Drop of the Hat

If you're reading this, you have probably been directed from The 17 (unless you just happened to have stumbled upon it, in which case, welcome). A brief summary of what this is:

The Hat existed to enable the random. The Hat existed because there were too many CDs on the shelf and in December 2008 we had no idea how to select them for in car / in house listening, which meant we invariably picked from a small selection of approved standards. The Hat existed to pull us out of the rut and emerge, blinking and unshaven, into a world where we would pick our music on a weekly basis according to letters drawn at random. The Hat restricted, by allowing us to listen to our favourite artists for no more than two weeks in the year, and thus deepened our appreciation for records that had grown stale, by helping us to listen harder. The Hat was a conduit for a new way of thinking about music, and writing about music, and thus it served creativity.

This particular idea was based on score 320 (CHOOSE), in a truncuated, twelve-month format. We recorded thoughts, impressions and recollections, and found that by December the blog worked best in chronological order, starting at the beginning. It is thus compiled here in book form. The journey is long, but for us it was worth taking.

If you want to know about me, it's there in the blog - but do please email me with any feedback.

James, 24 January 2010.

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