I’ve been making
recordings since about the age of eight.
My first recorder was a rather large telephone answering machine capable
of mono only. The age of the boom box came and I was finally able to make
somewhat decent stereo recordings with a dual deck unit my mother gave to me
for my birthday. I was doing my first
edits on the boom box- looping beats - pause / rewind / record. Making good
tapes was tricky. It took some trial and error but I was relating to the music
in a way that I was soon to leave behind.
When I got my
first TEAC Audio CD Recorder in 2000 that was it…. the recording cassette died
for me… So who cares about tapes anymore and why would I start making them
again?
1. Certain members of the audiophile community never let go of
tape and prefer the medium – Just follow the links around here and all your
questions will be answered.
2. Recent iconic representations in pop-art seem to be
saying a chic, cheeky “farewell” to the physical representations of music. So
some collectors collect objectively only.
I grew up in an age when we associated music with a necessary physical
medium. (Record, Tape, CD) This has all changed.
3. Cassette tapes have grown so undesirable to the common
consumer that many thrift stores have stopped accepting them as donations. This has caused a “rapid rarity” for those of
us who still bought them; whether to digitize or traditionally play and enjoy.
4. Higher quality recording tapes, (notably Type II and IV) have
ceased production. There will be no more.
(Have you started to feel the panic attack yet??)
The Speed of Sound
If you are still thumbing your nose at that old tape deck in
your local Goodwill, Consider the fact that music now moves through our lives
as fast as mp3’s move through hard drive space. Our personal music has evolved
into something floating around and almost intangible- A file mysteriously
located in a device or in cyber space.
We don’t touch it anymore or put it in our hand. I argue here that this makes the
Psycho-Physical connection for us more abstract and not as memorable. Between
digitizing all of the analog recordings I now purchase so cheaply and listening
/categorizing all of the new electronic music I am so passionate about- I’m
overwhelmed. Of the new music I listen to, there will now be fewer recordings
remembered. I do not spend the time enjoying certain recordings over and over
anymore because I have too much to listen to….But, at least I still listen. My past has given me that gift.
‘It’s the new style’
The percentage of
youth that actually pay positive attention to the music they listen to has dramatically
declined. (I don’t think they even pay enough attention to it to ascertain the
negative affects of profanity or obscenities anymore.) The digital age is
probably the single most responsible party to blame for the rapid evolution of
ADD in our youth. Being firmly planted
in deep house music, I observe that the younger members of our community seem
to be a small minority taking refuge in the repetition of a deep groove because
they need to escape into an ‘even space’ of meditation away from all the chaos
in popular society.
25 years ago, it
was too much work for us to FF through a tape after just hearing seconds of a
song so we listened and learned to appreciate songs we would have otherwise
overlooked. Even in the CD age, there
were only so many songs to skip through before you went through the whole disc.
When did we stop
caring about Stereos?
There is a serious
lack of amplification quality in modern home stereo systems (If you even have
one) As a result the loudness wars have become a phenomenon of the digital
age. Overuse of compression in
recordings so that your band’s song is the loudest thing on the IPOD when bobby
teenager is flipping through, has caused a dramatic deterioration in true sound
quality and the likely hood that you will want to play a song over more than
once or twice. There is a serious lack in detail and definition in modern
recording because digital allows so much sound to be packed into a single file. My non music
snob friends (and even a few of the snobs!) believe that their Bose IPod
docking stations are a dandy substitute for an honest to god component system.
I love the digital
age in a very selfish way; that is, when it is a custom built perspective for
me. When I am able to harness its powers
and not think about what it has done to desensitize and de-educate the musical bourgeois. My argument for analog is one of my
compassion for music and the way in which it is recorded and played back. Tape has personality and those that say that
is a bad one never made a good tape. So this section of the site is dedicated
the magical magnetic wonderland of tape and things remembered forever. –ray
K
