I have to admit, Spotify was a lot more fun and interesting to me when I was still on Facebook. Even if it was only an illusion I enjoyed the possibility that others were paying attention to my relatively eccentric listening patterns and thinking “My, what an interesting individual.”
Alas, like most everything else on Facebook and social media I have become skeptical and downright dismissive of its influence outside the hyperventilated world of local gossip markets and the self-infatuated world of Internet Celebrity.
At any rate, on the virtual turntable at this hour is Charles Alkan’s The Song of the Mad Woman on the Seashore, played by Vincenzo Maltempo on an Érard 1899 concert grand, an instrument not unlike that which Alkan himself would have played on.
I played this piece through high school, college, and beyond, albeit at a considerably slower tempo than Vincenzo Maltempo, and with an intentionally muddier bass, which I think should brood and gurgle with the proto-bitterness of primordial regret.
