The Platypus Music Hour is 100% memory-powered. Plato (no relation) believed that all true knowledge was derived from a form of memory called anamnesis, which could be accessed only intuitively, by “contemplation with the soul.” Such contemplation was thought to be cathartically purifying of all bias and desire. Later neoplatonists, like Plotinus and Porphyry, elaborated on Plato’s idea by locating the act of recollection not in the mind itself but in the world-soul.

Many years later, Marcel Proust echoed Plato in calling stark attention to the involuntary quality of memory, while at the same time persuasively demonstrating memory’s unavoidably creative nature. Every memory is a new being, and yet it is constructed effortlessly, and of an instant; simultaneously brand new and eternal. Simultaneously improbable and inevitable.

Each episode of The Platypus Music Hour begins with a song chosen by the playlist’s curator. This song is passed to the first of a rotating series of participants, who is tasked with allowing herself to remember or evoke some other song. This new song is then forwarded to another rememberer, who repeats the process. No single participant can see any further backwards or forwards than the single song he is given, or the single song she responds with.

Like the word game where you change  L-E-A-D  to  G-O-L-D  one letter at a time, The Platypus Music Hour changes one song at a time, starting from, let’s say, The Boswell Sisters, and ending with, say, The Ventures, Grace Jones, Tito Rossi, or Gorecki. Improbable yet inevitable, uncreated by any single mind, alchemized into being by an unorganized but related–and possibly fated–collection of private memory experiences.

Twitter: @platmus
Email: platypusmusic AT mail DOT com

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