#obsolete recordings

[dustedmagazine]

Various Artists — Solstice: A Tribute to Steffen Basho-Junghans (Obsolete Recordings)

Steffen Basho-Junghans

Solstice: A Tribute to Steffen Basho-Junghans by Various Artists

Steffen Basho-Junghans was a master of the steel string guitar, born in East Germany but finding a spiritual home in the geographically indeterminant blend of folk, blues and raga of the Takoma School.  Like Robbie Basho, whose name he appended to his, Basho-Junghans could play in a spare, contemplative style or conjure eddies and cascades of orchestra complexity. His work was always crystal clear and precise, but it evoked something beyond the notes themselves, a mystery and transcendence.

Basho-Junghans died last December, and so Buck Curran, who is also a devotee and practitioner of the Takoma style, brought together an international group of guitarists to pay tribute. His Solstice follows the same format as homages to Jack Rose (Ten Years Gone: A Tribute to Jack Rose) and Robbie Basho (We are All One, In the Sun: A tribute to Robbie Basho and Basket Full of Dragons: A Tribute to Robbie Basho Vol II). These are not covers, but rather free-flowing meditations on Junghans-Basho’s art and influence, with different artists emphasizing different elements of his work.

Curran himself opens and closes the disc with two mournful, contemplative versions of “Winter Solstice.” He plays both cuts on a 12-string guitar that once belonged to Robbie Basho, and that, indeed, featured on all of his records from 1965 to 1986. The guitar, however, needs some serious repair. Curran’s slow, considering approach, where each bent note gets the space to hang and decay, may be partly down to the instrument. In an email, he confided, “[It’s] only possible to play the first few frets, open notes/open harmonics and play slide with it (as I did on my recordings).” The two cuts are, nonetheless, very beautiful, both excellent examples of the rewards of working within limitations.

Many of the other artists on this 22-track collection will be familiar to fans of this Fahey-influenced style of playing. Joseph Allred lets the mountain air (and a few birdcalls) into his exploration of Basho-Junghans’ raga blues in “An Upper Cumberland Raga,” while Isasa, from Spain, lets the space between notes speak in the lovely “Paseo por el Alto Tajo.” In “Every Blue,” Nick Jonah Davis finds tranquility in limpid slides, while Boston’s Robert Noyes rambles and jangles against a bowed note drone in “Surmises.”

The most revealing tracks, though, are the ones that depart furthest from what you expect. Henry Kaiser’s “Requiem for Steffen Basho-Junghans” jars a full set of strings into discord. It sounds like a piano after it’s dropped a couple of feet, ringing with disgruntled dissonance. E. Jason Gibbs plays guitar like a percussion instrument, letting abrupt squeaks and squawks mark out unsettling intervals of time. And Bhajan Bhoy’s “I Can See the Lights of Heaven” interpolates 78-record crackle, bell-like guitar cadences and actual bells, into a chiming, luminous soundscape that opens to the numinous just as Basho-Junghans’ work often did.

Altogether, it’s a lovely tribute, but also absolutely its own thing. It may help to know Basho-Junghans’ music, or to be familiar with the participating artists, but it’s not necessary. So, use Solstice to honor Basho-Junghans if you already admire him. Or put it on to explore how forward-thinking guitar players are extending his vision around the world. It’s also a way to help out since some of the proceeds from Solstice will go to Basho-Junghans family. All good reasons to check in. What are you waiting for?

Jennifer Kelly

#Steffen Basho-junghans #solstice #obsolete recordings #jennifer kelly #albumreview #dusted magazine #guitar #takoma school #buck curran

[marshiebun]

cakes

#sacriverse #sacristuff #obsolete battle show #burner #burnerosc #5sos2 #5sos3 #5 secondly object show #battle for grandma #bfg #kit burner #flash bfg #hanger burner #crayon obs #floppy 5sos #record burner #paint roller 5sos #lava lamp obs #buzzery obs #marshie art #cw food #food

[mudwerks]

(via Internet Archive Responds to Recording Industry Lawsuit Targeting Obsolete Media | Internet Archive Blogs)

Statement from Brewster Kahle, digital librarian of the Internet Archive:

“When people want to listen to music they go to Spotify. When people want to study 78rpm sound recordings as they were originally created, they go to libraries like the Internet Archive. Both are needed. There shouldn’t be conflict here.”

These preservation recordings are used in teaching and research, including by university professors like Jason Luther of Rowan University, whose students use the Great 78 collection as the basis for researching and writing podcasts for use in class assignments (University Professor Leverages 78rpm Record Collection From the Internet Archive for Student Podcasts, June 9, 2021). While this mode of access is important, usage is tiny—on average, each recording in the collection is only accessed by one researcher per month.

The recording industry truly are a bunch of greedy morons that don’t give a fuck about music or the artists who create it...

just MONEY for themselves

#Internet Archive Responds #Recording Industry Lawsuit #obsolete media

[postpunkindustrial]

It’s bizarre but true: wire recording is the longest-lasting capture format in audio history, one that paved the way for reel-to-reel tapes and a host of others—even though most people today, and some techies included, have barely heard of it.

Invented way back in 1898 and patented two years later, wire recording was somehow still getting some limited use as late as the early 1970s, while rockets took man to the moon on an annual basis. In its wake, vinyl, with its 67 years, and CD with a mere 33, look like footling youngsters. In its none-too-brief life, "the wire" also found use in Hollywood, provided a broadcast aid to spying, helped launch digital data capture, and pioneered the new art of bootlegging—sorry, "home recording."

#obsolete technology #obsolete recording tech #wire recording #the wire

[seariii]

I was stressed but now i'm more chill and really sleepy...

#overall my mood has been better but i am so incredibly terrified of the future... its like.... #like i feel as if someone has holding me at gun point and got told thst if i did any mistakes they would shoot #but then im not given clear instructions on what i need to do and i have to figure it out myself #i am really scared... even tho all of this gave me a new objective... i dont wanna be obsolete... #... so... that what we will work on... also... i wanna work towards my dreams... #I've been putting it off for so long i want to do it #people support me and actually enjoy my voice... i want to... #the things on my plate right now are things i can achieve... but i want more... i want things i actually want... #i want... #my house has a constant buzzing sound. i believe its because of the small power plant behind the lot. which makes it difficult for recording #since i have to get rid of that and that messes with the rest of the audio #its comforting to know it wasnt the mic tho... heh... #tomorrow lets try to take the first few steps... well more like lets try to continue with the set up #we have already a couple stuff but we still have a lot missing... #... today the girls said some stuff that impressed me... thats how im perceived?... is that what people think of me? #i kinda want to... fulfill those 'expectations'... they dont expect anything but its more of a me thing... ive been dreaming and hoping for #so long but i dont take the next step. i never do... and its because of the executive dysfunction... but... once i get the hang of it... #once i do... everything will be excellent... and we will take it easy #i am so tired already... i feel im gonan falla sleep #seari talks

[milkyvast]

Ive made this animatic burner humanized on youtube, Check em out!

Animatic here

#milkart #osc #art #fanart #object shows #object show community #sacriverse #sacristuff #obsolete battle show #burner #burnerosc #5sos3 #battle for grandma #bfg #kit burner #hanger burner #record burner #paint roller 5sos #lava lamp obs #marshie art #tissue burner #milkdraw #burner osc #burner object show

[bbdoll]

She’s been late so many times that if she doesn’t get a top story soon...she’ll be toast.

#ts4 #ts4 gameplay #📹 #ya'll weren't gonna tell me bout gshade huh? #i thought we were friendsss #good heavens...it's so good i want to play awhile 🤎 #i just lvl'd up #remaking all of my main characters with a different style #got a mini story brewing... #btw...camera men are obsolete these days when you have recorders + tripods

[the-valiant-valkyrie]

if i told you guys i made a 30 minute game review/game design analysis on ieytd2 in comparison to the first one would you believe me and follow up quastion would you still love me if i told you that was over a year ago and i never actually finished it

#ieytd #i got all the audio down but fuck if i know how to capture good visuals with the quest 2 dude. it sucks so bad. #WHY DOES IT ONLY RECORD IN 6:6 WITHOUT A CABLE. ITS A QUEST 2. THE LACK OF CABLES IS THE APPEAL. #been feeling very demotivated recently with the release of the third game on the rise #i'm obviously incredibly excited but it also feels like a countdown to the day half a year's progress becomes obsolete #and even if i *did* get good quality recordings theres no guarantee my fiddly computer or editing software won't ruin it another way #it is what it is i guess. but its still demoralizing. makes me regret taking on difficult projects that i dont fully know how to do #anyways. i was gonna get an ice cream but it started thundering outside so its been a very fucked up and evil day all around

[geminigga]

Maybe it's because I refuse to update my app so these might just by blazed posts but if not . why am I getting ads for bts fan fiction and bnha cosplays

#???? #I'm so confused #no hate to the users btw I just don't know how they got on my dash #ads #sponsored #i wasn't even a vmin enjoyer when i DID like bts #nor do i like mha #get it together tumblr your record of me is looking pretty obsolete

[fozmeadows]

the older I get, the more the technological changes I've lived through as a millennial feel bizarre to me. we had computers in my primary school classroom; I first learned to type on a typewriter. I had a cellphone as a teenager, but still needed a physical train timetable. my parents listened to LP records when I was growing up; meanwhile, my childhood cassette tape collection became a CD collection, until I started downloading mp3s on kazaa over our 56k modem internet connection to play in winamp on my desktop computer, and now my laptop doesn't even have a disc tray. I used to save my word documents on floppy discs. I grew up using the rotary phone at my grandparents' house and our wall-connected landline; my mother's first cellphone was so big, we called it The Brick. I once took my desktop computer - monitor, tower and all - on the train to attend a LAN party at a friend's house where we had to connect to the internet with physical cables to play together, and where one friend's massive CRT monitor wouldn't fit on any available table. as kids, we used to make concertina caterpillars in class with the punctured and perforated paper strips that were left over whenever anything was printed on the room's dot matrix printer, which was outdated by the time I was in high school. VHS tapes became DVDs, and you could still rent both at the local video store when I was first married, but those shops all died out within the next six years. my facebook account predates the iphone camera - I used to carry around a separate digital camera and manually upload photos to the computer in order to post them; there are rolls of undeveloped film from my childhood still in envelopes from the chemist's in my childhood photo albums. I have a photo album from my wedding, but no physical albums of my child; by then, we were all posting online, and now that's a decade's worth of pictures I'd have to sort through manually in order to create one. there are video games I tell my son about but can't ever show him because the consoles they used to run on are all obsolete and the games were never remastered for the new ones that don't have the requisite backwards compatibility. I used to have a walkman for car trips as a kid; then I had a discman and a plastic hardshell case of CDs to carry around as a teenager; later, a friend gave my husband and I engraved matching ipods as a wedding present, and we used them both until they stopped working; now they're obsolete. today I texted my mother, who was born in 1950, a tiktok upload of an instructional video for girls from 1956 on how to look after their hair and nails and fold their clothes. my father was born four years after the invention of colour televison; he worked in radio and print journalism, and in the years before his health declined, even though he logically understood that newspapers existed online, he would clip out articles from the physical paper, put them in an envelope and mail them to me overseas if he wanted me to read them. and now I hold the world in a glass-faced rectangle, and I have access to everything and ownership of nothing, and everything I write online can potentially be wiped out at the drop of a hat by the ego of an idiot manchild billionaire. as a child, I wore a watch, but like most of my generation, I stopped when cellphones started telling us the time and they became redundant. now, my son wears a smartwatch so we can call him home from playing in the neighbourhood park, and there's a tanline on his wrist ike the one I haven't had since the age of fifteen. and I wonder: what will 2030 look like?

#millennials #technology #personal #generations #generational change

[dustedmagazine]

Buck Curran — Delights and Dangers of Ambiguity (Improvisations 2017-2022) (Obsolete Recordings)

Delights and Dangers of Ambiguity (Improvisations 2017 - 2022) by Buck Curran

Delights and Dangers of Ambiguity is an outlier in Buck Curran’s catalog, in that it is a collection of improvisational experiments. Even still, there is a tie that binds these tunes to Curran’s overall oeuvre: a focus on resonance. Throughout his career — whether with his ex-partner Shanti as Arborea or on his own — the artist, multi-instrumentalist and luthier explores ways of extending a note’s sonic envelope via extended techniques. This has led Curran, who drinks from the overflowing Takoma School cup and draws influence from blues-influenced folk music, to align himself with the psychedelic folk scene of the northeastern United States. With this song cycle he strays from both orbits, instead carving a path through dissonance and darker hued textures. Curran is searching within his shadowy side, poking at unexplored pockets of his psychic apparatus, revealing an instinctual drive toward the polychromatic.

While Curran commonly employs the guitar in his arsenal, he’s also adept at the piano. He demonstrates his ivory tickling skills on the title track, a brooding modal piece that balances dark and light tones. The alien timbres of the piano suggest implements within the strings of the instrument. Curran propels swarms of buzzing melodies into the air and sears strange glyphs across the visual field. This synaesthesia is common across his body of work. Curran’s particular brand of psychedelia does not require any substances; his music itself opens the mind. 

Curran is a serial collaborator, and some of these pieces find him selecting friends and confederates with whom to jointly experiment. On “Gemini Sun, Gemini Rising,” he enlists the help of cellist Helena Espvall (Espers, Anahita), who was a regular Arborea associate. The pair coax writhing phantasms from their strings, with Curran’s guitar producing intertwined streams of uncanny melody across Espvall’s arco environments. Composer Hiroya Miura lays down a delicate and impressionistic piano passage on “Mugen no Umi no Iro.” Curran fights not to overpower the sprightly tinkling, instead choosing to dissolve into the background so that Miura can shine. Eventually the pair seem to lock horns in a subtle dance of keyboard and guitar. “Slow Air” is a short folk guitar tune accompanied by organ drones from Jodi Pedrali, an Italian musician; Curran currently lives in Bergamo with his wife and kids. 

Some of these songs are centered on lyricism rather than dissonance. “Prelude in D Minor” roots itself in an evocative piano melody before diving down a rabbit hole of guitar drone, while the ultra-short “1894 (Coda)” eschews the guitar altogether, instead focusing on a hypnotic keyboard passage with notes that ring out to infinity. Resonance and sustain are never far from the core of all these pieces. Curran toys with these concepts, turning them over in his mind and creating sonic microcosms. We’re fortunate to imbibe the tasty auditory brew that results. 

Bryon Hayes

#buck curran #delights and dangers of ambiguity #obsolete recordings #bryon hayes #albumreview #dusted magazine #improvisation #guitar

[cemeterything]

i keep thinking about digital ghosts. or maybe digital hauntings would be a better term. the final messages shared between you and someone you no longer speak to, for whatever reason. a webpage, or blog post, or inactive profile on a social media forum that you still return to sometimes, no longer even hoping for something to have changed, just to remember, like returning to a grave year after year. video and audio recordings of people who've left your life that you play back over and over until the tape wears out. in the realm of the more fantastical, maybe a hologram that bears their likeness but only a pale, shallow imitation of their complexity, their personality, or an AI or other imperfect replica built on a lifetime of data collected from them that only reinforces their absence but is all you have left to remember (or replace until you forget the difference) them by. all these records that they existed that will inevitably only last as long as the technology that supports them takes to become obsolete, or the data corrupts and begins to break down, or the archives storing it are no longer hosted anywhere. you haven't cheated death, or the grief that comes with losing someone. you've just prolonged it.

#🐉 #lost contact with a beloved friend recently so im channeling that grief into this #but this is also what happens to val in my mech pilot thing #she becomes a holographic propaganda machine (until shes freed) and knows shes just a replica of someone real #who has been given a little more sand in the hourglass because shes still useful and even though #shes already dead her image cant be allowed to die with her yet

[argent-sz]

Gone are the days when you could kick something hard and it would start working again 😔😔😔 modern technology is just so frail and small and costly to repair and hard to manipulate its pieces nowadays...

#i loved fixing tape recorders when i was young... younger. #also alarm clocks #fishing rods too!!!! #i just miss being able to pop something open and see what the fuck is wrong with it #but now it's all software and hard coded circuitry specifically designed to go bad in a few years #i hate planned obsoletism!!!!!!!!!

[fluffleforce-mysdrym]

Like, I was on edpuzzle looking up other people's videos and thinking that would be good. But apparently people thought I would be making my own?

#Like I can spring board off the other videos #But I don't know how to record stuff amd all that #I feel old and obsolete

[autophage]

You were born 46 years ago, birthed from factories built by the smartest people in what they considered to be "the Free World". Your mission is to explore, to push forth into the void that surrounds the small fragile blue orb where you were created. Your other mission, perhaps, you are less proud of: to prove Capitalism stronger than Communism.

(You would have been happy to execute your sibling's mission: to bear the Golden Record, proof of human ingenuity, to announce to the universe that We Are Here, that humans exist and experience the world around them. But you are further from Earth. And you are a machine, so perhaps you have no pride of your own.)

For decades you have traversed space, more distant by far than any other thing produced by human hands.

You are nearly a half century old, and programmers on Earth still write code for you. They still send you updates. Back on Earth you would be considered obsolete, but out here, your age is part of what makes you so valuable: you have journeyed further. Updates reach you at the speed of light, and even at that speed they take twenty-two hours to reach you. And of course that time only increases as you continue. You were the first item born of human ingenuity to reach interstellar space.

In three hundred more years - according to current human calculations - you will reach the Oort Cloud.

Human hands made you. Human hands shaped you. You are a shout, a statement, a greeting. You are humanity's senses, further by far than any eye or ear. You are a projection of humanity against void, against history's dust, against vastness and distance and separation. You will continue to exist long after humanity's changes, whatever they may be. Perhaps they will remember you. You will always remember them.

#space #outer space #voyager

[moonmothmama]

#tumblr old #poll #obsolete technology #vhs #cassette tape #crt tv #landline telephones #laserdisc #boombox #nokia brick #floppy disk #retro computing