« Negroponte in Honduras | Main | The New York Times' short tail » "In Praise of the Segue"Dave Mandl fears that we're losing something valuable – the segue and the concept of the set of music – as we adopt the Ipod shuffle and a file-focused approach to listening. This is an interesting argument, but I tend to think podcasting will save the segue. ... the importance of segues in music sets can't be stressed too much. In the days when I first auditioned for a radio show (and later screened other prospective DJs), audition tapes were made with most of the body of each track removed, leaving just the segues and the few seconds before and after each transition. Once it's been revealed which track the DJ has chosen to go to after the current one, the rest is more or less an anticlimax, at least when you're evaluating the person's chops. It's not just your musical vocabulary and taste that matter, but the ability to put it all together in some meaningful way. Having a listener give you three hours of valuable time to spin absolutely any music in the world for them is both a privilege and a challenge, and creating some kind of unique sound environment for them (and this applies to rock and roll just as much as more obvious genres, like ambient or soundtrack music) is about the best thing you can do in return. The idea of "psychogeography" is no less important in a set of music than in an experimental film or an actual psychogeographical drift through a physical space. jon posted this at 6:11 PM |
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