k-punk said:
It's a shame. Tapes sound great. A bit hissy maybe, but warmer than MP3s.
Too much music?
- Thread starter Woebot
- Start date
It's a shame. Tapes sound great. A bit hissy maybe, but warmer than MP3s.
WOEBOT said:
Heh heh. I was wondering if anyone would remember that. I'm man enough to admit when I'm wrong Matt. Actually I still like the idea of 'objectless' mass digital storage, but my ears have retuned to analogue this year - an inadvertant side effect of having been 'forced' to buy dubstep releases on vinyl. MP3s just sound crap now.
The wierd thing is I'm currently using the same technology I was in the 80s - playing vinyl or recording it onto cassette to play in the car etc. First time I played a tape in ages I couldn't believe how much better it sounded than the iPod. Had to adjust all the eq settings cos the tapes were so much more bassy and warm.
k-punk
Spectres of Mark
blunt said:
Yes, but a gift and something you pay for have more in common with each other than things you can simply take as and when you want....
I'm not convinced by this; a new completist drive comes with the filing software of the new technology. Plus it isn't YOU who is the completist, it's the machine...
Well that much is fairly obvious, if I may sayWhat I'm saying is that I don't. Really.
Are you really saying that when you looking at an MP3 in five years time you'll warmly remember 'that time when I sat and pressed the button to download this'.... Genuinely, what is there to set that time apart from every other time you've done it? Whereas when I do look at my records, even, perhaps especially, those I bought over twenty years ago, I remember the shop, the period of my life etc etc...
On a slightly separate point, I'd just like to add a small disclaimer - I tend to use P2P as a means of *discovering* new music. If I like it, I'll then go and by it. Like Juliand, I've got sick and tired of buying stuff only to find it's cack.
And yes, by 'it' I mean the actual, physical product, not the legal download; because at heart I am a sucker for the sleeve art and everything that goes with owning the physical item, be it CD or vinyl.
But I also find my behaviour - in principle, at least - quite quaint and outdated. Basically, I'm a dinosaur. A happy dinosaur, but a dinosaur nonetheless
Yes, the complementary irony being that I rarely buy anything now. Getting the i-Pod was the threshold trigger --- (sadly the machine was stolen last year, but its legacy remains) --- I now see the physical objects of CDs as unbearable clutter, lost in a world of extensive space, filed in one place and one place alone...
bruno
est malade
the sadness of downloading
i'm a bit sick of this demonising of filesharing, the evils of downloading. we might as well go back to demonising virtual things, mass-reproduced things, why not every human technology while we're at it! let's go back to the stone age, what fun.
having bought hundreds of cds, lps in the past (some of these very beautiful objects). having crossed cities and searched shops, waited patiently for them to arrive in the mail, having starved for these things i can honestly say these 'originals' had the same impact as the skimpiest 128kbps mp3 on my hard drive. and i discarded these objects with the same ease as i move files to the trash on my computer screen. why? because to me it is MUSIC, first and foremost. and i assign emotional value to it on the basis of what it says to me IN MY HEAD. is there a separate scale for my happiness/aesthetic pleasure as a result of listening to music that is delivered in mp3? i think not.
there is also an obsession with other people's experience of things as valuable which i find a bit strange. who could possibly care less if someone hoards and fails to focus on one thing for very long? it's his/her loss, not the loss of humanity or of music. and why are you so sure of this degradation through digital storage and dissemination in other people's experience? couldn't the inverse of this, that to some people (perhaps most people) music has the same or greater value as an mp3, be just as plausible? that the lack of visual complement is actually liberating, perhaps enriching the experience of music itself?
a bit tired, too, of the prophets of vinyl and fidelity. to all of you i propose a little exercise: please try to remember why you liked music in the first place.
k-punk said:
i'm a bit sick of this demonising of filesharing, the evils of downloading. we might as well go back to demonising virtual things, mass-reproduced things, why not every human technology while we're at it! let's go back to the stone age, what fun.
having bought hundreds of cds, lps in the past (some of these very beautiful objects). having crossed cities and searched shops, waited patiently for them to arrive in the mail, having starved for these things i can honestly say these 'originals' had the same impact as the skimpiest 128kbps mp3 on my hard drive. and i discarded these objects with the same ease as i move files to the trash on my computer screen. why? because to me it is MUSIC, first and foremost. and i assign emotional value to it on the basis of what it says to me IN MY HEAD. is there a separate scale for my happiness/aesthetic pleasure as a result of listening to music that is delivered in mp3? i think not.
there is also an obsession with other people's experience of things as valuable which i find a bit strange. who could possibly care less if someone hoards and fails to focus on one thing for very long? it's his/her loss, not the loss of humanity or of music. and why are you so sure of this degradation through digital storage and dissemination in other people's experience? couldn't the inverse of this, that to some people (perhaps most people) music has the same or greater value as an mp3, be just as plausible? that the lack of visual complement is actually liberating, perhaps enriching the experience of music itself?
a bit tired, too, of the prophets of vinyl and fidelity. to all of you i propose a little exercise: please try to remember why you liked music in the first place.
blissblogger
Well-known member
k-punk said:
that's interesting, cos i've got a faint sense that cassettes are starting to become fetishisable objects -- which would converge with the idea of them not becoming common knowledge among the youth -- thurston moore put together a nice looking (but content thin) book on mix-tapes, with various famous and semifamous friends of his reproducing their favorite mixtape covers with personalised art work --
i can imagine things like the C86 tapes and Touch magazine tapes and so forth becoming collectable (whereas for years i'd try to flog them to music and video exchange and get no interest)
in that respect the designer using cassettes as a signfier of postpunk was quite a canny move on the cover of Rip it up
tangentially connected: on her first visit to our house one of the student girls who babysat for kieran exclaimed 'what's that?' and pointed at my turntable -- 19 and she'd never seen a record deck
Grievous Angel
Beast of Burden
Something about having relationships with people where they care so much about you that they lovingly craft a mixtape for you, perhaps? Isn't that what's being fetishized?blissblogger said:
I'll leave the amusing comment about High Fidelity to K-Punk.
Anyway, a personal diversion. Driving over the Snake Pass on Saturday night and we're all happily listening to Friday Night Special -- John Eden's first proper reggae mix, a tape that we'd listened to dozens if not hundreds of times, and the damned thing comes to a sudden stop. Of course, it had unravelled itself within the innards of the car stereo never to be played again. And it really felt like the end of an era -- the first set-piece mix John had done, on the original analogue tape, lovingly presented and preserved, hand-crafted, hand-written -- all of that, listened to and loved, and now dispersed into a spool of oxide tape in a glove compartment. I have it as an uncompressed AIFF on a hard drive, and it's still up as an mp3, but it's not the same.
Gutterbreakz -- save your music as AIFFs / WAVs or Apple Lossless (if you're iPoded) -- removes the deleterious effects of mp3 encoding, leaving you with only the problems of digital sound itself to deal with. (As you've discovered, vinyl sounds, pound-for-pound, better than CD, up to the £1000 player mark.)
k-punk
Spectres of Mark
head said:
Just because there's no existence without culture doesn't mean that everything that can be said of existence can also be said of culture. The existence of the average person in Europe in the middle ages, in fact in any period up to the post-war twentieth century, was pretty ephemeral compared to now. There's no controversy at all there, nothing to discuss. Next....
k-punk
Spectres of Mark
2stepfan said:
Sounds more like Dawson's Creek to me
But I'm glad to see the back of cassettes: they were fucking shit... c'mon now.. impossible to find a track you wanted to listen to...lasted about two plays... ABYSMAL sound quality... the scylla and charybdis of Dplby or not -- use noise reduction and it sounds like the thing was recorded at the bottom of a particularly deep swimming pool; don't use it and there's a constant buzzzzzzz....
yeh can understand vinyl fetishism... but cassette fetishism is a non-starter for me... CDRs MUCH better...
sufi
lala
there is a lot more to be said about this idea of a downgrading of experience into mp3s...
unless you are on a shopping fetishist trip then the experience of acquiring the track must ultimately be insignificant compared to the evocative moments spent listening... music, after alll....for me music evokes different people, experiences, times in life regardless of whether it was overheard, bought, gifted, mixed, DLed from a blog or p2p...,
the anonymity of downloaded playlist can mean that music judged solely on it's merits, i find some tracks stick out and often only learn about their context later, because i like em, i used to buy music (before i started smoking, i guess) since then it's pretty much always been copied tapes, cds, mp3...
also, it is not enough to look at the progression of the media without mention of the environment that you're listening in - just as 'sound quality' has diminished, there has been a precisely corresponding rise in portability thus the amount of opportunity to listen to music
thus:
totally agree on one thing tho:
unless you are on a shopping fetishist trip then the experience of acquiring the track must ultimately be insignificant compared to the evocative moments spent listening... music, after alll....for me music evokes different people, experiences, times in life regardless of whether it was overheard, bought, gifted, mixed, DLed from a blog or p2p...,
the anonymity of downloaded playlist can mean that music judged solely on it's merits, i find some tracks stick out and often only learn about their context later, because i like em, i used to buy music (before i started smoking, i guess) since then it's pretty much always been copied tapes, cds, mp3...
also, it is not enough to look at the progression of the media without mention of the environment that you're listening in - just as 'sound quality' has diminished, there has been a precisely corresponding rise in portability thus the amount of opportunity to listen to music
thus:
i started this another thread on this thing today which it turns out i guess is maybe 'son of' this thread ....?
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sufi said:
I was thinking about this as well. Although I certainly do remember when I bought a lot of the music I have on CD or vinyl, I have at least as many vivid memories of when I listened to things, and often they were things I've never owned a copy of myself. I love talking about music, discussing music, etc. etc. so in this respect even the most introspective or conemplative music I like still seems social to me, and tied to social experiences.
So although memories tied to the experience of acquiring the music are absent with music obtained via the internet, there are still all the experiences related to memorable times listening, plus subsequent dialogue / context from times listening to that music with others.
joeschmo said:
I think the fact that most of the people in this thread are not critics is a pretty strong argument against that...
look! even johnny greenwood (yes, that one, of RADIOHEAD) agrees! cf. his latest post on "Dead Air Space", the studio blog type thing they are maintaining:
johnny greenwood said:
(He mentions it really as an intro into his having gotten deep into dub for the last six months... wait, does that mean Radiohead really are the last descendants of PIL and post punk?)
k-punk said:
This is, of course, entirely and unarguably true
What I intended in my original post, however, was that religious faith has - up until relatively recently - softened the blow, so to speak. And, of course, another proviso... when I spoke of 'we', I was speaking of people living in rationalist, Western democracies; primarily because it strikes me that the vast majority of people on this forum seem to fit that bill. So apologies to anyone here who feels that doesn't apply - tho I'd be particularly interested to hear your thoughts on the subject.
Anyway, to be honest, I wish I hadn't inlcuded the word 'ephemeral' in that post now - it kind of muddied the waters a bit. What I do feel very strongly about is the fact that we're being confronted with the *subjective* nature of existence like never before. And I think that's the idea that's most pertinent to this particular thread.
I think the fact that most of the people in this thread are not critics is a pretty strong argument against that...
Not professional critics, maybe, but there's no-oneon Dissensus (or virtually no-one) who doesn't have a semi-professional interest in talking about music. Why would you be here if you didn't?
This is something I keep hitting, though. It is a function of scarcity,I think; my current ennui about downloading is the same ennui I had when I spent a whole student loan in Rough Trade on Easter - I can remember sitting in my room surrounded by more vinyl than I'd ever owned before that, most of itstuff I'd been dying to hear for years, and I just couldn't be arsed to listen to a note of it. That's the same feeling I get when I download 5 albums in a night.
Not professional critics, maybe, but there's no-oneon Dissensus (or virtually no-one) who doesn't have a semi-professional interest in talking about music. Why would you be here if you didn't?
This is something I keep hitting, though. It is a function of scarcity,I think; my current ennui about downloading is the same ennui I had when I spent a whole student loan in Rough Trade on Easter - I can remember sitting in my room surrounded by more vinyl than I'd ever owned before that, most of itstuff I'd been dying to hear for years, and I just couldn't be arsed to listen to a note of it. That's the same feeling I get when I download 5 albums in a night.
blissblogger
Well-known member
me i like the sound of cassettes, it's warm -- an analogue medium innit
ooh must be something in the air -- here's john carney aka kevin pearce at Tangents have a good old nostalgic witter about cassettes -- http://www.tangents.co.uk/index2.html
ooh must be something in the air -- here's john carney aka kevin pearce at Tangents have a good old nostalgic witter about cassettes -- http://www.tangents.co.uk/index2.html
blissblogger said:
Yesss, back-up from the Blissblogga, no less. I take it when I get my international tape-swapping club organised, you'll be seeking membership, Simon
blissblogger said:
Thirded. I've already ranted to SR about this in private correspondence...
Oh and a special 'tip of the hat' to tape hater K-Punk:
From Brussels With Love
Look at that tracklisting!