Analogue Revolution

Dunnes Stores are selling record players this winter for the first time in years. For Dunnes ("better value beats them all") the absolute gutter point in terms of cultural trickle-down, to find this as a market worth exploiting come Christmas is remarkable not only in terms of the ever more fickle consumer but also as another waypoint in the regressive cultural shift away from technology. It looks like the CD digital revolution wasn't quite the year zero (binary code pun) event it was advertised as.
As the world speeds up, technology gains futher ground on the mean knowledge of the population. This argument has been given for the rekindling of superstition; religion fills the gaps in knowledge and as our world fills more and more with new and more complicated technology those gaps widen.
"I watch a television every day, I don't know how it works, I'm sure its wires and electricity, but there is a chance they really are pixies trapped in a fish tank."
In terms of the audio example given above, I believe that a return to honest old vinyl is a product of the disconnection of music from the tangible to the intangible. Before the advent of music in a digital format an artist recorded a track and the only way a consumer could get ownership of it was to purchase it on record, immovably branded in hot shellac.
However digitalistion of music, by definition, only results in its proliferation. Consumers crave a more substantial relationship with purchased music then click and charge. Vinyl is offering that return to physicality.
I was once on holiday in Bordoux. While in an ancient church carved out of the mountain side, our tour guide told my wine group, in broken english, that the relief carving hune out of the ceiling dipicting musicians was to remind the congregation of man's most intangible and eternal products, music. And for a while there, digitalisation and internet proliferation returned music to it's most uncommercial origin, so much so even the comsumer was left out.
Recorded music is an almost unique example in consumerism as it promotes a more emotional response from its consumers then say home heating oil. But is this a trend? is the tide turning on digital? Will the future see calculators thrown on pires in favour of the abacus, will I be trading in this PC for a big cabinet thing with whirrling reel to reels and a stack of punch cards? Sounds like fun.

Well if they insist on buying vinyl records this thing made out of tough sponge I just invented might bridge the gap.



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