SEE ALSO: the movie "High Fidelity" Mix tapes are a folk art that is in danger of disappearing. In a sense, a cassette tape -- like other forms of perishable art -- is wistful in its impermanence, and the ones that survive over the years are more precious for it.
I have dozens and dozens of them -- notably the mixes by DJ Teep from the early 90s that are seminal for me. In particular Ziq Zaq -- an all Muziq mix incorporating Bluff Limbo from years before it's wide release -- is something that I hear in my head all the time -- actually playing it has become redundant. Even earlier, I still have cassettes I recorded in high school by putting a cheap microphone between two equally cheap speakers, because there was no tape output on my stereo. It is interesting how integral nostalgia is to this whole aesthetic of hiss. People becom nostalgic for the aspects of old technology that used to drive them nuts. There was a period in the mid 80s during the rise of CD when the problems inherent in vinyl records seemed really horrible. At the same time the popularity of vinyl, especially for indie rock people (back before Nirvana, when 'indie' meant indie) never really waned. Now I'm continually struck by how durable vinyl really is, and how gracefully it degrades relative to CDs. I have a bunch of really old Trax and Dancemania records I picked up at a thrift store in Chicago that look like hell and have degraded to a noise floor about 5 dB below the music. But in their own way they sound brilliant, the noise like the accumulation of wrinkles on a person's face. I think there's something a little scary about perfect digital records. I'm sure a lot of you poked around on google when they incorporated their netnews search capability. How many dead people are immortalized in their own dashed off, ephemeral news posts? And what happens now that most of the world's documents are just bits on a disk, easy to fake, and impossible to authenticate? If you have a cassette, you have a two part artifact -- you have the program content, and you have the thing itself, with someone's handwriting on it. Everything about it points to when and where it was made. When you have a CDR, you're much less certain whether it was made 10 years ago or yesterday. More disturbing than the slippery sense of artifact digital documents embody is how counterfeit-able everything has become. Case in point: when the Bush administration released the 'smoking gun' Osama Bin Laden tape, my very first thought was "they could have totally faked the whole thing." Part of that reaction was my cynicism rearing its head, but it's scary to me that we're on our way to losing the inextricable binding of information to the medium that's the fundamental to establishing authenticity to history. When all the important stuff can be counterfeited, how does anything remain trustworthy? --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
