SELECT TRACKS: OPPORTUNITIES FOR LOVE SONG USER ANALYSIS
SELECT TRACKS: OPPORTUNITIES FOR LOVE SONG USER ANALYSIS
Tyler Brett, Select Tracks: Love Songs, 2002. Record player, five 12" LPs purchased from Vancouver thrift stores, mack-tack vinyl adhesive, manually isolated country music tracks by Anne Murray, Johnny Cash, KD Lang et al. Exhibited at Neon Gallery, Brösarp, Swenden as part of A Thing Called Love, a Trapp Project featuring eight Canadian artists.
Gallery visitors were instructed to select a record and activate the designated “select track,” initiating a controlled playback event. Once activated, the system produced a continuous stream of audio classified under the operational category of “love‑song output.” This output was broadcast simultaneously through speakers inside the gallery and through loudspeakers positioned in the town of Brösarp, ensuring uniform distribution of the signal across both interior and exterior zones. The procedure required no specialized knowledge, only compliance with the selection protocol. The system produced no measurable emotional data, yet continued to generate it, creating conditions in which sentiment was neither requested nor prevented but emerged as an incidental by‑product of mechanical repetition.
As the records rotated, the manually isolated tracks by Anne Murray, Johnny Cash, k.d. lang, and others circulated through the environment with no adjustment to their affective content. The adhesive modifications ensured that only the designated love‑song segments remained accessible, reducing each LP to a single operational function. Playback occurred regardless of listener intention, producing an ambient field in which emotional resonance was both optional and unavoidable. The town received the same signal as the gallery, creating a distributed network of unintended intimacy. The system maintained its loop, and the loop maintained its atmosphere, generating outcomes that exceeded its procedural design while remaining fully consistent with it.
A Love Song, performed by Anne Murray, written by Kenny Loggins & Donna Lyn George
[Verse 1]
There's a wren in a willow wood
Flies so high and sings so good
And he brings to you what he sings to you
Like my brother the wren and I
Well, he told if I try, I could fly for you
And I wanna try for you 'cause
[Chorus]
I wanna sing you a love song
I wanna rock you in my arms all night long
I wanna get to know you
I wanna show you the peaceful feelin' of my home
[Verse 2]
Summer thunder on moon-bright days
Northern Lights and skies ablaze
And I bring to you, lover, when I sing to you
Silver wings in a fiery sky
Show the trail of my love and I wanna sing to you
Love is what I bring to you and I wanna sing to you, oh
[Chorus]
I wanna sing you a love song
I wanna rock you in my arms all night long
I wanna get to know you
I wanna show you the peaceful feelin' of my home
Select track user analysis:
The lyrics describe a communication protocol in which natural phenomena—wrens, willow woods, summer thunder, Northern Lights—are deployed as emotional transmission devices, producing affection‑coded output without confirming whether such output is required by the receiving unit. The singer identifies himself as a functional analogue to the wren, a small‑scale audio emitter capable of generating love‑song signals calibrated to evoke comfort, proximity, and domestic stability. Environmental imagery (fiery skies, silver wings, moon‑bright storms) operates as auxiliary data meant to reinforce the sincerity index of the transmission, though no measurable verification is provided. The repeated desire to “sing,” “rock,” “know,” and “show” functions as a looped directive, suggesting that emotional connection is both the intended message and an unavoidable system artifact. The result is a closed circuit in which affection is produced automatically, regardless of whether the system understands the content it continues to generate.