Dancecult: Journal of Electronic Dance Music Meditations on the
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Attias http://dj.dancecult.net/index.php/journal/article/view/96/138[9/25/2012 3:04:23 PM] Font Size: Dancecult: Journal of Electronic Dance Music Culture, Vol 3, No 1 (2011) HOME ABOUT LOG IN REGISTER SEARCH CURRENT ARCHIVES NEWS Home > Vol 3, No 1 (2011) > Attias MEDITATIONS ON THE DEATH OF VINYL BERNARDO ALEXANDER ATTIAS California State University, Northridge And vinyl is dead; it's dead. It's gonna be a special item for collectors, and probably will exist forever in that way, but that's it. It's over. You can really count on two hands who's carrying vinyl bags around the world. It's dinosaurs like Sven Vath or Ricardo Villalobos, and for them it's great because that also makes them special. But at the same time, no one really gives a shit anymore. You have to feel comfortable with what you use, whether it's vinyl, CDs or any digital gadget (DJ Ali Schwarz of Tiefschwarz, quoted in Golden 2010). While this was definitely not the first time that the "death of vinyl" had been announced in the history of recorded music, there is little question that 2010 marked an important technological crisis in electronic dance music history, particularly for the DJ. Vinyl DJ culture had already been taking a beating from the increasing popularity among DJs of compact discs and computer-based systems, and at the end of 2009, Pioneer announced the release of the CDJ-2000, a fancy (and overpriced) CD player that many speculated would sound the final death knell for turntables in club installations. Twice that year rumors surfaced on the Internet, finally confirmed in October, that Panasonic would cease production of the Technics series of turntables, including the iconic SL 1200 line that had become so emblematic of DJ culture. Panasonic made the announcement official at the 2010 DMC World DJ Championships, and the DMC, for its part, announced that this would be the last year its competition would be strictly vinyl-based: for the first time, this bedrock of analog culture was opening its doors to users of Digital Vinyl Systems (DVS) like Serato Scratch Live and Traktor Scratch Pro (Samoglou 2011; Tokyo Reporter 2010). And "controllerism" emerged into the mainstream as music conferences and trade shows that year showcased a dizzying array of new devices that allowed laptop performers to manipulate sounds with neither turntables nor CD players. Indeed, it was also in 2010 that one company announced that it would press vinyl records out of recently deceased customers' cremated remains (Solon 2010)—as if to confirm with chiastic cruelty that not only was vinyl now dead; death was now on vinyl. DC Vol 3, No 1 (2011): Special Issue on the DJ TABLE OF CONTENTS Reading Tools Meditations on the... Attias Review policy How to cite item Indexing metadata Print version Notify colleague* Email the author* SEARCH JOURNAL All This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution- Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License. CLOSE * Requires registration
Dancecult: Journal of Electronic Dance Music Meditations on the
AttiasFont Size:
Dancecult: Journal of Electronic Dance Music Culture, Vol 3, No 1
(2011) HOME ABOUT LOG IN REGISTER SEARCH CURRENT ARCHIVES
NEWS
Home > Vol 3, No 1 (2011) > Attias
MEDITATIONS ON THE DEATH OF VINYL
BERNARDO ALEXANDER ATTIAS
California State University, Northridge
And vinyl is dead; it's dead. It's gonna be a special item for
collectors, and probably will exist forever in that way, but that's
it. It's over. You can really count on two hands who's carrying
vinyl bags around the world. It's dinosaurs like Sven Vath or
Ricardo Villalobos, and for them it's great because that also makes
them special. But at the same time, no one really gives a shit
anymore. You have to feel comfortable with what you use, whether
it's vinyl, CDs or any digital gadget (DJ Ali Schwarz of
Tiefschwarz, quoted in Golden 2010).
While this was definitely not the first time that the "death of
vinyl" had been announced in the history of recorded music, there
is little question that 2010 marked an important technological
crisis in electronic dance music history, particularly for the DJ.
Vinyl DJ culture had already been taking a beating from the
increasing popularity among DJs of compact discs and computer-based
systems, and at the end of 2009, Pioneer announced the release of
the CDJ-2000, a fancy (and overpriced) CD player that many
speculated would sound the final death knell for turntables in club
installations. Twice that year rumors surfaced on the Internet,
finally confirmed in October, that Panasonic would cease production
of the Technics series of turntables, including the iconic SL 1200
line that had become so emblematic of DJ culture. Panasonic made
the announcement official at the 2010 DMC World DJ Championships,
and the DMC, for its part, announced that this would be the last
year its competition would be strictly vinyl-based: for the first
time, this bedrock of analog culture was opening its doors to users
of Digital Vinyl Systems (DVS) like Serato Scratch Live and Traktor
Scratch Pro (Samoglou 2011; Tokyo Reporter 2010). And
"controllerism" emerged into the mainstream as music conferences
and trade shows that year showcased a dizzying array of new devices
that allowed laptop performers to manipulate sounds with neither
turntables nor CD players. Indeed, it was also in 2010 that one
company announced that it would press vinyl records out of recently
deceased customers' cremated remains (Solon 2010)—as if to confirm
with chiastic cruelty that not only was vinyl now dead; death was
now on vinyl.
DC Vol 3, No 1 (2011): Special Issue on the DJ
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Meditations on the... Attias
Review policy How to cite item Indexing metadata Print version
Notify colleague* Email the author*
SEARCH JOURNAL
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-
Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License.
CLOSE
Pioneer CDJ-2000 Official Promo
RIP Technics 1200 Turntable
And yet, even as DJ culture began to grapple with the pace and
meaning of technological change, the music industry was celebrating
a huge spike in vinyl record sales (Green 2010). Schwarz's
interview, in fact, took place only three days before Record Store
Day, which saw significant increases in vinyl records purchases
worldwide (Cardew 2010). But as DJs are well aware, this recent
surge in vinyl enthusiasm was driven far more by hipsters and
audiophiles than EDM audiences. Even turntablism subcultures within
hip hop—only very recently hailed for remaining "resolutely analog
in a digital age" (Katz 2010: 130)—have moved away from vinyl
recordings, if not yet from the turntables on which they
spin.
DJ Hideo Sugano, recognized in the Los Angeles hip hop scene as
"the hardest working DJ on the west coast", passed away from cancer
on 24 April 2010. I knew Hideo from the Los Angeles branch of
Scratch DJ Academy, where I had taken a number of classes and been
part of an emerging community of hip hop DJs and turntablists since
2005. Scratch DJ Academy had for me epitomized the ideals of vinyl
culture; aspiring DJs were taught how to handle records first and
foremost before mixing skills were addressed. Instructors and
students alike prided themselves on their ability to manipulate wax
and their almost fanatical devotion to collecting it; nevertheless,
one of the last times I saw Hideo playing, he, like most of my
Scratch Academy colleagues, was using Serato's DVS technology, and
he had even demonstrated controllerist techniques on a Vestax MIDI
controller at a major trade show in 2009.
Attias
DJ HIDEO with VCI-300 @ Vestax Booth NAMM2009
I informally polled several DJs about the issue at one of Hideo's
memorial events and their responses were the same—they still
carried a handful of records to gigs for backup, but when they
played out they consistently turned to DVS rather than actual vinyl
records. This was usually admitted in a tone of shame and loss, as
if confessing a fraud, as well as a reaffirmation of their
preference for wax. They used DVS for the convenience of not having
to schlep around bags of records and the ability to access large
libraries instantly (though some begrudgingly acknowledged the
advantage of being able to more extensively manipulate sounds in
the digital realm with loops and cue points and the like), but made
clear that they preferred the sound, feel and physical virtuosity
of the older format.[1]
Such reactions were manifestations of a crisis in the relationship
between technology and identity that had for some time been
mediated by discourses of authenticity and virtuosity rooted in the
vinyl format. In EDM culture outside of hip hop, a similar crisis
had passed some years earlier with the wide acceptance of CD
players designed for DJs. Hip hop DJs, on the other hand, emerged
into the digital world somewhat surreptitiously—DVS technologies
allowed them to spin music from digital collections without giving
up the tactile dimensions of the performance interface—DVS DJs play
digital music using vinyl records and turntables as their primary
interface.[2] It is clear from the expressions of anxiety
surrounding the shift (not to mention the vehement denunciations
among the vocal minority who hadn't made the leap to digital
technologies of any sort) that within perceptions of the format lay
an as yet unexamined crisis of identity.
Music technologies have always been cathected with discourses of
authenticity and virtuosity. Of course, these discourses are
intertwined: a "real" DJ is defined in part by his or her technical
proficiency with the instrument. What is at issue, however, is the
"instrument" itself: both the format of the musical recording and
the interface through which that recording is manipulated. Sarah
Thornton's studies of club cultures have shown that the dynamic of
authenticity and technology is fluid rather than fixed; new musical
technologies are first perceived as phony and threatening to the
"truth" of musical virtuosity. They may be skeptically incorporated
into musical subcultures in the beginning but they carry audible
traces of inauthenticity in the sounds they produce, sounds that
audiences find unnatural, even unsettling. "Once absorbed into
culture", however, "they seem indigenous and organic". Underlying
this movement is "the fact that technological developments make new
concepts of authenticity possible" (1996: 29). New technologies, in
other words, undergo a process of authentication that is tied to
the emergence and consolidation of new subcultural communities.
These communities—Kenney (1999), following Paul Valéry, calls them
"circles of resonance"—legitimize new conditions and standards for
what is considered musical expression and skill. Eventually, as the
new technology is incorporated into larger circles of resonance, it
no longer sounds artificial and unsettling at all. This sequence of
events has accompanied developments in music technology at least
since the invention of the phonograph (Kenney 1999).
The only thing new about the current crisis is the speed of
technological change. Vinyl DJs had been frowned upon by mainstream
musical culture until the turntable could be authenticated as a
performance instrument in the 1980s (Schloss 2004). These same DJs,
threatened by digital technologies in the 1990s, looked down upon
CD-DJs and decried their efforts as inauthentic and unoriginal. DVS
technologies emerged in the early 21st century, with many DJs, both
vinyl and digital, expressing disdain for this latest innovation.
In just a few years, DVS has been authenticated in some
communities, with some of its users now questioning the
authenticity of a new generation of performers increasingly known
as "controllerists". And even these new button-pushers were
outraged seeing their own authenticities under attack when in April
2010, Rana June Sobhany, a "social media maven" with no DJ
experience at all, suddenly went viral with a YouTube video
declaring herself "the world's first iPad DJ", and proceeded to
book gigs at major venues thanks to the backing of shrewd
publicists in the technology industry.
Attias
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The iPad DJ
The phenomenon of the iPad DJ in particular seemed to take the
question of authenticity to its most absurd extreme. Here was a
young woman with rudimentary DJ skills at best (but plenty of
marketing savvy) generating a storm of press (and landing coveted
gigs) for DJing with nothing but a couple of video screens.[3] Many
DJs and controllerists alike felt her sudden popularity made a
mockery of the skills a DJ was supposed to have. Some blamed the
technology—of all the instruments one could be known for playing,
Sobhany had perhaps picked the one most symbolic of the increasing
technological mediation of everyday life—while others pointed the
finger at her skillset and criticized what they perceived as her
arrogant appropriation of the "DJ" title without the requisite
proficiency. Don't blame the tools, some argued; in the hands of a
true virtuoso, the iPad could be a very effective DJ
instrument:
dJ dAb iPad DJ Rig First Build
Whatever the skills of this or that performer, the history of
recorded music generally and DJ technology in particular confirms
that nobody holds the corner on authenticity—new technologies
appear deceptive at first but they can be authenticated within
particular circles of resonance.
Nevertheless, this authentication takes place within a material
physical context. While we can dispense with the idea that one
technology is inherently more "truthful" than another, we can
perhaps say that it can be ineluctably so. The materiality of
recorded sound as physical reality is often missed in academic
discussions of digital DJ technology in perhaps too quick a rush to
avoid technological determinism. For analog and digital recording
technologies are materially quite different, and the notions of
authenticity that emerge from the different subcultures involved
are tied to these differences. As Rothenbuhler and Peters (1997)
argued in a remarkable essay on "phonography", the physical traces
of sound required in vinyl recording have a direct and non-
arbitrary relationship to the reproduced sounds themselves.
Farrugia and Swiss (2009: 42) write off Rothenbuhler and Peters'
analysis as a value judgment against CDs, misapprehending the
material basis of their argument. For the vinyl record, the
relationship between the sound being reproduced and the technology
of reproduction is a relationship governed by the laws of cause and
effect—the grooves of the record press were carved by a needle
vibrating to the frequencies of the sounds being recorded.
Attias
How vinyl records are made
This relationship is in some ways the shadow of the physical
dimension of visual art that Walter Benjamin (1968) once described
as the "aura" of the work of art, an aura that allegedly had been
lost in an era of mechanical reproduction. Benjamin, too, has been
misread as arguing for the inauthenticity of film and photography;
such readings ignore the fact that his idea of the "aura" is
explicitly tied to physical processes, as well the ways in which
the work of art's liberation from this aura opens up new
possibilities for art as a vehicle of social change. Rothenbuhler
and Peters (1997: 246) explain that in the world of recorded music,
digital technology stores numbers:
These numbers are related to waveforms by a convention arrived at
in intercorporate negotiations and established as an industry
standard, but they could be anything. . . . By contrast, the
phonograph record and the analog magnetic tape do contain physical
traces of the music. . . . The hills and valleys of those grooves
are physical analogs of the vibrations of the music. . . . When we
buy a record we buy music, and when we buy a CD we buy data. If
that key claim is true, then the end of the age of phonography will
be marked by the spread of attitudes and practices that take
advantage of that difference (emphasis added).
Their essay was written in the 1990s, when CD distribution had
become very widespread and a very different "death of vinyl" had
been announced. While it's clear that vinyl never really "died",
the "spread of attitudes and practices that take advantage" of the
new technologies have clearly been embodied in the practices of
digital DJs. While digitization of recorded music separated it from
the material conditions of the production of sound, it also opened
up possibilities for musical expression that could only be dreamed
of by vinyl DJs.
DMC Champion DJ Rafik Performs on Traktor Scratch Pro
Attias
Traktor Turntable Tricknology with DJ Shiftee
The fact that a vinyl recording is indelibly linked by natural
physical processes to a specific moment in space and time makes the
phonograph a medium in the spiritual sense: vinyl records are
literally a window into another world. Vinyl may not be dead, but
the dead speak to us through vinyl. Indeed, it is telling that
among the earliest suggested uses of the phonograph was the
preservation of the voices of deceased loved ones (New York Times
1889). "The phonograph speaks from 'the other side,' as if in a
séance" (Rothenbuhler 1997: 245). The DJ is an interpreter of the
past, and when s/he works with vinyl recordings, s/he works with
literal reproductions of past events. As Jeff Chang (2010: 119)
writes, DJs are "historians of the future. Who knows better the
possibilities of the past than the one who will plunge a needle
into it blind?"
On the other hand, to work with digital media—whether CDs or
MP3s—is to work with reconstructions rather than reproductions of
past events (Rothenbuhler 1997: 252). The digital medium cannot
physically hold a piece of the past the way a vinyl record does; it
can only hold symbols that have an arbitrary relationship to that
past. While one is tempted to mourn the loss of the reproduction
and declare digital media inauthentic, it bears emphasizing that
while a reconstruction is not necessarily a reproduction, a
reproduction is always a reconstruction. In other words, the vinyl
recording is also an approximation of reality rather than reality
itself; it's just a different kind of approximation, one connected
by physics rather than symbolics. One can just as easily read
digital technology not as the "death of vinyl" but rather as
liberation from the physical limitations of the natural world. This
liberation allows for the manipulation of sound in ways that simply
aren't possible with vinyl. It wasn't very long at all after the
invention of the phonograph that George Prescott (1878: 858) mused
about the possibility of developing from it a "musical
kaleidoscope, by means of which an infinite variety of new
combinations may be produced from the musical compositions now in
existence". While the phonograph may have opened the door to
thinking about such possibilities, digital technology offered tools
with which to implement them. Electronic musicians have explored
the possibilities of the synthesizer and digital sampler for many
years now; DJ culture, in many ways, is perhaps finally taking
stock of these developments.
For the vinyl DJ formatist, of course, there is another discourse
at work here that concerns not just the medium but the interface
between the medium and the performer. Part of the vinyl DJ's
virtuosity lies in the way that s/he negotiates the risk of
"trainwrecking"—of failing to match beats accurately and destroying
the energy on the dance floor. But a lot of the computer software
available to DJs today eliminates this negotiation, or, more
precisely, removes it from the performance situation. The notorious
"SYNC" button allows DJs to match tempos perfectly, without having
"paid their dues" with the months of practice it generally takes to
learn beatmatching by ear (Golden 2008a). Some argue that the SYNC
button eliminates the one technical skill that constitutes the DJ's
virtuosity (van Veen 2002); others say that if that's all there is
to the DJ in the first place, then good riddance. DJ Lorin (aka
Bassnectar) said as much in an interview, after declaring
beatmatching "obsolete":
Although I can beat match as instantaneously as the next DJ, I
don't give an at's rass about doing it and making people watch me
do it. I'm rather much more interested in creating and collecting
awesome sounds, and layering, combining and broadcasting them as a
means to conjur [sic] up an energetically cathartic experience for
other humans (Golden 2008b).
While the debate over such software will likely continue, it is
worth reminding ourselves that new instruments have always been
viewed with skepticism in the world of music. Jim Samson reminds us
in his study of Liszt that "our puritanism echoes Plato, who
regarded instruments as an excess". He continues:
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instrumental music deals with a material base that needs to be
penetrated and transformed by 'collective human action,' to be
purposefully humanized and socialized, before it can become music.
However it can also resist that process, allowing the mechanical to
stand in opposition not just to the natural but to the human,
notably through a reification of instrumental technique (Samson
2003: 85).
The SYNC button is of course the ultimate reification of
instrumental technique, and many would argue that it functions
precisely in this manner—the antithesis of musical experience. But
for controllerists, new techniques and ultimately new virtuosities
are developing around the new tools, "humanizing and socializing"
them so they can be considered instruments for musical
performance.
Ultimately, when we focus on authenticity in relation to
technologies we tend to ask the wrong questions. New technologies
will always face a dynamic of authentication within circles of
resonance, and old technologies will never really disappear. It
behooves both the scholar and the DJ to consider the possibilities
of new technologies without getting caught up in taking sides and
choosing weapons. I was not close to DJ Hideo, but I count myself
among those touched and influenced by his spirit. When he died, the
people around him made a conscious decision to celebrate his life
rather than dwell on what the world lost. The qualities that he
brought to the world were not buried with him; his friends and
family made those qualities a part of themselves as they celebrated
his memory. Similarly, rather than mourning the death of vinyl, we
should celebrate its life even as we explore new technologies and
new possibilities.
DJ Hideo Tribute
Attias
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to vinyl junkies Anna Gavanas and tobias c. van Veen
for pressing me on the arguments in this essay as well as for
constantly reminding me to take heed of the physical dimensions of
the art. I'm also grateful to the teachers and community at Scratch
DJ Academy in Los Angeles for continuing to promote the values and
skills of vinyl DJ culture while preparing students for the digital
age in which we live. This piece is dedicated to one of those
teachers, DJ Hideo Sugano.
Author Biography
Bernardo Alexander Attias (Ph.D., University of Iowa) is Professor
of Communication Studies at California State University,
Northridge. His research is primarily in cultural studies,
performance studies, and critical theory; his current projects
focus on the legal, aesthetic and cultural implications of the
phonograph. He has been a DJ for over twenty years, spinning
eclectic sets incorporating house, hip hop and drum 'n' bass as
well as funk, jazz and swing. He occasionally blogs at
<http://turntablepoetry.com>.
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<http://blog.commarts.wisc.edu/2010/04/17/record-store-day-or-vinyl-
record-day/> (accessed 20 April 2011).
Cardew, Ben. 2010. "Record Store Day Hailed Success as Indie
Takings Rocket". Music Week, 1 May: 3.
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———. 2010. "Tiefschwarz Interview: The Death of Vinyl and Big
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Notes
[1] The evidence here is anecdotal, to be sure, but these
assertions are quite consistent with published research on the
issue; see, for example, Montano (2010), Ferguson (2009) and Katz
(2010).
[2] Digital vinyl systems work through standard turntables and
special "timecode" vinyl records that are played as one plays any
other record. Instead of music, however, the record contains a
high- pitched sound that can be read by computer software in order
to determine the position of the needle, its direction, and its
speed on the record. This gives the DJ to manipulate the sound of a
digital file housed on a hard drive with virtually the same
physical actions as playing or scratching an actual record (see
Kirn 2008 generally).
[3] Technically, she used a mixer as well, though as is evident
from some significant gaffes in the YouTube video, the mixer is
hardly an instrument she is familiar with.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License.