Recorded crackle foregrounds the digital era’s loss of tactile materiality and mortal fragility

Evidence

Miniatures was one of a number of records from the 00s whose sound centred on crackle. Why should crackle resonate now? The first thing we can say is that crackle exposes a temporal pathology: it makes ‘out of joint’ time audible. Crackle both invokes the past and marks out our distance from it, destroying the illusion that we are co-present with what we are hearing by reminding us we are listening to a recording. Crackle now calls up a whole disappeared regime of materiality – a tactile materiality, lost to us in an era where the sources of sound have retreated from sensory apprehension. Artists like Tricky, Basic Channel and Pole started to foreground vinyl crackle at the very moment when records were becoming superseded. Back then, it was the CD that was making vinyl obsolete. Now, the MP3 can neither be seen nor touched, still less manipulated by the hand in the way that the vinyl record could be. … The digital seems to promise nothing less than an escape from materiality itself, and the story of Willam Basinski’s 2002 album Disintegration Loops – a recording of tapes that destroyed themselves in the very process of their transfer to digital – is a parable (almost too perfect) for the switch from the fragility of analogue to the infinite replicability of digital. What we have lost, it can often seem, is the very possibility of loss. Digital archiving means that the fugitive evanescence that long ago used to characterise, for instance, the watching of television programmes – seen once, and then only remembered – has disappeared. Indeed, it turns out that experiences which we thought were forever lost can – thanks to the likes of YouTube – not only be recovered, but endlessly repeated. — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life, 332

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: Crackle as audible temporal pathology and the loss of the possibility of loss through infinite digital replicability — a dense, portable insight about nostalgia, materiality and mortality in the digital age.
• XREF: Directly underpins the hauntology theme across this book and Derrida’s ‘out of joint’ time; links to Fisher’s broader argument about lost futures and the stalled 21st century. — connects to: Vinyl crackle in music marks audiovisual distance from a lost tactile materiality — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on…, 332; Digital immediacy obscures the material extraction beneath it — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 331; Technological utopias mask a fear of our embodied vulnerability (+3 more)
• SEED: Angle: why analog ‘flaws’ (crackle, grain, film scratches) get fetishized at the moment their medium dies — a nostalgia-for-materiality piece.
• CANDY: The Disintegration Loops story — tapes that destroyed themselves during digitization — is a compact, striking anecdote worth telling.

Broader Connections

• Vinyl crackle in music marks audiovisual distance from a lost tactile materiality #corroborates (1.00) — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life, 332
• Physical traces carry aura that digital content supposedly lacks #corroborates (0.88) — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory, 213
• Digital immediacy obscures the material extraction beneath it #expands (0.85) — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 331
• Computers fail at the rich texture of ordinary lived experience #complicates (0.80) — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 1023
• Technological utopias mask a fear of our embodied vulnerability #expands (0.78)
• Tele-technologies dismantle the body’s unified synthesis of action, perception, perceptibility, and vulnerability #complicates (0.75) — Grégoire Chamayou, A Theory of the Drone, 953