Vinyl crackle in music marks audiovisual distance from a lost tactile materiality

Evidence

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like Tricky, Basic Channel and Pole started to foreground vinyl crackle at the very moment when records were becoming superseded.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. — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life, 332

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Marconi believed sounds never die but only fade beyond perception — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on…, 335; Crackle and surface noise can carry the spectral essence of a record — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on…, 211; Recorded crackle foregrounds the digital era’s loss of tactile materiality and mortal fragility — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on…, 332 (+2 more)