Great Paraphernalia! Lend your keepsakes and forget-me-nots in the forms of magnetic tapes and Fujifilm. The spiraling descent of the tangible, ricocheted from the tombstone, back to the tactile sensations of our fingertips. Digital photography* is accessible, consumable, but becomes static, it’s transferable, so ultimately temporary—one could lose a handful of smartphone snappings, and not bat an eye—. The 35mm extractions that can be traded like baseball cards are where we drive our attentions toward, the gift of the manifest! Yet, there is not only whispers about the revolution of film, we can grab at cassettes, patches, prints (anything that’ll get you funny looks from Best Buy employees!).
Before I go off into the lagoon that lay ahead of the attractions of past technology, I need to establish my own perspective. I’m purely a tourist to it all, I grew up burning CDs on hard drives, sooner throw a floppy disc in the trash than use it to load sounds onto my synthesizer. But times have changed! The past beckons me as much as the future does, as amazing as the computer in my pocket is, I’m just a sucker for a good Walkman. Exploring the revival of the “outdated”, it’s through the eyes of a distanced generation, yet not an ungrateful one. Find me renting DVDs (which are apparently archaic now), manipulating the guts of a VHS, or emulating any form of that ghostly overexposure & sunspot bleeds present in dime-store shutter cameras.
An object that I find can navigate the greater meaning behind the return of these deceased formats, is the photograph. There is a lot to say about a photograph, it’s textures, tones, shades, an old shutter’s unpredictable nature. Yet it crafts a sentimental image ranging from a film photo of a band, a picnic or some amalgamation of kids crawling along the rafters, cans of booze flying over head like UFOs and walls, tattered with paintings, illustrations and murals. It could come from the creeping sense of permanence, there is no denying that once the ill-fated click! sounds off, what you have is what you have (down one photo, up one negative for processing). I don’t mean to imply that photography is terrifying, if anything clutching that housing of mirrors and switches fills even the most cynical with a sense of greater power and responsibility. It’s more on the side of: (a) haha ya, I took a bunch of pictures of your set. iPhone camera doesn’t fair too well in low-lighting, but I got some fun ones (b) I took a few on my camera, threw some double exposures in there, played around with the light—flash on / flash off—, got some angles. Both valid, but there is some level of distance with the digital, they can come and go, but the film is a permanent stamp, a physical gesture, there is some outlandish quality to how someone looks on film as opposed to looking at them with your own eyes. Saturated colors, certain little quirks such as dust or the effect of refractions that lead to altered perceptions of moments (smoke can create blues, sun exposure to film can create warm color streaks...don’t see that even with the strongest prescription of glasses). Cannon-balling into the community, one sees there are aesthetic draws that are coupled with the tangential nature of the film format, to see what a photographer will do behind the camera. There is an artistry to allowing a photographer to run wild in their field, and what that can do for collaborative media. More and more are there pop-ups of bands scrounging for film whisperers, those that dance with the dark room in the pale moonlight. As attuned as we are to the endless wall of photos we can summon from our fingertips, the feeling of a envelope up to the brim with emulsion stained film strips is marketable enough to share. I don’t simply believe that aesthetics are purely the culprit in the rise of its popularity: nostalgia dips its fingers a fair amount. While there may be a form of generational difference, I don’t necessarily believe that all have an adopted form of nostalgia. Even the youngest of the current artist communities are candid to old photo albums, their parents/guardians/grandparents days of youth. It’s nostalgic of imagining oneself being apart of those photos, when one is old enough to get themselves in Kodak moments, worn-in clothes with naturally shaped hair. There is also the distanced nostalgia, of finding crates upon crates of yellowing Rolling Stones, Creem, where visions of arena rockers are plastered against flash bulbs and ornamental backdrops. There is definitely an argument to be made that these callback technologies affect music communities.
I have spun webs with musicians who run their sonic signals through magnetic tape into compact cassettes. While there is much opportunity to create a visually striking housing, all of the components relatively affordable, the question comes...why?!? In most cases I’ve gotten the answer that it comes from a love of tape, the way it can wrap and saturate the sound in a more comfortable fidelity than any amount of ProTools** could summon. I find that tape is a medium that seeks to connect listener with artist in a very intimate way, tape is very bare. If you screw up a take, that means a new reel, that means a chop & a stitch & maybe an inversion...or ya just give it your best! Even a transfer from the warm strips to a digital output (give the robots something to hold onto), it retains the same permanence of a moment captured by the stringing slings of tape. It also creates some other specialty. A phone is great for instant access to a world beyond the fingertips, all the artists having a palooza inside the device. But the presence of a tape creates a collection, that these few artists (who may be friends, new friends, or people that stand above us on linoleum-clad stages) have reserved seating. An entire tape is a way of dedicating the time of four songs entirely to an artist, creates a whole different feel (causes for incidents such as all other mediums failing you, spiraling towards busting out the tape player and relive the sentiments). There is also something to be said in this regard pertaining to touring, a single drop of a cassette into an audience pool that you’re new to swimming in provides some floaties. Some friends near and dear to my heart are merch auteurs, crafting tape casings, stickers and shirts. They’re full-time tourers who dedicate a good handful of their time to pollinating the sides of the nation with paraphernalia to keep them wanting more. The cassette is the inter-communal can-on-a-string that stretches with resounding vibrations!
One assured thing I believe in at the end of the day is the idea of sentiment vs conveniency. There is something very vulnerable about running towards these formats that are beyond the ease of reach. It’s an aesthetic choice that broadcasts to fans and friends that whatever comes in the packaging is hand-crafted. One can be engaged and attached to their community with the love notes of cassettes, vinyl stickers and the like! Catch coffee shops filled with Nalgenes and MacBooks tattooed to the brim with logos and designs of the musical communities. Find every show go-er’s room adorned with handheld tape players and portable vinyl spinners, a return from the dead! I do a fair amount of twiddling along the Bandcamp highway (someone help me understand SoundCloud, the whole UI seems weird to me, I need like a lesson or something), yet the handing off of a tape or a patch will craft a connection. One will have the moment of clutching the fabric of a new favorite band burned into their mind, the dark room moments that manifest ideas and dances into the actual. To keep it brief: vinyl is thicker than water. Great Paraphernalia! So much you can craft for our hands and our ears and our souls!
*Before I completely alienate some people, or coal-less a pile of hate mail, lemme define some of my “terminology”. When I speak of digital photography, I mean smartphone photography. Not to say that there are not great smartphone photographers (hell I take so many photos on that darn thing), but I use the term mostly to emphasize the temporary, lossless, and sometimes infinite quality to digitized photography.
**Ought to make myself perfectly clear: I am not an enemy of the digital state! Check my laptop, you’ll find walls of Logic and Garageband files as evidence to my allegiance to new tech. I am not demanding an overthrow, I am drawings parallels and hey! People use digitals on the day to day, might as well show the analog a good time.
words by jake
