Music is Math

Broken Record, Auntie P, 2005

Like a broken record [industry], people are constantly portending the death of the album. In an age when every released track is a potential chart entry the album is an obsolete collection of songs.

Originally the album was a collection of physical media containing a lengthy coherent piece. The limited length of a single record necessitated that something like Beethoven's Ninth be split across many records bound together like photographs in a photo album. With increasing storage and a commercial and cultural shift in the post-war era toward self-contained songs, the album came to be a compilation of a group's output.

Ask (GA-Slag FAQ)

Two years ago in the GA-Slag Retrospective I wrote about the genesis and development of said site. In this second background feature I've collected some questions about the GA-Slag, addressed some issues, and provided a little background to events depicted in prominent editions.