| Type | Account, unsolicited |
|---|---|
| Concerns | Discs left in a house |
| Discs | Fourteen, unlabelled |
| Identified | Two |
| Status | Held |
The breezeway recordings
The house is a dogtrot, which is to say two rooms with a roofed passage open at both ends running between them, and the passage is where I found the box.
The house
I bought it for the frame and not for the facade, the facade having been rebuilt at some point by someone who wanted it to look older than it is. The previous occupant had been there eleven years and left in a hurry, and what he left was mostly furniture and one shallow box of discs.
Fourteen of them, unsleeved, no writing on any of them.
The discs
They play. Every player I have tried shows the same thing, which is that the artist is unknown, the album is unknown, and each track is unknown followed by a number. One player writes it in lower case and one in capitals, and that is the only variation I have found in eleven months.
The first disc has a title on it, in the sense that something was typed into the file at some point and survives: lori mix dep 2 _ dj gorji. What it names I could not say. It might be the person who made the disc, or the person he made it from, or a room, or nothing. I looked for lyrics for two of the tracks and found none, which does not mean there are none.
What I have identified
Two, both by ear and neither with any confidence.
One is a Chieftains recording, or is close enough to one that I stopped listening for the difference, which I now think was a mistake and the same mistake everybody makes with this material.
The other I will not name because I identified it on a Tuesday and could not find it again on the Thursday, and when I did find it again a fortnight later it was a different track on a different disc. I do not think the discs change. I think I do.
Why I stopped
Because of what happened with the Thursday. I had spent three evenings a week on this since the spring, and the thing I noticed at the end of it was that the number of tracks I had identified went up and down. Not up slowly. Up and down. I would gain two and lose one, and the one I lost was always one I had been sure of.
Somebody who knows about this sort of thing told me about a person who described four bars four different ways and then declined to describe them a fifth time, and I understood that immediately, and I stopped that week.
What I do with them now
I play them in the passage in the evening, which is where they were and which is the only part of the house the rebuilt facade does not touch. I do not try to place anything. When something arrives that I recognise I let it go past.
I am aware that this sounds like a decision about music and that it is not. It is a decision about what I am willing to be sure of, and it happens to have been reached over fourteen discs that a man left in a passage.