Enjoy the silence - and the album

The first rule of Album Club is that you have to listen to the album in silence all the way through. No skipping back and forth, no tuning in and out, certainly no shuffling - just pure aural concentration.

As my handful of regular readers may have suspected, I'm in favour of this kind of thing. I'll admit that the shuffle function on my iPod/iTunes held some novelty value for a short while, but this soon wore off. Singles are all well and good, of course, but my belief in the noble art of constructing an album remains unshakeable. Records - or at least the best ones - aren't simply collections of random songs; on the contrary, the songs are generally deliberately sequenced in the service of the whole. I'm constantly disappointed with how individual songs sound when ripped out of context.

This line of reasoning will probably see me accused of sailing too close to the quasi-fascistic conviction that albums should only ever be listened to in the way and order their creators intended. As someone who's also a fan of mixtapes, clearly my perspective isn't as black and white as that - but even then the songs are carefully chosen and sequenced so that, while the individual tracks may be radically and eclectically different, the juxtaposition between them and the overall order is far from random. Swiss Toni may have christened his annual mixtape project the Shuffleathon, but putting on someone else's offering is very different to simply pressing 'Shuffle' on their iPod.

If all this sounds quaint, old-fashioned and ridiculous now that the power very definitely lies with the consumer, then so be it. I'm pleased not to have the attention span of a gnat who's clean out of Ritalin, and am not ashamed to say I think music and the form in which it's delivered deserves a little bit of respect - even if Album Club might be going a bit far the other direction.