More than a decade ago, an album came out recorded mostly on cassette in a house, never released on a major label — and until last month it had been out of print for almost that long. When Noel Gallagher of Oasis heard it, he declared it "amazing," and The Guardian called it "the best album The Beatles never recorded."

People enjoy remembering things, and particularly things that happened within their own lifetime. Remembering creates meaning. There are really only two stages in any existence — what we’re doing now, and what we were doing then. That’s why random songs played repeatedly take on a weight that outsizes their ostensive worth: We can unconsciously hear the time and thought we invested long ago. But no one really does this anymore. No one endlessly plays the same song out of necessity. So when this process stops happening — when there are no more weirdos listening to “Centre of Eternity” every day for a year, without even particularly liking it — what will replace that experience?

Ten days ago a concert-goer at the Cedar Cultural Centre in Minneapolis made the mistake of shouting out a sarcastic request for the Knack's 1979 hit My Sharona towards the end of a show by Georgia indie-rocker Bradford Cox's Atlas Sound project. For his sins he was rewarded with a dissonant, hour-long, "death trance" version during which Cox free-associated spoken-word lyrics about "the death of folk music, the passing of time, and the ends of our lives", invited the heckler to remove his clothes, and repeatedly shouted: "This is what happens when you make requests." Some fans fled the venue, aghast. One reviewer fretted: "Atlas Sound at the Cedar was unforgettable, definitely, but it's disappointing that it was for strange reasons."