Delamination of Music

April 23, 1999:

Interesting program on WBEZ ("Odyssey") about how recordings changed our perception of music. It's sort of ironic that recordings were first used only to archive music. The double irony is that we return to the original idea and now we use the archive to make works of art that we replicate in the archive. Steve Albini made the interesting point that digital sound will degrade over time, unlike vinyl recordings which last much longer. He liked the idea of having the recording as a physical object rather than having just the data on some drive somewhere. This way we keep a time capsule. But it's also an interesting idea that we let culture mutate on its own through cyberspace—anathema to the idea that things are preserved. In such an atmosphere, archived copies can only be relics.

Albini made the interesting point that digital sound will degrade over time, unlike vinyl recordings which last much longer. He liked the idea of having the recording as a physical object rather than having just the data on a hard drive, as a type of 'time capsule'. It is also an interesting idea that we let culture mutate on its own in cyberspace—anathema to the idea that things are preserved [in a fixed form]. In this scenario, archived copies become relics. 

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April 23, 2009: Steve Albini must be using his I-told-you-so's as vinyl (and even well preserved tape) is still the most durable medium. Digital media is already degrading and precipitously disappearing. The only thing perpetuating it is the fact that it is collaged into other works.