The other night, James Quentin Devine was walking his dogs on Hillhurst Avenue in Los Feliz when he passed three young people discussing how they had been finding music.
“From the radio,” one of them said. Then, as if clarification were required: “Like: The Radio.”
The others agreed.
It is a tiny scene. It may mean nothing. But changes in taste are often first visible as tiny scenes: a piece of clothing appears twice in one week; a word returns after twenty years; somebody starts carrying a camera again; a supposedly obsolete medium acquires the glamour of novelty.
For two decades, music discovery has moved toward personalization. The promise is frictionless relevance: a system studies what you have already chosen and produces something statistically adjacent. In practice, this often turns discovery into a hall of mirrors. The listener is sold a refined image of previous behavior.
Devine, the singer and lyricist of Scaled Alps, has a harsher formulation: “The ideal consumers are sold themselves first.”
Radio interrupts that loop. A station does not need to know what you did yesterday. A DJ can be mistaken, eccentric, impatient, knowledgeable, partisan, generous or obsessed. The listener inherits somebody else’s sequence and, for a few minutes, somebody else’s priorities.
That is not personalization. It is encounter.
Scaled Alps’ sixteen-song Let the Alpine Play is unusually suited to that kind of encounter because it resists a single stable description. A track may arrive as bruised piano music, heavy guitar music, nocturnal pop, strange funk, dub-shadowed atmosphere or something that changes category halfway through. The record does not behave as if genre were useless; it behaves as if genre were provisional.
“We do not make music because we like music that’s been made,” Devine says.
That is a difficult proposition for a recommendation engine, which must begin with resemblance. It is an ordinary proposition for a selector, who can simply hear a record and decide that another human being ought to hear it next.
Devine has written elsewhere: “Culture isn’t being distributed — it’s being warehoused.” Uploading makes an object available. It does not make the object move.
A selector makes it move.
Perhaps that is why the radio suddenly sounds futuristic again.