"Burma encourages shuffle play," reads a line from the very sparse notes that accompany OnOffOn. I tried it out this morning. It took some figuring; I threw away the instruction manual for my CD boombox ages ago, and who shuffles the tracks of an album, anyhow? A few bouts of random button mashing, though, and suddenly I was listening to the fifteenth of the album's sixteen tracks as if it'd been the lead-off. Of course one can do this whenever one likes; my friend Peter has been known to re-sequence albums and burn himself new CDs of them when he's found a running order that suits him better; everybody skips over tracks they don't like once in a while. How often, though, does one leave song order to chance within the confines of a single album, and how often does one do this more than once? And what does even thinking about such a thing do to the notion of narrative development, one of the album format's great claims to primacy?