PKB

Just got back from a two day work trip to NYC. At a club in the Lower East Side, whose name I couldn’t tell you for the life of me, the current single from Arctic Monkeys came on. I’d heard this song a bunch of times on the radio driving to work and was not digging it.

Hearing it in a loud, crowded Manhattan club completely changed the experience. The song was meant to be listened to in that kind of environment. The kind of place where you have to shout to be heard by the person sitting two feet next to you.

I remember an interview I read with Beck. He was recording Odelay, and each day he’d take material he’d worked on and go for a drive to listen to it. He said that he wanted to recreate, in advance, the environment he expected the record would actually get listened to within. The ambient L.A. freeway noise adding unexpected texture to the music.

Does the environment you experience something within color the experience? Probably so. Now that a chunk of my life involves the computer and the Web, where are the natural variables that the real world offers in spades? To fuse experience into memory, maybe even emotion.

The Web experience we’ve all been at the emergence of is going to evolve many times over in the next ten years. Finding a way to bring the real world to the bloodless way most of us experience the Web would be amazing.

Not as a substitute for getting out and being in the crowd. But as a way to bring that energy to what is mostly just a cerebral activity today.