Moffa is one of a crew of young dance producers who have dumped their neat little laptops for rooms full of hulking black boxes, scouring eBay and garage sales for vintage, amp-driven, analogue synthesisers.
Interesting. In the early 80's, when the cool people like Moffa were jumping on the digital bandwagon, it was crappy old analogues which were cheap and easy to acquire and people like Gary Numan and Depeche Mode used them to create the sound of their generation. Now, when software synthesizers have made weightless music - free and open source - possible for the first time in history, the cool people are trying to make bulky, hard-to-acquire, difficult-to-repair-store-and-carry technology fashionable again. The article above talks about
the genre's growth (or dilution, according to some)
Uh-huh. Because if more people can do something, it suddenly becomes worthless. There's the logic of not only capitalism but of all class societies in a nutshell.
It gets better:
"People are realising what's missing from the sounds they're getting out of software," Phil Moffa of production/DJ outfit Vinyl Life says. "They're conscious of how everything is sounding the same, and digital replication is the same every time."
But of course, when you sell it to them on a record, it will be the same every time. And you don't object to that because it's your precious intellectual property, which by its nature has to be infinitely reproducible to make you $$$.
"You try to do something, and they'll give you something back you didn't expect," Ford says of the old-school technology. "Also, because they're physical things, it's less cerebral; there's a humanism to it. We're not big fans of pushing blocks around screens."
Firstly - fuck humanism. I'm going transhuman as soon as it's feasible. Secondly - pushing blocks around screens is precisely what the majority of working people in rich countries do for a living all day. If you want escapism, fine - I'm looking for something which expresses real, concrete, nasty reality.
Oh, and the best bit is this:
"I hate really nostalgic records that are trying to sound like old records," Ford says. "But there's something familiar about (analogue), the way it shapes the sound and rounds out the edges and warms it up. It reminds you of the records you grew up with."
Ay-ay-ay. Warm, comforting, reminding you of your childhood... this is not the direction in which a future which avoids the Ghost Point lies.
