connexion: the selector

Sometimes on our Brownian motion through the Web we hit some pinball target, and chimes sound and lights blink, and a flipper accelerates us to a blur, and after much bouncing about the next thing we know we’re at the checkout counter with a Shiny New Thing in our, uh, hand.

[This would have sounded better in French, where instead of “we” I could have used “on“, i.e. “one”, without sounding like a dork.]

So it was last night when I described the following trajectory:

� Click bookmark of Pitchfork to see what new & unknown indie music they have written [too] clever [by half] things about today;
� Home page is pre-empted by an announcement of their new streaming radio station;
� Paste that URL (<http://pitchforkmedia.com:8000>, but it seems to be down right now) into iTunes and start listening, since the toy project I’m working on is going to spend five minutes crunching numbers anyway;
� Masterful shimmery pop music comes from the tinny speakers, allegedly “Come On Feel The Illinoise” by Sufjan Stevens, drawing admiring attention from my knitting wife;
� Chimes & lights & bouncing about, thanks to Google;
� Stereogum, an MP3 blog, has a review of the album and a full track-listing, including many very long & wonderful song titles such as “11. To The Workers Of The Rockford River Valley Region, I Have An Idea Concerning Your Predicament, And It Involves Shoe String, A Lavender Garland, And Twelve Strong Women” and “14. A Conjunction Of Drones Simulating The Way In Which Sufjan Stevens Has An Existential Crisis In The Great Godfrey Maze”;
� ��Then!! TeachingTheIndieKidsToDanceAgain, another blog, has a post about the album, with an honest-to-god MP3 of the song I just heard, which I download, even though the battery poops out 4/5 of the way through and I have to go to the living room to plug in and resume;
� While playing the song at higher fidelity on the stereo I bounce about the Web some more and come to rest in a shopping cart at Asthmatic Kitty records clutching a spectral virtual copy of the CD (which will not become real until the 5th of next month);
� As a fitting coda, buying the CD involves bouncing to first a separate payment-processing site, then to PayPal, and then back.

So now I’m out $12 but I have one great song to listen to now (which is apparently about both the 1893 World’s Fair and Illinois poet Carl Sandburg) and 21 more to look forward to in the mailbox in a few weeks.

And you should listen to the song too. I’m not very good at describing pop music: I do better when I can focus my purple prose on pure texture. I will say that there are layers and layers of instruments here: piano, violins, bells; and Sufjan’s innocent-sounding voice and many backing singers; all forming a wall of sound with no electric guitars needed. It’s ‘lush’ and ’sunny’ and ‘orchestral’ without being a Beach Boys pastiche or in any other way ‘retro’. In fact, I’m hard-put to say what else it reminds me of. Fortunately for you, it doesn’t matter, you can just click below and hear for yourself.