Ephemerality.

[DavidD]

I'm going to say that jazz was pretty much inherently ephemeral; it came from communities interested in performance, and outside communities - generally speaking, white people - stepped in to record it for "history" (and to make money). Recording culture for the history books, yeah?

 

[Logan Sama]

My dub of Eskimo vocal featuring Wiley, Flowdan, Jamakabi, Dizzee, Taz and Dom P will never sound like it did the first time I played it, and everytime I want to play it, I do so knowing that each play makes the quality sound worse and worse.

And the actual recording of the track has been lost since.

 

[Omaar]

Now you could argue that this just means that in the future the music will still exist, but its interpretation will have changed. But I think this would be to ignore that the driving force behind making this music is for it to be part of a scene that changes rapidly with time.

Yeah agreed, its crazy to think that scholars in the future may be doing textual analysis on this stuff and trying to put it into context .... like kids trying to get shakespeare for the first time. in school.

I imagine scholars using some kind of massive hypertext - hypermusic web mp3 archive database that you could navigate to discover what a rhyme or loop is referring to.

hypermusic? - I'm thinking of being able to somehow click through a sample to find and hear every other recorded instance of it. Oops tangent again.

 

[LRJP!]

hypermusic? - I'm thinking of being able to somehow click through a sample to find and hear every other recorded instance of it. Oops tangent again.

but what a tangent!

 

[Woebot]

listening to the pirates i always has the urge to get the tape recorder running, i've lost a whole tape colection in the past (had it stolen, all my vintage jungle shows, boo hoo), and this is by no means a large collection of c90s but LOOK, am i ever going to get round to listening to this lot (NB there is a DJ Wrongspeed-style 2step tape i mean to collage from a load of these):

<img alt="tapes.gif" src="http://www.woebot.com/images/dissensus/tapes.gif" width="500" height="244" border="0" />

to square with the original central point, nowadays when i listen to the pirates, i just hold myself back and say, cool it, just let the music flow, enjoy it, and let it go.

 

[bassnation]

listening to the pirates i always has the urge to get the tape recorder running, i've lost a whole tape colection in the past (had it stolen, all my vintage jungle shows, boo hoo), and this is by no means a large collection of c90s but LOOK, am i ever going to get round to listening to this lot (NB there is a DJ Wrongspeed-style 2step tape i mean to collage from a load of these):

i was thinking about starting a service to encode peoples tapes and vinyl to mp3 (actually nicked the idea from someone on ukd, but there is nothing original under the sun!

i think i'd have to draw the line at euro trance however - not that i'm suggesting you've got any of that!

 

[Diggedy Derek]

Of course, the fact we're all talking about lost tapes and classic dubs means that, despite the ephemerality, the oral culture of rave is made even stronger.

 

[LRJP!]

I have to say I fundamentally disagree with the central thesis of this thread.

If you look at the progression of modern music it's gone on a journey from transparency to contextuality.

Even if rappers didn't shout "2004" at the start of records, you'd still need a huge amoung of temporally specific context to interpret the lyrics, because of the sheer volume of obscure slang and cultural references most rap records contain.

Riddim culture is also incredibly ephemeral - so many grime records exist only as responses to merkery, and devoid of their cultural context will lose a lot of their meaning. Like what would your grandchildren make of "Sad ass strippa" or "Dylan's on a hype ting"?

Yes, Kool Moe Dee and LL Cool J dissing each other has a certain degree of historical interest, but only because it was so public. I can't imagine today's mixtape beefs and grime scene clashes being known in the same way in 20 years time.

Now you could argue that this just means that in the future the music will still exist, but its interpretation will have changed. But I think this would be to ignore that the driving force behind making this music is for it to be part of a scene that changes rapidly with time.

i'm not sure that something being trivial is exactly the same assomething being ephemeral. Just because these records and lyrics are in a sense insular and dependent on their immediate context does not mean they completely lose meaning and value. Look at all those old Soul songs and their 'answer' counterparts [can't think of examples right now - i'm at work!] which get reissued for a new and/or ageing audience... Pirate tape archives of the turn of the century THE reissue phenomenon of the 2030's??

 

[blissblogger]

waaaah

to square with the original central point, nowadays when i listen to the pirates, i just hold myself back and say, cool it, just let the music flow, enjoy it, and let it go.

NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO THIS IS CONTRARY TO EVERY DEEPEST IMPULSE, EVERY FIBRE OF MY BEING NO NO NO NO GOTTA TAPE IT KEEP IT HOARD IT CHERISH IT FOR EVER FOR EVER FOR EVER

no you're right that's probably the right attitude, but i'm so very far from getting there.. the other day, being insufficently tech-savvy to get one of those things that can save a radio stream into your hard drive, i did somethign truly sad -- put my walkman in front of the computer speakers, the one i do interviews with, with the left input corresponding to the right speaker and vice versa (flipping the stereo image in other words) and i recorded the Ixtra Cameo show. it sounds surprisingly not-shit although there's a ping every time an email arrived in my inbox and at one point Joy comes in asking if i want a bagel

i've lost a whole tape colection in the past (had it stolen, all my vintage jungle shows, boo hoo),

what an upsetting story, that's my nightmare, if the house started burning down it's be a toss up between the pirate tapes and the photo albums (after rescuing the kith and kin, obviously)

NB there is a DJ Wrongspeed-style 2step tape i mean to collage from a load of these)

YES YES YES YES DO IT DO IT

i've been meaning to do something similar, the best unidentified tracks, MC freestyles, and vibe-intensive pirate ads for UKG/2step era

i did three such comps for ardkcore/darkkore, they are pretty magnificent i must say

no i don't really believe this stuff is ephemeral, or perhaps its the ephemerality is whatt makes it so culturally rich, all these off the cuff mc things should be preserved for ever as ethnographic material

if you ever decide to get rid of those tapes Matt you should a/ give them to me b/ donate them to the National Sound Archive

it's truly disturbing the number of times people have told me they used to have a lot of pirate tapes but taped over them, or threw them away, or put them in the garage where they rotted -- THIS IS LIVING KULCHA PEOPLE, PRESERVE IT KEEP IT CHERISH IT

 

[john eden]

NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO THIS IS CONTRARY TO EVERY DEEPEST IMPULSE, EVERY FIBRE OF MY BEING NO NO NO NO GOTTA TAPE IT KEEP IT HOARD IT CHERISH IT FOR EVER FOR EVER FOR EVER

YES YES YES YES DO IT DO IT

THIS IS LIVING KULCHA PEOPLE, PRESERVE IT KEEP IT CHERISH IT

*John scratches his head and wonders what Joy is putting in Simon's bagels*

 

[hamarplazt]

no you're right that's probably the right attitude, but i'm so very far from getting there.. the other day, being insufficently tech-savvy to get one of those things that can save a radio stream into your hard drive, i did somethign truly sad -- put my walkman in front of the computer speakers, the one i do interviews with, with the left input corresponding to the right speaker and vice versa (flipping the stereo image in other words) and i recorded the Ixtra Cameo show. it sounds surprisingly not-shit although there's a ping every time an email arrived in my inbox and at one point Joy comes in asking if i want a bagel

Heh heh, when I was a kid I used to record commodore 64 game tunes directly from the speaker of my brothers television with an old beat up microphone. On one of the tapes, my mother enters the room and asks a question, but just as the track is ending so I decided to keep it rather than go through recording it again. And ever since, my mothers voice have become an integrated part of how I percieve that piece of music... listening to it from another source, I'd still expect her to enter. A very strange effect. And I really, really cherish those old, noisy tapes. One of them I've heard more often than probably most records I own, even though it's only playing in one channel (more or less). Was it a real record, it would be on my all time top ten, no kidding.

 

[egg]

it's truly disturbing the number of times people have told me they used to have a lot of pirate tapes but taped over them, or threw them away, or put them in the garage where they rotted -- THIS IS LIVING KULCHA PEOPLE, PRESERVE IT KEEP IT CHERISH IT

obviously you're in the right line of work, whatever ologist cultstud academic journalist dj etc etc - if this is gut reaction

my instincts are to listen, listen a couple more times, chew it up in the brain and then stop concentrating on it, assimilate it into the general musical consciousness and watch what happens (usually it gets bastardised and spit out as some part of some tune somewhere)

radio/club dj/mcing is live performance n'est-ce pas? so what you get on tape will never quite reflect what really happened.

i take joy in ignoring or chucking things away, i can't live in the present if i'm surrounded by past events. but i'm not born to do the ologist stuff

 

[ome]

Even the whole mp3/digital approach to music seems like a tactic to preserve music forever. Backed up your hard drive?QUOTE]

digital media sucks for longevity:
-consumer hardDrives die between 3-15 years (like in your ipod or computer)
-CDRs dies quicker than that
-out of favour music on p2p networks dies faster than a virus in an inoculated tribe

- of course we can run redundunt harddrives (like x2 drives mirroring using OSX or XP) or a clever RAID BOX. but who does that at home?

long live vinyl, celluoid & RAID

 

[puretokyo]

I Hate Vinyl

Forgot to mention above -

For the same reason that I am utterly averse to ephemerality - because I am afraid of death and of loss - I hate vinyl!

I appreciate that it sounds better than CD (depending on equipment), and the sleeve art shits on most CDs, but the thought that every time I play this piece of music, it will never be that good again - that terrifies me.