After a week of being hooked up to a prozac drip (feel free to mollycoddle) I'm back and contributing amazingly good threads like this to Obner, and all in the name of unremitting attention seeking.

So, Best Ipod/Environment Interface. Well, picture the scene. Last night I was coming home late from the university library. About 10pm, dark (obviously!), quite cold (below freezing), a clear Northern sky with the constellations dimly peaking through the oppressive orange haze of the street lights. A huge silver moon hangs in the cosmic violet, glowing eeriely.

I turn on to the scuzzy end of West Princes Street (of Dreams). In the later decades of the 19th century this would been a well-to-do area but now it's fallen on hard times. Hemmed in by the claustrophic five storey Victorian tennements, I make my way through the canyon like street, amidst the crumbling Ionic columns, rusty railings, smashed security doors, broken glass. I step over bags of garbage, the carcass of a bicycle, pass the strange sight of a stacked pyramid of battered oil drums from a suspicious looking Chinese restaraunt.

Not so much as a cat stirs in this scene of decayed elegance. 'Tears From A Compound Eye' by Boards of Canada is selected by the random play mode of my Creative Zen. It is absolutely awesome.

Tomorrow or the next night I will recreate the experience.

how does a creative zen create an ipod experience?

or is ipod the new jello/kleenex

You have to watch out for these. They cause lots of trouble. Was it skulking in the shadows?

Edit: Actually I really enjoyed this. Thanks! This sounds like one of those moments where the scene before you appears as if it was from a movie and the soundtrack and visuals mesh so well, that it makes an indelible impression. Almost like an epiphany.

Darrin, that's awesome, and very poetic

Boards of Canada got me through 17 hours of train rides when we were crossing Europe a few years ago. Watching the landscape pass while listening to them was simply magic. My wife and I actually looked forward to the trains.

Ding!

Cool. I have a 4 hour train ride across the Netherlands, Belgium, and France coming up........any other suggestions?

M83 perhaps?

What about walking around Paris?

no M83!

Rick, I'm gonna send you some stuff. Get at me on IM.

I generally refer to my Creative Zen, for the benefit of the bovine masses, as an ipod. I think it's become a generic term for a portible mp3 player.

As opposed to an I-Pod of course, which is a specific product.

See 'Tannoy' for precident.

actually, following your logic, ipod would be the general, and iPod would be the specific. I think that would be perfectly acceptable nomenclature.

i really appreciate those moments when the digital fates bring the perfect song to you to fit the environment / time of day / weather / mood. feels sublime.