Even if we were to plug our ears to the bluster of its
romantic champions or the sober head-shaking of its
practical detractors, vinyl can still be said to have
a sort of enduring magic to it, and it’s hard
to imagine records disappearing in the cold and passive
way that the cassette was superseded by the compact
disc, or the way that the CD is now slowly being supplanted
by the Super Audio CD (SACD) and DVD-Audio (DVD-A).
This magic of vinyl is something that goes missing
in today’s sterile world of ones and zeroes,
and perhaps this niggling lack explains—at least
in part—why, for example, LPs are such sought-after
items on eBay, and why the audiophile Mosaic label
always releases its remastered jazz sets on high-quality
vinyl in addition to CD, not to mention the fact that
the vinyl pressing invariably sells out before the
other. If the compact disc were truly superior in
every way, it would be commercial suicide for a small
company like Mosaic to put out a painstakingly remastered
limited edition set on a delicate, restricted, outmoded
medium. And only certifiable lunatics and incorrigible
nostalgia buffs would waste time bidding for them
online.
Over the past two weeks, during which time I made
the coincidental sighting of the T-shirt, I’ve
been engaged in the rather peculiar and time-consuming
task of cleaning my records. This process involves
the removing the dust from the record with a carbon
fiber brush, spraying the disc with Windex, wiping
it down with a soft cloth, and then letting the stylus
dig the remaining trapped oil and grime from the grooves.
(With CDs I normally use a soft cloth and Pledge,
if I do it at all.)
This means I have to play the records from start
to finish for a thorough cleaning, which means I can’t
stray too far from my record player (sans automatic
tone arm), which—not to put too fine a point
on it—means I consider myself more or less bound
to the seventy square meters of my apartment for the
thirty minutes it takes for a side to finish.
Which naturally begs the question: Why?
For starters, the cleaning process gives me a great
excuse for listening to my entire collection of records
one by one, especially those which have been gathering
literal and figurative dust. Much of the time this
results in discoveries and rediscoveries, like the
nascent symphonic ideas that appear in Schubert’s
Moments Musicaux (Alfred Brendel playing),
or the twisted nonsensically poetic lyrics (“freeze
your blood and then stab it into me”) on Modest
Mouse’s Night on the Sun EP, or just
how stunning Antonio Carlos Jobim’s overlooked
Stone Flower can be, or how expertly Miles renders
the “Saeta” on Sketches of Spain.
Or that somebody somewhere surreptitiously switched
my disc of the Philadelphia Orchestra/ Ormandy performing
Tchaikovsky with a disc of Haydn symphonies. Their
loss.
Still, I suspect that the reason for my cleaning
ritual is also one of the main reasons behind vinyl’s
decline in popularity. The format asks a lot more
of its listener than CDs or even 8-tracks; wax cylinders
notwithstanding, records are the physical manifestation
of inconvenience. A mere slip of a fingernail while
taking a record out of its slipcover can ruin it.
So can a prematurely worn stylus or an out-of-balance
tone arm. The playback apparatus even favors a handedness:
southpaws like me have to learn to work with their
right.
Storage is a big issue too. A rise or drop of a few
degrees in temperature can warp them irrevocably,
and stacking LPs on top of one another is the same
as slowly squeezing the music out of them.
The payoff, however, is that the responsibility of
ownership makes the reward of listening all the greater.
The medium enhances the music. The greater care and
attention a record requires means that the work it
contains takes on a special quality. In turn, every
vinyl album I own, whether it’s indie rock,
classical or jazz, takes on the same fragile beauty
as an Old Master painting or a Ming vase: for all
their sonic and emotive dynamism, those horns and
guitars and drums can’t withstand the force
of a stray fingernail. A violin concerto can be destroyed
by heat.
Likewise, it suddenly becomes apparent how necessary
each part of the music is to the pristine whole. Not
a millisecond can be sacrificed to dirt or dust without
losing something essential, just as a fleck of paint
falling from a Vermeer will lose the fluid effect
of pouring milk or the light shining off an earring.
One of the things that makes art—all forms of
art—so precious is its physical transience.
The sheer durability and convenience of CDs causes
us to forget that sometimes.
None of this philosophical approach to record collecting
has prevented the medium from being regarded as passé.
Not that I mind entirely. At a flea market recently,
I came across some gum-chewing teenagers eager to
clear out several milk crates of records. Lord knows
how they got a hold of them, but it was a stack of
pants-wetting finds—Ella singing in Berlin (the
set where she forgets the words to “Mack the
Knife”), von Karajan conducting Beethoven’s
Fifth, Placido Domingo in Verdi’s Rigoletto
(Guilini conducting)—in impeccable
condition. They wondered if ten euros ($12) was too
much to ask. The speed with which I reached for my
wallet assured them it wasn’t.
Despite what the hardline pragmatists and technophiles
might argue, I don’t browse flea markets and
eBay in search of records for reasons of nostalgia.
Precisely the opposite. I buy them because the hand
I have in a record’s preservation brings me
closer to the music; because they subtly prompt me
to consider what goes into a work of art and what
should be treated as such; and because ultimately
this keeps the recordings fresh as well as timeless.
Contrary to the appealing slogan on that T-shirt,
I know vinyl will die eventually. So will I. Everything
around us will someday crumble and decay and vanish.
But right now, when it matters most, vinyl is still
here. It’s survived the introduction and proliferation
of more advanced recording formats, and I have a feeling
it will continue to do so for the reasons I have just
named (and many I’ve no doubt overlooked), all
of which add up to some untranslatable allure. And
the way to discover that allure is through a little
extra care.
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