location, location, location

this evening i interviewed climax golden twins for a piece on the use of field recordings in contemporary sound art and composition for new music box. i was struck at the show by their incredibly well-timed and charming senses of humor, which is of course juxtaposed to the isolationist icescapes, victrola nostalgia and weird found sound collage that sometimes turns crate-digging music nerds into mad, junk culture vultures with an over-refined eye for the absurd. the CGT's curated 78 rereleases seem problematic from the standpoint of intellectual property, but provocative within this weird world of 'celebrating long lost, mediated dead people' which seems to preoccupy me when thinking about phonography and photography as now in their maturity. what does it mean to have long-dead recording artists? how does music making and listening change in reference to the artist(s) with this knowledge? does age automatically connotate nostalgia/memory, or is that a function of the sound of mediation (scratches, dust, skips, you know, your average portishead song)? how will this change in the era of digital recordings? will digital sound bad to use in 50 years? i met some dude who used to work at Quad Studios (Tupac RIP) who is now producing the s/s John Wesley Harding and who was railing on (imagine how bored other conversationalists were) to me at a party about how when digital music first started, a competitor of Sony's used a much higher sampling rate, but then Sony and Phillips got together, bought out the competitor, and shut it down so that they could make CDs at a lower bit rate. CONSPIRACY! well, maybe we'll be listening to higher quality digital audio in the future, but this dude seemed unconvinced as the wonderful world of consumer electronics continues to dump slot-machine screen AIWA shelf systems on the world for cheap, disposable and ugly listening.