It’s hard to really appreciate music when you just pick and choose what you want to play while actively avoiding unknown territory. For this reason, I decided that any album I am to cover will have been chosen randomly. This way, it keeps me honest as I won’t have a chance to form opinions before playing the record. It also helps me avoid overloading my blog with one particular musical interest, as I would otherwise tend to avoid those handful of oddball records that somehow ended up on my shelf.

You can stop reading here. Take my word for it – it’s more-or-less random. However, if you really are interested in my oddball algorithm, then by all means, press on.

The random selection process is rather simple. Heading over to random.org, I’ll enter a number range equal to the number of records currently on display and let the ‘atmospheric noise’ pick for me a number. From there I merely count records until I hit my assigned number (I have them grouped for faster counting, obviously), pull it out and play. In the event I land on a record already covered, I’ll either move to the closest new title or pick again. I’ll also regenerate a new number if I land on an album by an artist whose other work I already covered fairly recently.

Here’s where my own rules get needlessly complicated: I will cover a single after every fives album posts (my way of taking a breather.) Normally, I would pick a 45 from one of the five boxes in much the same way as I pick albums. However, if when I’m picking regular albums I land on a 12″ single (they’re filed together) then I’ll just save that for when it’s time to do a ‘single’ post instead of heading to the boxes of 45’s.

Finally, there may be a handful of times when I completely dispense with the ‘randomness’ for whatever reason. In that case, I’ll typically add a disclaimer or explanation of some sort lest anyone would hold that against me.