Have you ever held an mp3 file? But, on the other hand, have you ever carefully wiped the dust from the surface of the black vinyl, or been annoyed at packaging that sometimes makes the foreplay phase, the »stripping«, last longer than the on average 30 minutes playing time per side? Exactly. Digitally stored music is – as Jean Baudrillard didn't say – so high-resolution that practically the whole range of physically perceptible stimuli is non-existent. The sound of digital media is a priori pure. There is no place for the hissing noises inherent in vinyl. However, precisely this acoustic »patina« not only refers back to the medium itself, but also establishes a link to an emotionally charged past history of personal music reception.

When the tone arm lowers onto the disc, there ensue some nerve-racking tenths of seconds – until the needle hits the groove, followed by the typical scratching for three or four revolutions, then the first sounds. By the time the melody and bass fade in, the whole thing's practically over. Then, towards the end, weary but still excited, the loop of the run-out grooves. Particularly in the case of 7" singles, which have a normal playing time of three to five minutes, this is fatal. Who wants to imagine how many hot – but also cold – romantic nights began just at this moment of »scritch, scritch«? So, while we could reflect on the erotic potential of this loop of run-out grooves, we could also ask why, since its launch in 1984, the medium of CD has been unable to produce this passionate self-referentiality, and why it is always experienced as an annoyance when the record gets stuck.
You can't keep a good thing down. As far back as the mid-eighties, people were already prophesying the end of vinyl records. This was given the lie both by techno music and by the fact that the record-playing DJ had become an omnipresent cult figure, one so powerful that the profession of DJ is still at the top of the list for teenagers, the overwhelming majority of them white, male and hetero. Every club of any standing includes two Technics record players and a Pioneer mixer in its standard equipment. In principle, this seems middle-class and monopolistic; after all, Technics has been making models like the »1210« or »1200« series for more than 25 years without any great changes. The acoustic sonar signals of the future are thus sent out by relatively »old« media.

To make digital scratching a haptic experience, the software program »Final Scratch«, developed by the American audio company Stanton together with the Canadian producer Richie Hawtin, needs two real vinyl records. In this way, analog records and digital files can be mixed together, different beat sequences can be immaculately levelled out by using »B(eats)P(er)M(inute) counters« in programs like »Traktor« from Native Instruments. All these kinds of developments in CD players, on the other hand, have been taken on board by only a small number of DJs. This is despite the fact that, in a global context, playing vinyl records is a minority practice and plays only a secondary role in most countries of Africa, South America and Asia. This has to do partly with their lack of availability, but in the main it is a question of storage and the fact that the climates tend not to be beneficial to vinyl records. The use of cassettes was always more widespread, because these proved to be much more resilient and cheaper. For this reason, in these countries a direct transition from cassettes to CDs can be observed.

John Cage was one of the pioneers: in his manifesto »The Future of Music: Credo«, written in 1937, he elevated the turntable to the status of an instrument. But it was not until the mid-seventies that DJs like Grand Wizzard Theodore and Grandmaster Flash, with his legendary »Adventures on the Wheels of Steel«, penetrated into the syntax of sound. Seen in this light, scratching is the haptic appropriation of sound and surface particles that are centrifugally accelerated – that is, physicalized – by »deckwreckers« like Christian Marclay and Otomo Yoshihide on the one hand, and the X-Ecutioners or the Invisibl Scratch Piklz on the other.

At any rate, the vinyl disc has an extremely varied history. In July 1877, the great inventor Edison had rung in the development of the phonograph by sending his call of »Hulloo!« through the ether. At first sound grooves were etched onto a rotating drum of silver foil, but people soon had the idea of producing discs made of acetate and shellac with 78 r(ounds)p(er)m(inute). In 1948 these were replaced by vinyl discs, making it possible to play them at 33 1/3 rpm. Now that they were more user-friendly, there were no more obstacles to standardisation. The recording possibilities also produced an inherent change. Whereas up into the 19th century people had got by on the »harmony of the spheres« taken over from Pythagoras, it was now possible to expand the acoustic spectrum by adding frequencies, recording them and reproducing them. »In frequency curves the simple proportions of Pythagorean music become an irrational, i.e. logarithmic function,« writes Friedrich Kittler in 1986. If the blueprint of the content can be reduced to abstract mathematical facts, then it is only a matter of time until music, and particularly methods of storing music, are assimilated into the technical state of the art. Archiving and logistics are clear points in favour of digital processing methods, for why should music be treated any differently than library stock?

The real media quantum leap occurred on a weekend in 1974. The New York dance-music producer Tom Moulton had run out of the 10" acetate that was until then usual for test pressings. Without further ado, Moulton pressed the piece »Ten Percent« by the group Double Exposure on a 12" disc, and did not believe his ears when he listened to the dubplate. Because the sound grooves were cut further apart, the reproducible frequency spectrum was considerably enlarged. Nonetheless, it took a good year before the big DJs, like Larry Levan and especially Walter Gibbons, discovered adequate ways of exploiting the potential of this discovery: pieces that had lasted five minutes in the original version were now extended to 15-minute-long sound monsters, while the trance effect that arose of a »stimulation by repetition« was delivered ready-made. Improved recording systems like »Zucharelli Holophonic«, for example, which was used in the mid-eighties for records of the label Some Bizarre, like the album »Dreams Less Sweet« by Psychic TV were however not able to match the already fully developed sound spectrum of the CD, and thus tended to be treated as an »exotism«.

If there really were one day to be a vinyl-free era, what will collectors and those in charge of stands at trade fairs do? What would a stand that offers mp3s for sale look like? Why would we need record shops? The sweet, dusty smell would be gone, the grumpy record salesperson as well, but in return we would have any number of administrators of digitalized platform transfer for all sorts of audio formats. And Internet exchanges like Napster, Gnutella or Kazaa are just the start of services geared solely to online distribution, which, almost of necessity, will absorb those experts once proudly entitled »record dealers«.

 

Translated by Timothy Jones

 

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