BLOG 15/04/2020
The Jan Diaries — A Short School of Listening
Written in April 2020, with daily obligations thinned out and studio time suddenly available, this entry of The Jan Diaries is about how records are meant to be heard. Jan Kinčl was then finishing a new album with Regis, built out of demos made roughly two years earlier, and the column starts from the definition he works to: an album is a whole that in its finished form exceeds the sum of its parts and carries a narrative which unfolds linearly, in the order the artist chose, from the first track to the last.
What the piece covers
The complaint is with what online sales did to that structure. Being able to buy two tracks instead of a record removed songs from the context they were written into; Kinčl compares it to buying the fourth and ninth chapters of a novel and skipping the rest. Against that he sets the method he and Regis follow on their ten-track album, in three stages. First each song is finished on its own terms. Then instruments and sounds are processed so the record has a single colour and a single context. Only then is each song shaped according to where it sits in the arc — making the fourth piece continue out of the third through shared instrumentation, or setting two neighbours in deliberate contrast.
The analogy that carries the piece is cinematic: ten songs treated as ten connected scenes, the opening laying the ground, the middle developing, the closer resolving. Kinčl reaches for Marlon Brando bellowing Stella! in A Streetcar Named Desire — a scene that means very little to anyone who has not watched the film around it, exactly as a track pulled out of its sequence loses what gave it weight. A Seinfeld gag about a joke landing forty years late makes the same point from the other side.
The part that stayed
He then admits the contradiction. There is a playlist on his home computer called dnevna soba, on shuffle, into which he drops favourite songs from new albums — precisely the behaviour the column argues against. The recommendation survives it anyway: when a record genuinely catches you, sit down and play it whole without doing three other things at the same time, because the context only opens up under attention, and it keeps opening on repeat listens. His summary is blunt — “Vrjednije je sto puta poslušati taj jedan, nego sto albuma poslušati samo jednom”. The piece closes with ten albums that reward it: Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp A Butterfly, Radiohead’s Hail To The Thief, Marcos Valle’s Previsão Do Tempo, Madvillainy by Madvillain, The 24-Carat Black’s Ghetto: Misfortune’s Wealth, Arthur Verocai’s self-titled record, Herbert’s Bodily Functions, Floating Points’ Elaenia, Egberto Gismonti’s Sonho 70 and Drexciya’s Neptune’s Lair.
Read the full piece
The full column, in Croatian, is on Red Bull Croatia. Four minutes.
