8Sided Blog

a zine about sound, culture, and the punk rock dream

Ghosts of Christmas Past

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I was obsessed with my Tascam 246 Portastudio. I mowed a bunch of lawns, saved my money, and somehow found the Tascam for sale (cheap!) in the local newspaper. A church was selling it. The Tascam was practically new. I assumed the church bought it to record choirs or whatever and then realized a four-track multitrack recorder was more than what was needed. 

I lucked out. At the time (1986), the 246 was the Rolls-Royce of Tascam four-track recorders. It had features like two speeds (you could run the tape faster for better audio quality), pitch control (handy for creative tomfoolery), and an effective dbx noise reduction system. I learned most of what I know about recording from my experiences with that Portastudio. I recorded my punk band, one-off ‘bands’ with various friends, and my solo experimentations. I ended my teenage years by recording almost every day. 

I was a fan of albums over songs, so I was always recording with some future ‘album’ in mind. Sometimes I assembled songs into an album, fitting them snuggly on a 60-minute cassette — or a 90-minute cassette if I was feeling proggy. I was always looking for ways to connect songs for these imagined albums, or finding ideas that maintained my interest for the time it took to record a long-player from scratch.

It was on a Halloween — again, probably 1986 — that I walked into a shopping mall and heard Christmas songs. Though we now accept the Christmas season seemingly starting earlier each year, I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. How dare anyone play Christmas music on Halloween? At the very least, someone should ‘spookify’ the songs, giving the holiday standards a ghostly twist. 

Light bulb moment — my next album project was born. I called it something like Have a Spooky Christmas, but I don’t know for sure. I don’t remember a lot about it. 

There’s a box in my closet with all the original four-track cassette tapes from those years. But I can’t play them without a Tascam 246 — these are one-sided cassettes recorded on four-tracks. They’re at double speed, encoded with the 246’s aggressive dbx noise reduction that rips the sound quality apart when played on anything else. 

Maybe someday I’ll hear this (and my other teenage tape experiments) again. But, for now, it sits only in my fractured memory. Chances are it sounds better trapped in nostalgia. In my experience, my music never sounds as good as I remember it. That doesn’t mean a lot of it sounds terrible — just not as good as I think it will. 

Here’s what I do remember:

  • A version of “Santa Claus Is Coming To Town” turned into a horror soundscape, voices ominously whispering the unaltered lyrics revealing the creepiness of the words: “He sees you when you’re sleeping … he knows when you’re awake …”
  • “Jingle Bells” as a funeral dirge. The “laughing all the way” lyric triggered multi-tracked tortured, maniacal cackling. 
  • “Twelve Days of Christmas” was epic. It was a somewhat straight cover musically, but I substituted the various items (turtle doves, lords-a-leaping, etc.) with sounds from Halloween sound effect records. Thus, “On the first day of Christmas, my true love gave to me: (werewolf howling).” This track was a particular endurance test (just like the real song) as it cycled through all the Halloween sound effects in reverse order as the song went along. This was long before I ever touched a digital sampler, so I have no idea how I technically pulled this off.
  • Out of all the tape’s songs I want to hear again, “Silent Night” sticks out. I remember creating all sorts of droning ambient tones and noises as the initial music bed. Then, I plucked out the “Silent Night” melody from memory using an echoed piano-ish Juno-106 patch. I didn’t rehearse and didn’t know the song ahead of time — I figured it out while the tape was recording, one take only. This is my memory talking again, but I recall the song ending up especially spacious, mysterious, and melancholy-sounding. It was my personal favorite on the album.
  • I know I recorded two or three other songs. I did a strange version of “Blue Christmas,” but I don’t remember anything about it except that I drearily repeated the song’s opening line throughout. 

I filled a 60-minute cassette, dubbed off about ten copies, and gave them to my close friends as Christmas presents. No doubt, confusion and concern for my well-being followed.

Someday I’ll get ahold of a Tascam 246 and go through this box of four-track tapes. Those old Portastudios aren’t cheap nowadays (retro fever — catch it!), so it won’t happen anytime soon. But, when it does, the spooky Christmas album by 17-year old me is the first thing I’ll revisit. 

I’d love to follow up this post on a future Christmas day with a stream of this odd early attempt at an album. But only if it sounds at least half as good as it does as I sit here remembering it. No promises. 

I hope you’re having a wonderful Christmas day.

Put the Blueprint Down

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Season 3 of KCRW’s Lost Notes → This week, I spent 30 minutes each morning listening to the third season of KCRW’s Lost Notes podcast series. The other two seasons are terrific, but this latest particularly grabbed me. This time, each episode focuses on a prominent event or artist from 1980. The host is poet and cultural critic Hanif Abdurraqib, approaching his subjects with an engaging language. The series suggests 1980 as a pivotal year, setting the tone for the next decade and reverberating into the present.

If you’re me, the temptation is to skip to the end and listen to the fantastic Grace Jones episode (which also throws in a short history of Chicago’s Disco Demolition, occurring the previous year). But roll through them all, in order, to get a grander picture of the influence that year had on music and culture. Stevie Wonder, Ian Curtis, John Lennon and Darby Crash (together), Minnie Ripperton, The Sugarhill Gang, Hugh Masekela and Miriam Makeba — each topic is fascinating and offers something to learn. 

You can also read each episode online via KCRW’s site (click on the artist’s names above). But Hanif Abdurraqib’s personable narration, peppered with audio and musical examples, is the way to go. It’s a compelling production.

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Throwback on a Comeback: The Last Cassette Tape Factory → I enjoyed this mini-doc on ‘The Last Cassette Factory‘ — though I’m wondering if any tape manufacturers have popped up since the video’s release four years ago. As noted in the video, there’s a resurgence of cassette releases. This growth is partly thanks to Bandcamp and a need to give fans a limited, physical version of a release without breaking the bank for vinyl pressings. It’s an excellent idea for emerging bands to offer cassettes, especially when personalized with homespun artwork and packaging. Just don’t believe that your fans are listening to your cassettes. For one thing, as the first commenter on the video’s page notes, “The problem is I don’t see any quality cassette players being made today.” As for this video, we’ve all seen footage of the whirring machinery found in record pressing plants. It might be surprising to see that a cassette factory’s inner workings are also fascinating and highly technical. 

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A Guide to Sun Ra on Film → A useful list of long-form Sun Ra footage found on YouTube and elsewhere. Some of this I hadn’t seen before. The Magic Sun film, intended as a projection behind the Arkestra as they performed at Carnegie Hall, is particularly wild. And I think the writer of this piece somewhat downplays Space Is The Place — it’s a great movie, low-budget or not. 

As a proponent of focusing influence on one’s own ‘world,’ I like this quote from Ra in the listed French television interview: “You want a better world, put the blueprint down.”

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Ralph Kinsella – Lessening → My 8D Industries label released a new album today on Bandcamp. Titled Lessening, it’s the debut album from Scottish guitarist and ambient producer Ralph Kinsella. I’ve written about Ralph before — I discovered him after he reached out to this blog with his music. A few months ago, he sent the demo for this album, and I haven’t stopped listening. An antidote to lockdown — this is travel in a small room.

The last paragraph of the press release does a great job of describing Ralph’s music:

Kinsella’s guitar is the even thread, sometimes bare and then often processed, awash in texture and synthetic glares. Tracks like “In the In-Between Light” use the guitar to express enormity — of space and emotion — before the song is gently brought close by calming lines and reassuring synth patches. There’s also a soft tension in songs like “Lung Noises,” sharing the masterful slow build of the shoegaze genre’s finest practitioners. Lessening‘s closer, “Born on the Cusp,” offers a resolution — chiming guitars and reverberant tones signaling both loss and promise. This is the sound of an uncertain present feeling its way to that better world.

I hope you’ll check it out. Lessening is available now exclusively on Bandcamp and, like all 8D Industries releases, is set to ‘name your price.’ 

Not Good Enough for Vinyl

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Tom Waits – Big Time → Tom Waits’ Frank’s Wild Years is a longtime favorite album of mine.1That album followed Waits’ Swordfishtrombones and Rain Dogs, completing one of the great album trios in recorded music. In 1988, a concert film from this album’s tour was released, titled Big Time. The movie is beautiful, and the performances of the songs are creative and mischievous. It’s as good as Stop Making Sense, in my opinion (that Talking Heads concert film was probably an influence on Big Time). Big Time has been missing all these years, only available via used DVDs and extremely low quality torrented files. But! Without fanfare, Big Time suddenly appeared to stream on Amazon Prime Video at the beginning of the month. Watch it. (Side note: fingers crossed Laurie Anderson’s digitally unavailable Home of the Brave follows soon.)

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ECHO: The Music of Harold Budd and Brian Eno → ECHO is billed as a YouTube documentary about the early ’80s collaborative relationship of Brian Eno and Harold Budd. In actuality, it’s a mix of music from their classic albums The Plateaux of Mirror (1980) and The Pearl (1984), accompanied by snippets and quotes from interviews. The visuals are suitably ambient — dreamy pastures, scrolling snow-fields, and misty cityscapes. The video does have some interesting bits, including Eno pointing out various ‘treatments’ and even identifying tools like the Lexicon Prime Time delay. Despite the occasional commentary, the 40-minute film ends up as soothing and hypnotic as the subject albums. Hat tip to Sasha Frere-Jones, who listed this today in his always illuminating email newsletter.

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Rimarimba – Below The Horizon → I recorded my first ‘album’ in the ‘80s, and it was cassette-only. I was a part of the self-released cassette movement (as documented in the book Cassette Mythos), even having my ‘albums’ reviewed in a few ‘zines. I still remember a friend of mine, also active in the cassette underground, telling me one day: “I know why all this music is released on cassette. Because it’s not good enough for vinyl.” Ouch.

There might have been a little hard truth in that. I mean, just revealing that I recorded some cassette albums in the ‘80s has me a bit nervous, because I would hate the fine folks at RVNG Intl. or their Freedom To Spend side-imprint track down these cassettes and offer to release them. Because they really weren’t ready for vinyl. In retrospect, they were quaint but kind of terrible (btw – Ira Glass is right). But that’s not the case with Rimarimba, an artist who I’d not heard of until today and who seems to have once existed on the edges of the ‘80s cassette underground.

That said, Below The Horizon might not count — according to Discogs — as it was released on cassette in 1983 but made its way to rare-ish vinyl in 1985. And, this time, it is good enough for vinyl. What’s not to like? The first couple of tracks sound like Penguin Cafe Orchestra playing the last 30 seconds of Faust’s “The Sad Skinhead.” If that doesn’t sound wonderful to you, then … still give it a try. And then this final track, titled “Bebang,” is 20+ minutes of layered, ringing guitar loops and riffs, a fanciful, improvised toy synthesizer line, and a subtle tick-tock rhythm that helps the song’s time pass in an instant.

Rediscovering My Favorite Mixtape

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(Old man voice:) Remember when we recorded mixtapes in one take, two turntables recording to a cassette, and that cassette duplicated to cheap tapes to give/sell to friends? If you messed up, you had to start over again — kind of like the first two attempts to film Russian Ark. 

In the summer of 1997, I recorded one of these mixtapes, and, yes, started over a few times due to flubbed beat-matching. Finally, I ended up with one of my most popular tapes. This recording was a special session — only recently had I found my ‘sound’: a floaty, jazzy psychedelia hinged on downtempo and mid-tempo breakbeats. I enjoyed the tough Mo Wax’ian trip-hop of the time and the phased-pad soundscapes of the dreamier drum n’ bass productions. I settled on a vibe that combined the two, which inspired my first records and Feng Shui. Anyway, this mixtape was a documentation of my favorite songs of the time that expressed this style.

I lost all copies of the tape and haven’t heard it in perhaps a couple of decades. Then, Friday afternoon, I’m cleaning out some old folders on a dusty hard drive and find an MP3 labeled ‘Summer 1997 Mix.’ I didn’t think anything of it and clicked to preview the file. I heard the opening didgeridoo of the Wagon Christ remix of Nåid’s “Blástjarnan.” OMG, this is that mix!

I have no idea where this MP3 came from. I don’t remember ripping it from the cassette — I didn’t really have the means to do that until recently. Maybe a fan or friend sent it years ago, and I filed it away to listen to someday, then I’m immediately distracted and forgetful? No idea. 

But what a find. The audio quality isn’t the best — it’s a rip of a cassette tape, after all — but THESE TUNES. I love them all. I have the fondest memories of playing these at Knock Knock, in the backroom of Phat N’ Jazzy, and, with increasing frequency, in dark rooms across the globe. (Nostalgic sigh.)

This might be my favorite mixtape I ever recorded, which is really something as I had another 20 years of mixing ahead of me at this point. Here it is, and I hope you enjoy it as much as I have since its rediscovery. 

Marc Méan’s Collage: Imperfect in the Best Way Possible

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Long before Brian Eno dreamed-up the term ambient music, there was “Furniture Music.” Coined by composer Erik Satie in 1917, “Furniture Music” intends to “make a contribution to life in the same way as a private conversation, a painting in a gallery, or the chair in which you may or may not be seated” (Satie’s words).

There’s a story of the debut of “Furniture Music” (or more correctly “Furnishing Music” — ‘musique d’ameublement’). Satie performed it during the intermission of a play, and the audience was encouraged to mill about as they usually would during a theater break. Instead, and much to Satie’s frustration, the audience stayed seated and listened. 

Marc Méan is a Zürich-based musician who has found inspiration in Satie’s “Furniture Music” 100+ years later. It informs his fascinating album Collage, a set — and cassette — of two twenty-minute compositions that vibrate from ethereal soundscapes to lightly percussive sound design. It’s experimental in sound and process and, though “Furniture Music” serves as a launching pad, like Satie’s intermission music Collage leaves the listener more attentive than passive. 

“[Satie’s] approach fascinated me,” Marc says. “Before that, I was playing mostly jazz and improvised music, which required me to be active and personally involved as a listener and as a performer. It’s music where you have to be highly reactive to everything around you, where everything happens fast, where one prefers evolution to repetition. I wanted to find an approach to music where I could slow things down, where I could stretch time, be more passive, find simplicity.”

The inspiration came through the acquisition of an unusual electronic instrument. Marc explains, “It all began when I acquired Peter Blasser’s instrument the Ciat-Lonbarde Cocoquantus. It is a weird synthesizer-sampler that has a life of its own.” 

Originating in Portland and partly hand-crafted out of wood, the Cocoquantus is a sampler combined with looping delays and multiple analog synthesizer engines for modulation. Blasser himself describes the Cocoquantus as “not for the faint of heart: but once you speak its language, nothing else is quite the same.”

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“Peter Blasser’s instruments don’t come with manuals,” Marc says. “Nothing is labeled on the instrument, so you have to explore it yourself. And I have never been someone who likes to practice for the sake of practicing. I always need to work in a musical context to learn something new. So while taming this new instrument, I recorded all my experiments.”

The process developed into a creative game (or, as I like to say, a tiny accident). Marc explains: “I like the idea of organized chaos, of controlled randomness in my work. The more I surprise myself in the creative process, the more interesting the music will be to me afterward. In the end, I felt that the material had a strong unity because of the gear I used. The Cocoquantus has such a strong personality that it binds the recordings together.” These exploratory pieces were combined to form the backbone of Collage. 

The resulting album is a lovely and imaginative trek through experimental ambiance. There are haunting piano moments, teasing through snatches of melody transmitted from a distance. Distinctively electronic antics appear, manipulated bleeps and clicks that soon give way to luminous passages. For all of its digital manipulation, Collage is warm and organic sounding, and the two twenty-minute stitched-together compositions don’t sound stitched-together at all.

Though there are elements of ambient ‘drone’ music, Collage‘s pieces develop and subtly change, sometimes offering surprises for the listener. “I can’t help myself but to have things evolve and have some drama,” Marc says. “The two sides are designed as a response to each other. One doesn’t need to listen to both sides back-to-back, but I would recommend listening to each in its entirety.”

I get this impression even as I listen to Collage as a digital stream on Bandcamp. The nature of the tracks, their grainy sound, and 20-minute lengths make Collage imaginable in a cassette format. Marc embraces Collage on cassette: “I like when music can be tangible; when music pairs with an object. It grounds things into a reality in this era where everything is virtual. Also, analog tape was used during the recording to transform and give color to certain elements. So for me, it makes sense that Collage is available on a physical medium.”  

Thus Neologist Productions has issued Collage on cassette, limited to 30 copies. The artwork is beautiful and visually fits the tone of the music. And, as Marc points out, the cassette may be the best way to experience Collage: “Because of the physicality of the cassette the listening experience is different. Cassettes sound different than a digital medium. Cassettes are lo-fi in comparison, they wobble a bit, they age, they are imperfect in the best way possible.”

Listen to Collage on various streaming platforms or on Bandcamp (where you can also purchase the limited edition cassette).

How a Factory Fire Underscores Vinyl’s Fragile Future

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This month doom and gloom descended on the record industry. And by the ‘record industry,’ I mean the industry that manufactures, releases, and loves vinyl records. The fragility of the vinyl revival was dramatically revealed by a tragic fire at a factory in California. People are freaking out. And, as I wrote about the story for my newsletter, I started thinking about vinyl in a broader sense — why do we love it, what are its alternatives, and do we really need it?

Before we go down the rabbit hole, you might want to watch an informative video that shows the creation of a vinyl master:

Pretty cool, eh? So, back to this concerning fire. The quick summary: a couple of weeks ago, the Apollo Masters Corp. building in California burned to the ground. Thankfully, no one was hurt, but the damage to the facility was severe enough that it’s unlikely the plant will reopen. And that’s bad news because this plant was one of two in the world that provided the lacquers necessary to create master discs for vinyl record production. (You may have noticed that Gonsalves opens an Apollo box for his lacquer in the above video.) The other plant is MDC in Japan, reportedly behind schedule and turning down new customers even before the fire.

This tragedy triggered a lot of doomsday takes, with the founder of record presser Capsule Labs memorably coining the word “Vinylgeddon” in Billboard. I briefly spoke to Mike Dickinson of Austin’s Chicken Ranch Records, and he wasn’t as dramatic: “There could be a bottleneck in the new release categories for a bit, but I don’t think we will see much of a slowdown in already mastered and plated product. It will be interesting to see what labels will do to innovate during this time.”

Chicken Ranch presses with Gold Rush Vinyl, which fortunately uses the Japanese lacquer-maker. Once word gets out that this plant has a reliable source for lacquers, what happens to their backlog? Will prices rise? Will it take much longer for finished records to ship? And, more importantly, what happens to the plants that used Apollo for lacquers? Another wrinkle to this story is that Apollo was also a source for the cutting styli used in Westrex heads. Thus plants with Westrex equipment may have a problem replacing styli.

All is not lost. There is DMM (Direct Metal Mastering) technology that most European pressing plants use. DMM doesn’t require a lacquer, though some feel the sound of DMM records is harsh and lacks bass (thus not the preference for DJ music). With some tweaks, this process could be viable for everyone, but the promise of improving DMM tech might be a fool’s errand. Here’s Abbey Road Mastering Engineer Miles Showell being a total downer:

I highly doubt there will be any serious development in DMM. All the Neumann engineers who designed and knew about this stuff are dead. All of them. They did not write everything down which will probably make reverse engineering DMM technology prohibitively expensive.

The absence and cost of innovation are other issues. For all the talk of a vinyl resurgence, it’s still a niche business. Is there enough financial incentive for invention and new technologies? Physical manufacturing isn’t as sexy a pursuit as some shiny, disruptive music tech start-up. Where will we find the vinyl innovators?

The Discogs editorial team has a more optimistic take. There are quotes from ‘unnamed executives’ that other American lacquer plants could appear soon, and it’s hoped that a retired Apollo will openly share their proprietary technique. Also, master plates are created far in advance, so we shouldn’t see a slowdown in new releases for several months. Record Store Day 2020 is probably safe. And represses of classic titles make up most of a record plant’s business, and those plates are ready to go, no new lacquers needed.

Despite which way things end up, the Apollo fire is a wake-up call. The infrastructure for the vinyl industry is fragile. Another reminder of this instability is the recent — and on-going — scandal with Direct Shot Distribution. All three major labels now use Direct Shot to get their vinyl to stores, including the indie labels distributed through the majors’ indie services such as Warner’s ADA. The handling of all these records by a single distributor has created an inexcusable backlog, delays getting releases to stores, and weird things like shipments “supposed to contain music [instead] filled with bottles of prescription cough syrup.” The situation has prompted some to throw around the conspiracy theory that it’s the major labels’ way of killing off the vinyl revival. I don’t buy it — it’s merely the migraine headache of coping with unexpected analog hold-outs in a world that’s moving toward the digital. The ‘niche’ is so easy to maintain digitally that its physical side can’t keep up in the global market.

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This brings me to what I really want to talk about: reliance and identity.

The identity of a lot of independent labels is tied up in vinyl. This strong link is a reason the news of the Apollo fire sent shockwaves around the music industry. I doubt many labels are depending on vinyl financially — the dirty secret of the ‘vinyl revival’ is that most independent labels would be stoked to sell 200 or 300 copies versus the couple of thousand pieces small labels shot for in the ‘90s. But, for many, the identity of the vinyl-pressing label is vital in the wake of digital labels.

Anyone can start a digital label, right? It’s believed that vinyl means you’re more serious, that there’s an investment, and, for artists, there’s prestige. There’s something to be said for all of that. It’s why many labels pressing vinyl do so at a loss — which is fine if you can afford it. But there are other ways to show you’re serious about your label. Springing for an exceptional website that engages fans comes to mind — or spending that vinyl money on someone to help with promotion. And seriousness doesn’t have to cost money. Operating your label professionally and with ambition and purpose says a lot more than a stack of unsold records in the corner of your home office.

Things have calmed down a bit since the fire, but labels relying on a vinyl identity were initially terrified at the news of Apollo’s demise. What would their futures look like if the infrastructure for vinyl collapsed? Here’s an unwelcome comparison: is this fear the same for a label that put all its eggs in the Spotify basket, and now Spotify is shifting its focus to podcasts? Or, how about the fears of an industry propped up by the insane profit margin on compact discs, and a few years later, no one wants CDs anymore?

Today there’s so much opportunity for diversification. Not only in the delivery format of a musical release, but also in the means that a label and an artist can inspire income streams, distribute themselves, and find previously untapped audiences. There’s no reason to narrow one’s scope. Nurturing an identity is cool — branding is a necessary consideration — but not at the expense of putting your project in a predicament if that one aspect you’re tied up in changes direction.

Do we need vinyl? I want to think so, though I did sell my entire collection in one not-as-painful-as-you’d-think decision strategically before moving to a new house. Here I’ll defer to Shawn Reynaldo, who asks some crucial questions about the need for vinyl in his outstanding First Floor newsletter. Provocatively, Shawn — who primarily writes about DJ-oriented genres — states:

It’s funny, electronic music is supposed to be rooted in notions of futurism… But so many of our practices are rooted in sentimentality and notions of “this is the way it’s always been done.” Traditions can be a good thing, and I’m not the kind of person who regularly advocates for “smashing the system,” but when it comes to vinyl, we’re long overdue for a change. The [Apollo] fire is a major bummer, but it might also be the catalyst we need to make some real changes.

Vinyl enthusiasts are sometimes puzzled by people who purchase records and never open them. These record-buyers do listen, but they opt to use streaming platforms or digital downloads (the vinyl probably came with a download code). The album is an appreciation of the music, a totem of sorts, something to look at or to show friends. It’s often a measure of support. And more than a t-shirt, albums become decor, giving voice to the fan like a collection of books on a shelf.

I’d venture that in 2020 most albums are purchased like this. And that gives me pause about an album’s purpose. I wonder if this power is transferable to other collectible items. The answer: of course it is. We already see it in the surprising return — and popularity! — of cassette releases on Bandcamp. The mocking was rampant when cassettes started to reappear. But think about it — if we’re buying a personalized item to support a band and to physically show that support in our homes, a cassette is equally effective. It’s even more potent wrapped in a groovy and personalized package. Financially, a cassette is a lot less risky and more hands-on for the band. And, refreshingly, the investment is in the personalization and creativity of the object, not the cost.

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The door is open for imaginative stand-ins for the vinyl album. It could be a screen-printed wooden box containing photos from the recording session and an odd-shaped USB for the music. Or perhaps a compact disc in a hand-stitched multi-page zine with artwork reflecting the band’s political activism. And if you want to get really nostalgic and downright weird with your format, how about releasing your music on a floppy disc?

I’ll go one further. Does this physical object even require music? As long as the listener has the audio files or access to the release via streaming, anything can represent the fan’s love for the band.

I recall my friend David and his support for the South African electronic musician Felix Laband. Felix is also an excellent visual artist and David tracked down and purchased one of his paintings to proudly hang on his wall. Though he loves the artwork on its own, this was primarily a show of support for Felix’s music. As David writes on his blog about the purchase, “If we could do the same for John Kennedy Toole for having written A Confederacy of Dunces or for Brian Hutton directing Kelly’s Heroes we would, but they’re dead so you’re it. We hope that repatriating your art is adequate compensation.”

The first trick is inspiring your fans to offer support and want to display your object in their homes. Next, come up with something crafty, surprising, and personal that connects with a dedicated listener and dazzles her friends. This something could be a vinyl record, but it doesn’t have to be. And, someday, it’s possible that it can’t be. Be ready.

A quick addendum: We can’t ignore that vinyl manufacturing is an environmentally hazardous procedure. The Apollo Masters Corp. supposedly ran afoul of the EPA in the past. Apparently, the plant didn’t have to adhere to some environmental regulations due to grandfather exemptions. Building a new plant removes these exemptions, and that could be one reason Apollo is hesitant to reopen.

Furthermore, as pointed out in a recent must-read article in The Guardian, the PVC in vinyl contains carcinogenic chemicals. The Thai factory where half the world’s supply originates is likely contaminating a local river with toxic wastewater. Records are a petrochemical product, so let’s not forget the pollution and greenhouse gas that entails.

But, as also mentioned in The Guardian piece, digital streaming has its own impact on greenhouse gas. The manufacturing of the phones and computers we use to listen results in toxic waste. And, as our devices are updated, the old ones end up in landfills. Like a lot of news these days, this knowledge is dispiriting. But having this conversation offers a glimmer of hope as we explore and imagine alternative, less harmful ways to listen.

This post was adapted from the second episode of my email newsletter Ringo Dreams of Lawn Care. Click here to check out the full issue and subscribe.