The first time I made an engineering choice was in the 1980's with the Dolby switch for cassette recording. I knew it was there, but refused to use it when making my absolute hellish productions on modified boomboxes.
Less NOISE? fuck that, this is New York City!
Zip forward decades later, people are pasting tape noise over their clean shit to make it less so. It’s the choices like that, which no one knows or cares to know, that is what trains the future of sound systems; every one of us has something that can be untrainable to a model until the accident makes itself known as an act of resistance to suppression, in the future.
Recording is the act of capturing the current time frame’s idea or “peak” of interest, but the sound studio itself, with the help of the sound system, manifests other time frames not yet seen or heard. It is a laboratory for the possible effects of that future, and it is always about resistance, regardless of whether its creative knows it.
There is a reassurance in knowing the mainstream is mostly wrong about everything and can only rely on its own “artists” and producers to keep that bullshit going.
We will discuss noise itself more in the coming posts; meanwhile, please enjoy this one from the 90s (still no Dolby).
Read: Sonic Graffiti: The Untold Story
