Tubular Bells

I’m going slowly mad from the constant thumping. I have no idea where it’s coming from, but it shakes the floor under me. Sometimes I don’t notice it for hours, and then I’ll feel dozens of them over the course of 5-10 minutes. I have no idea the times when I don’t notice is because it isn’t there, or just because I’ve managed to block it out.

I suppose if one has to go mad, slowly is the way to go. You wouldn’t want to rush going mad, you might miss some of the good bits.

One of my defence mechanisms against the thumping is to shove my ear phones hard into my ears and turn up the volume on whatever I’m listening to. I have these new Apple “In-Ear” headphones, and if you shove them in so far that it’s a little bit painful, you sometimes get this very cool bone conduction thing going on where you feel the music as well as hear it. But then after a few minutes the earphones wiggle their way out again and the effect and affect is gone. Shoving them in hard and then holding them with your fingers makes an even better effect, but unfortunately it’s hard to get much work done that way.

Right now I’m listening to Tubular Bells. It’s not a very good recording – it was recorded by a friend off a vinyl version, and there is a lot of hissing and popping. One of these days I’ll buy the CD. Why not, I’ve bought it on cassette and vinyl, what’s one more format?

I listened to Tubular Bells and Omadawn(?) a lot when I was a teenager. Enough that you’d probably have thought I was a stoner, except I only took drugs when my brother pressured me to. [One of these days I’ll post about the time when I got proof that my dad thought I was a stoner even though I wasn’t.] I bought them both on cassette tape, but I had a really shitty little tape player – so shitty it didn’t have Dolby, so you had to really turn up the treble to make it sound anything approaching (from a long way off) decent. For the longest time I wondered why my copy didn’t have the bit where a narrator introduces the instruments, until I listened to it on a better tape player when suddenly I could hear it. I’m not sure if it was lost in the Dolby squishing, or maybe my tape player was only playing one track.

The revelation I felt the day I first listened to the tape on a good tape player is now matched by the relevelation I’m feeling right now as the bass line is pounding into my skull and travelling along my jaw. Man, this is COOL.