*I mean, look at this mess. Listen to it. What the heck is left of them and their craft of music? Every aspect of production, distribution, socialization even, has been virtualized and network-distributed. Musicians have really been close to the fire there for a long time. And their troubles aren't over, either, not by a long chalk.
*When someone chooses to halt this potentially endless digital process, a stream of ones and zeros reverberates out of a speaker somewhere. Although that artifact still strikes the human ear as music, it's got about as much to do with analog music as an ocelot-patterned synthetic rug does with an ocelot.
*Text has also suffered a great deal by digitization, but the transition from typewriters to word-processing keyboards, and to radically collaborative text distribution systems such as Twitter, was not QUITE so weird as the truly eerie fate of music. This is what text might have looked like, if writing had been messed with that radically and pitilessly:
3D Translator from Daniel Lara on Vimeo.
*Okay, fine. What's done is done, right? But now have a listen to this – especially the sequence around and after 2:20. Do you hear how warm and flat and squinchy that music sounds – kind of stretched, somehow, and especially the very disturbing background rhythm under the drums, that is subtly drifting out of phase? That music could not possibly be created with human hands. That is Brian Eno manipulating analog tape loops. Yes, ANALOG tape loops, with STRIPS OF RECORDED PLASTIC. In 1974. You can still pick up an acoustic guitar and learn to play it, but you can no longer get THERE from here. The high-tech studio of 1974 is dead-media. You're about as likely to find music of this kind now, as you are to find a jaguar stalking around downtown Mexico City.
*You need a capper for this? "Whatever next," eh? Check that out:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/12/world/europe/12germany.html
