take your earbuds out

All the wise, skeptical thoughts you’ve ever had about what wearing earbuds 24/7 does to us as a society, what real silence sounds like, and what role the full spectrum of audio plays in our lives have all been crystallized into this perfect, dreamy essay from former Pitchfork eic Mark Richardson: Listening for Silence With the Headphones Off.

Our fave part is the sixth paragraph, which goes like this:

“We all know the ecstatic feeling Pavel describes, that drug-like sensation where the visual field is colored by the tone of the music, and the music is given a different emotional tint by the visuals. My experience with this phenomena is so rich, I can look back on dozens of times when I was walking somewhere and listening remembering just how intensely blissful that moment was. Sometimes, I can close my eyes and put myself back in that space and recall what I was thinking and feeling—what felt good, what didn’t: the time I crunched through the snow along the shore of Lake Michigan while visiting my brother in Grand Haven and listened to Modest Mouse’s Lonesome Crowded West, worried about money and my future; the period after I bought my first Merzbow CD, Hybrid Noisebloom, and walked the streets of San Francisco blasting it, terrified and exhilarated by what I was hearing; the day in the fall after I’d moved to New York, finding myself moving through Manhattan on a nice day while listening to the Feelies’ Crazy Rhythms and looking at the endlessly rich street life before me…”

Jesus, that’s gorgeous, isn’t it?

Like Deez Links? Forward to everyone blasting Sweetener in their ‘pods.