Comment by drops
9 days ago
“Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit - all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It’s the sound of failure: so much modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart. The distorted guitar sound is the sound of something too loud for the medium supposed to carry it. The blues singer with the cracked voice is the sound of an emotional cry too powerful for the throat that releases it. The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them.” - Brian Eno, 1996
There’s a nostalgic aspect to lots of music. The errors we grew up with do become nostalgic. (And other sounds—what kind of a dead-hearted monster doesn’t get a little happy to hear the first couple seconds of GSM interference noise? It’s so jaunty, how has nobody worked that into some techno?). It reminds us of how things were when we were so cool that we could only afford junk.
Nostalgia is cheap of course, but some times cheap things make us happy and that’s fine.
It has been worked into a tune! Love this artist (Venjent), he takes a lot of random samples like that and turns them into EDM tunes.
https://youtu.be/gpQS41WQSPY?si=7zK7wbtulqbgx-AA
Similarly, Mistabishi's Printer Jam from 2009 sounds much like you might expect from the title.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ALNV4ZW33fA
1 reply →
Almost forty five years ago, Telephone and Rubber Band by PCO - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9_h9AvSnYQA
Venjent slaps, and this is his best track (imo).
His door genre deserves recognition too.
Mario Piu, “Communication”, 1999. Somebody pick up the phone!
https://youtu.be/cBMWgiQujPw?si=WMrOoYMIamjRrWpf
Or simply we just like things that have some noise.
> CD distortion
lol.