On rediscovery

January 20, 2021

Few experiences in music are as satisfying as rediscovering an album. It feels like stumbling upon a treasure you completely forgot about, one you maybe didn’t value properly the first time around.

For me, the circumstances of rediscovery don’t matter all that much. Maybe I actively hated the album in the past. Maybe (probably) the first listen didn’t even make an impression on me at all. Music isn’t always love at first sight. That’s fine.

It’s funny to think about the way our perception of music is always changing.

I have gone through countless different modes, as I am sure many music listeners have as well. These different modes of listening are not linear and not logical. They are ambiguous, they overlap and sometimes they’re outright contradictory. For instance, I would say that my music consumption in the latter half of 2020 was defined by a departure from Hip-hop and a return to heavier, guitar based music.

This ranged from poetic-yet-in-your-face hardcore (check out Drug Church) to guilty-pleasure-goth goth (to this day I mess with Bauhaus and Type O Negative heavy) and straight-up-doomer-noise (case in point: Daughters).

However, during that exact same period I found myself unapologetically vibing to the careless, steeped-in-mezcal sounds of Mapache as well as HAIMs latest high-energy pop masterpiece.

Oh, and while all of this was happening, I was digging deep into DVS1’s sublime techno curation and DJ skills and Steve Bicknell’s heavy-duty production chops.

My point is: sometimes, an album you don’t enjoy in the now might be perfect for your next musical phase. Maybe you just haven’t arrived there yet.

And the delayed gratification of revisiting that same album when the time is right for it, can be one of those elusive, magical moments where the sheer joy of music reveals itself. And in my opinion, it can make you fall in love with music even harder.

By no means do I want to underscore my opinions by gratuitously using authoritative arguments. But as a graduated musicologist, I feel like I have just enough knowledge of music cognition to get away with an educated guess on what makes music rediscovery so satisfying (in other words: I am going to use authoritative arguments anyway, just try and stop me).

I like to think that music rediscovery can evoke such strong emotions because of the exposure effect (one of the most convincingly argued reasons for music preference), which has taken place. Musical memories have already been locked into our minds, even if the subjective experience of the first listen wasn’t especially uplifting. Have you ever been surprised by a song you used to know as an adolescent or child? Then you will surely know the giddiness, the physical impact even, this can have. Rediscovering can get you that same high, trust me (I guess now is as good a time as any to ephasize that you should always trust charlie dickens).

Sometimes, not always (not even often to be honest), the stars just align.

Then, you aren’t just discovering music you at one point in your life have heard before. You are rediscovering a part of yourself. And that is cathartic as fuck.

And from the point of view of this passionate music enjoyer, that’s the good stuff, that’s the fix.

Your own inner worlds revealing themselves to you, through art.

Or - put slightly less pretentious: the actualization of the juice. 

A handful of records I recently had the pleasure of rediscovering are:

Hella Personal Film Festival by Open Mike Eagle

Intraverso by Fabrizio Lapiana

JEFFERY by Young Thug

S/T by True Widow

Goths by The Mountain Goats

Phantom Studies by Dettman & Klock

 MM..FOOD by MF Doom

 You Won’t Get What You Want by Daughters