At firstthere wasthe cover.
At Gorbushka, I picked up my very first compact disc almost blindly, seduced by its cover as a moth is by the light. It was Brian Eno's The Drop. At first the music seemed strange and viscous, like the air in an unfamiliar room. Yet the impression lodged itself in my memory once and for all, like a first touch from another universe.
CHOSEN BY SIGHT. HEARD LATER.
First
came the records.
First there were my mother's records. Pink Floyd: the man dressed in light bulbs on Delicate Sound of Thunder. And Wish You Were Here: a white sleeve, a handshake, one of the men on fire. The man burned, the record turned. All was well at home.
Then there was Creedence with Down on the Corner, and the Italian singer Savage. I played those records almost to pieces. The needle travelled round and round, never in any hurry.
Of my early CDs, I remember Nirvana's Unplugged in New York: there was a man with a guitar on the cover, and that was enough for me. And Tina Turner, perhaps the one with GoldenEye. Then came a long pause in buying music. The music itself kept playing.
The word
“nearby.”
Then came Moscow, MESI, and a student dormitory in Ochakovo-Matveyevskoye. Gorbushka was considered nearby. It stood in Fili; in Moscow, the word “nearby” has always been rather good at travelling without a ticket.
The music
had yet to play.
At Gorbushka I sifted through CDs. Their bright covers jostled before my eyes like passengers crowding a doorway. There was hardly a chance to listen properly. The pictures argued; the music kept silent. With Eno, even silence looked different.
The air in
an unfamiliar room.
I waited for the music to explain itself. It did not. It simply changed the density of the air. The disc was small, the room unchanged; somehow, there was more space in it.
And then
it felt familiar.
Later I kept returning to that sound, as one returns to a window beyond which nothing much is happening except the entire world. One day I realised: this was already my music. I never noticed who had let it in. Other Eno albums followed.
Eno again.
This time with Cale.
Then, worn out by my own indecision, I returned to Gorbushka. I wandered past the stalls, examined every gaudy cover, and suddenly everything around me seemed deliberately vulgar, like fairground tinsel. And so I chose Eno again, this time with Cale: Wrong Way Up. The sleeve was hideous, almost tasteless, but as soon as the first track began, the music pierced me instantly, like a beam of light through clouded glass.
Vinyl edition. A photograph for this story.
The day is gone.
I'm still sitting here.
I listened to Wrong Way Up for a long time. Whenever Spinning Away played, I imagined myself sitting on a small hill, watching the day depart. At first the colours were so bright it was as though the evening had only just painted them. Then they slowly faded; hillside, grass, the distance beyond — everything became almost indistinguishable. Only the stars and a hazy dark sky remained. The day was gone. I was still sitting there.
Like a beam
through clouded glass.
CALE
Lay My Love
Choose a track or press Play.
Four restored recordings from Wrong Way Up; The Drop has a separate record player.