The other night James Quentin Devine was walking his dogs along Hillhurst Avenue in Los Feliz when he passed three young people who looked, in his description, like “the sort of kids demonic trend forecasters and marketers would die to access.”

He heard one ask the others how they had been finding music lately.

“From the radio,” came the answer. “Like: The Radio.” The others agreed.

It is a small incident, perhaps meaningless. It is also exactly the kind of incident from which changes in taste are eventually reconstructed.

For the better part of twenty years, the assumed direction of music discovery has been toward increasingly intimate personalization. The machine knows what you listened to yesterday and therefore knows what you ought to hear tomorrow. The premise seems reasonable until one remembers that taste is often created by accidents, mistakes, other people's enthusiasms and encounters with things one would never have thought to request.

A radio station possesses one quality a recommendation engine cannot satisfactorily counterfeit: somebody else is responsible.

The listener cannot skip backward through the DJ's biography and ask why the record was chosen. It simply arrives.

Devine has another formulation for the larger problem: “Culture isn't being distributed — it's being warehoused.”

Scaled Alps' sixteen-song Let the Alpine Play is an interesting object to place inside this argument. It moves through pop, heavy music, piano balladry, funk, dub atmosphere and post-punk guitar without behaving as if any one of those descriptions ought to become its permanent postal address.

“We do not make music because we like music that's been made,” Devine says.

That is a difficult proposition for a recommendation engine and an ordinary one for a good disc jockey. Perhaps this is why The Radio suddenly sounds novel again.