2008: The slow death of analog still drags on well into the 21st century. Just as it seems as though the ol' standard of media formats should be beginning to see its last days, we instead are beginning to praise and covet those archaic analog relics from the past. In both music and film there seems to be a fluctuation between analog and digital recording/equipment depending on there genre. With film, the majority of modern Hollywood classics, the action flicks, the megacomedies, young teenage horror dramas...it's all shot on digital equipment, edited with computer software, shipped off to major movie theaters like the Metreon via satellite connections, and projected onto the screen with fancy HD digital projectors. On the other hand, 2008 shows the underground film scene to be bustling with ambitious purist filmmakers determined to stick to the original beauty and warmth of celluloid by shooting with 16mm and 8mm, despite the increasing production costs of shooting with analog equipment. With music it's the same situation. The majority of popular music made today is produced completely digitally and with the highest digital sound quality, while the underground music scenes all tend to contain areas which appreciate the warm, lo-fi, sound quality of analog instruments/equipment.
For me, this whole digital vs. analog issue has played a significant part in my life as an artist. I consider myself to be a filmmaker and musician, and personally, i have always tended to enjoy the quality and reality that analog provides. I grew up listening to my parent's record collection, and always loved the entire vinyl experience, the rotating disk with the needle gliding in the grooves, the music melted into the hot wax, it's the only organic media format, it was what got me to love music. So when it came to making my own music collection, i stuck with vinyl, buying up both new and used LP's since the age of about 15. Even though CD's were making their way into the mainstream media, and cassettes were still widely used, i never bothered buying a compressed form of the original real recording. I commonly refer to the format of CD as the "digital death" of any form contained on it. Digital compression does detremental damage to a piece of music, and for me, all i want is to hear a piece in the form the artist intended. For instance, listening to a John Coltrane album that was originally recorded for vinyl formatting on a CD will be a completely seperate, more detached musical experiece.
I record electronic music as well, and i am aware of the divide the exists within the genre itself amongst analog and digital performers. Digital enthusiasts utilize MIDI controllers and software of virtual module emulators of classic analog synthesizers like the Arp Odeyssey or the Moog Voyeger to achieve their intended sounds. I, however, am dedicated to creating sound through analog equipment. I utilize circuit bending techniques to restructure old electronics to function on a more spuradic level, opening up the possibilities for artistic creation without the insertion of pretensions from the artist. With both my filmmaking and music creation, i see the pro sides of digital, and mostly, what they boil down to is that it is easier to create using digital. Everything is more effecient, more easily executed, and more "perfect". However, i do not think this represents the way the real world is, with all its imperfections, and rather instead I see digital as a virtual simulation of the real, a postmodern simulacrum of what real art is all about. So, overall, i embrace analog formats of media in an attempt to preserve the original, the organic, and the real that can be associated with artistic creation.