http://arts.guardian.co.uk/netmusic/story/0,,1499360,00.html
Cute Guardian piece wherein the classical music critics are given and iPod and asked for their reactions.
Shuffling is actually ace. Without it, I would never have felt the unique tingle when Fairport Convention suddenly turned into Kanye West, or been delighted at the segue of AC/DC into MIA. Shuffling makes the old sound new. The unexpected contrasts make you think about music in different ways. My iPod will mine a rich vein of folk, then swerve off into hysterical R&B, pointing up some subtle texture of the female voice or making you ponder the nature of melody (if you’re into that kind of thing). If you stick loads of quirky, esoteric, non-song stuff on your iPod – such as snippets of Ivor Cutler, foreign language courses or CDs of street sounds from Lhasa (one of a series on the Sublime Frequencies label) – these can pounce on your consciousness in between the more conventional tunes. Sometimes, it’s been laugh-out-loud pleasurable (well, Cutler does that) or delightfully disorienting.