Postdigital Christmas Playlists

I enjoy an end-of-year ritual that involves scouring local charity shops for Christmas records. For the most part, I flick past artists and interpretations that seem to play on a loop in the lead-up to Christmas, and focus instead on the festive-less-familiar. I like Slade and The Snowman as much as the next person, but I can hear them without having to crouch down in dusty corners of charity shops where boxes of once-loved vinyl tend to be deposited.
 
Through experience, I’ve developed a reasonably good hit rate, and when it comes to playing them for the first time, almost every record reveals an unexpected gem. And even when that’s not the case, I feel like I’m giving the discs one last rotation on their way to landfill. I like to think that each of these records once sat at the heart of a happy Christmas scene,  an impression I get from drink stains on the sleeve, personal messages written on the paper inner, and sticky thumbprints on the edges of the vinyl.
 
After a few listens, I connect record player with laptop, before converting the best songs into mp3 format. From there, I select and sequence the songs. There are some rules to this. An artist can only appear once, and I generally avoid choir song and most orchestral work. Kitsch is fine (inevitable, really) but there’s no room for novelty records. The song needs to feel Christmassy, rather than simply mentioning Christmas in title or lyrics. With that done, I compile the playlist using Audacity.
 
Even after removing dirt and static with cleaner solution and cloth, and later spending a bit of time tweaking the audio files, imperfections remain. I’m going to suggest this adds authentic charm to the listening experience, as the past lives of these records are heard in their flaws.

In order that a playlist can be heard at all, I upload it to Mixcloud, where matters of copyright and artist royalties are covered by inputting the details of each song.
 
This might sound like a lot of work for a playlist that will only be heard by a small number of friends and family, and anyone who arrives at it among the hundreds of alternative Christmas collections on Mixcloud. But as I wrote earlier this year on the subject of postdigital sound, efficiency is a poor way of capturing what matters when we listen to music. And as Rasmus Fleischer (2015) notes in his work around music and a postdigital sensibility, we cannot reduce ‘music’ to ‘digital content’. Joy, surprise, sadness or some other emotion surely matter more than convenience. Applied to the creation of my Christmas playlists, it would be considerably quicker to compile and share songs via Spotify or Apple Music, but personally speaking, that would be much less enjoyable than the process I’ve described above.  
 
Part of this pleasure comes from finding songs that, even despite the overwhelming amount of music available online, are not available to stream or download. And even when that is that case, how many recordings of Jingle Bells would I have to sample before finding Duke Ellington’s superior version? I know a bit about Bert Kaempfaert’s music, but I wouldn’t have known to look online for his take on the Christmas genre. 
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Pleasure is also to be found in the physicality of the record. In the same piece of writing I mentioned above, I argue that, while beauty is subjective, there is surely greater pleasure to be found in the carefully designed record sleeve, and the dropping of needle onto rotating vinyl, than in the thumbnail artwork and soundless touch-screen operation of Spotify and Apple Music. Music streaming provides incredible convenience and choice, but it can’t give us a pop-up manger scene.

It's worth saying that my pursuit of physical records doesn’t have anything to do with a fashionable rejection of digital technology, something that Cramer touches on when conceptualising the Postdigital (2015). I don’t have ambitions towards being hip (in case that wasn't already absolutely clear), and it would take an awful lot of effort to sustain an analogue music-listening ascetic.  
 
Postdigital thinking challenges the idea the digital technologies will sweep away pre-existing resources, objects and practices. Instead, they overlap and combine, for instance in the way that decades-old pieces of vinyl are converted into digital files, polished and sequenced using sound editing software, hosted on a music sharing platform, and then experienced through smartphones and Blue Tooth speakers by listeners who might be looking to experience emotions of happiness or nostalgia as they edge towards the holiday season. These are postdigital Christmas playlists.

References

• Cramer, F. (2015). What is ‘post-digital’? In D. M. Berry & M. Dieter (Eds.), Postdigital aesthetics: Art, computa- tion and design (pp. 12–26). New York: Palgrave Mac- millan. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137437204_2.
• Fleischer, R. (2015). Towards a postdigital sensibility: How to get moved by too much music. Culture unbound, 7(2), 255–269. https://doi.org/10.3384/cu.2000.1525.1572255.
• Lamb, J. (2024). Postdigital Sound. In: Jandrić, P. (eds) Encyclopedia of Postdigital Science and Education. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-35469-4_75-1.