WOEBOT

At the Glade Festival this Summer I heard Erik Davis give a talk about Electronic Music. It was full of fascinating insights and mind-boggling historical facts. Did you know that as much as electricity has been quantified and its effects both observed and manipulated, that (even in 2007) we are no closer to understanding what the hell it actually is?!? So for instance while Faraday was able to work out that moving a magnet over a coil of wire causes an electrical current to flow, his theory for what was going on is "off-the-wall" in today's parlance. And no better explanation has been advanced. Electricity truly remains some kind of mystic force, Davis taking delight in exhuming an 18th cult of Electric Christians.

Perhaps in keeping with the less-than-academic context of a music festival Erik's talk was free-ranging and his theoretical derive also took in the pseudo-Magical nature of crystals and their role in channelling Radio signals as well as the relationship between Analogue and Digital. It was at this final point that his talk became more speculative. Erik sees traces of the mystic in both Analogue's wave-like forms and in the principals of Digital music. Refreshingly he didn't come down on one side or the other though I sensed that he perhaps had greater sympathy with Analogue music (in its final manifestation as the vinyl record) as opposed to the Digital.

It was at this point, before legendary Occult Author Graham Hancock took the stage, in the form of a question, that I got to lay my Summer theory on Erik. I paraphrased it but it went something like this (deep breath):

Since the dawn of recorded media, be it Audio or Visual we've had to had to contend with the effect of Analogue generation loss. When we used to see old films on television or old music on the radio we not only had to contend with the "zeit" fingerprint as manifested in the then archaic film or audio process (be it Technicolor or Direct-to-Disc cutting) but also the decay which has occurred as those signals pass down between analogue mediums of recording.

One could argue the toss whether methods of recording have become more "transparent" as the years progress. Though equally one could simply argue that each generation's notions of transparency supplant the previous one in quite random ways, and that this revolves as much as anything around notions of realism. So for example the brittle trebly production signature of Martin Hannett on The Buzzcocks's "Spiral Scratch" was "more real" than, say, Martin Rushent's engineering on Gentle Giant's "Three Friends".

However, what no-one could dispute is that with a correctly-implemented digital pipeline there need never ever again, and let's focus on the history of recorded music (though it applies equally to film and video) be a need for sound quality to degrade. When one copies digital information properly there is a simply an exact copy made of each 1 and 0 in the string.

When I was eighteen I stayed at the house of my friend's father, a famous hippy Earl in Cornwall, and I taped his scratchy copy of Randy Newman's "12 Songs" onto a crappy old C90. That C90 had belonged to my Dad in the mid seventies and had previously had a performance recorded off Radio 3 on it. I had then taped some gleeful punk crud over the top of that, and then finally like icing on the cake, the Randy Newman. The Earl's tape deck was busted and so there was practically no signal at all in the left channel. In those days before I discovered Second-hand record shops that was the only way I was going to be able to hear "12 Songs" and I listened to it all the time. Many of you will have similar memories of how the analogue pipeline, not necessarily compromised, but intruded in your listening experience.

As much, perhaps more than the method of recording, this made things sound old. Even at the most basic level, records got scratchy and started to wear away in the course of time. But with Digital (ta-daah!) time as we once recognised it officially ended. And I'm sort of fascinated with how this apparent stasis of time has thrown the music industry into crisis. There are lots of phenomena one could ascribe to it. The voracious Retro culture (of which I must be a component), music like Amy Winehouse and The White Stripes (who Simon Reynolds once described as like a "cabinet-maker") and maybe even (over-egging it) the death throws of the industry itself- for if there is no past, then can it ever have been alive?

I find it's quite difficult from this position to think about the Digital in ways that are meaningfully constructive. But despite my tone, and the slightly negative remarks I made a month or so back about Analogue -vs- Digital when it comes to making electronic music, I am really committed to not turning into a cartoon proponent of superseded technologies. That would be too boring.