Clutter is my favourite new OSX toy. It starts off as a tiny little window that links in with iTunes. While you’re listening to music, it pops online and grabs cover images from Amazon. Now that – in and of itself – is quite entertaining. But then it gets really good. You can drag the covers off onto your desktop and pile them up like there were CDs on your floor. And when you want to listen to an album, you just double click on the cover. iTunes then makes a bespoke playlist and starts playing it straight-away.
There’s a couple of really interesting aspects to this. Firstly, there’s this nostalgic yearning for groupings of music in album-like shapes. Many of us using toys like the iPod have got used to thinking about the future of music as being song-sized – componentised. It feels kind of weird to start playing with albums again. But then again, maybe the rampant componentisation that we’re currently experiencing is a push too far – a utopian idea of totally fluid information chunks that will prove to be illusory and against the best interests of human beings. It could be that the ‘album’ is about to enjoy a resurgence. I’ll tell you one thing for nothing – the predictable and consistent noise of an album is much easier to work to than the on-the-fly “Greatest Hits Of Your Life” approach…