Music format: The Psycho-Physical relationship with the listener.

    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