody to mismatch in New Order’s all-time dance hit “Blue Monday”  — and it ended up being the best error ever made.

And “close listening” parties are rising across the world, especially in Germany and Japan, where people get together and pay a ridiculous amount of attention to a record being played on a top-end hi-fi system.

That trend has come to Audio Ark. While not everyone can afford spending thousands on a turntable or even $300-$400 for a Dragonfly stick that improves the audio on streaming file, the shop’s listening rooms are available for get togethers.

Steph Patsula is a sound and interdisciplinary artist, who has hosted listening parties at Audio Ark for New Music Edmonton, an organization which champions experimental soundmaking.  Patsula also works for the shop, and she said there’s been a shift from just selling gear to becoming a place where people can appreciate and hear music like they’ve never heard before. For those of us who really only have ever played songs through a phone or laptop, hearing sound come from top-of-the-line speakers joined to amps is… something. It’s like you’re hearing the songs for the first time all over again.

“We’ve always had folks who wanted to get as close to the music as they could get, and we still kind of draw that clientele,” said Patsula. “But what I’m really noticing is this shift in media, physical media, is a new generation of people who really love to have their cassette players and their CD players, and artists who are making releases on vinyl and CD and cassette. And so, having those actual objects to listen to, they come with all these special textures and artifacts and ways of listening. So I guess you could say with a younger audience, it’s just about a kind of a closer listening.

“If I’m holding this record in my hands, having my headphones on, and just looking through the album liner, and looking at like the album art, and finding out, this is the person who did the instrumentation on this track or that track — it becomes this kind of embodied experience of listening. You’re activating all of your senses.”

For LaRoi, it’s about thinking outside of the box when it comes to getting his music heard. Radio play is tough, and does it really matter? The number of outlets that review new releases have dwindled.

“I think for contemporary musicians, it’s about trying to find different things to do to sustain some kind of attention on your your work, because the big collective sigh of musicians everywhere is working years on a release, putting everything into it and slaving over it, the writing and then the production, releasing it, and then it gets spat out of the news cycle in about three weeks.”

Patsula said the plan is to expand the use of the listening rooms. The pace of events is monthly. Artist Elliot Rose will have a one-month residency in November, where he will be pairing paintings to music. In 2027, look for bring-your-own-record events.

“Bring out a record, let’s listen, let’s have a beverage or two, and talk about what we hear,” she said.

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