n.b. I created this in spring 2021, but am just now getting around to organizing personal projects on this site in early 2022.
I spent a lot of time creating a playlist recently, and was reminded of buying physical CDs, and in particular the booklets and material that accompany them. I thought it’s such a shame that now when we buy or stream an album or playlist, we don’t get to experience that material along with it anymore. Purchasing a full album from iTunes used to get you a .PDF download of the booklet, but to my knowledge they aren’t available on modern streaming services. Something about paging through the lyric and photo booklets felt so special, something that many people may have overlooked, but we didn’t. Plus, the booklets are sometimes the only source for the true lyrics—good for settling disputes between what we hear and what the artist said.
I thought of projects I had seen before, including a QR code for a mixtape in an anniversary card, the brief TikTok meme where the Spotify code for Sean Kingston’s Replay was hidden or 3d printed everywhere, and I thought “what if I combine Spotify’s own bar codes with an album’s photo booklet?”
My original concept for this playlist, “Time・Place,” was to have one song for each hour of the day, in which each song had that hour in it’s title, but even after branching out to numbers with plausible deniability, this proved easier said than done. Eventually, I included songs that referenced specific times or places, concretely or abstractly, in their titles.
Putting this together felt a lot like making a very small, very focused Zine; in other words it was a fun project. For more information on the process and how I put this together, see my process post here.
Duston Baranow-Watts 