Head On September

Head On September

HEAD ON

VINYL JUNKIES VS DIGITAL DJS

Head On, September 2006, COMMENTS

Does the meteric rise of MP3s spell an inevitable end for vinyl? Technology fetishist Richie Hawtin [right] (Minus/Novamute) and vintage vinyl fuzz addict Andy Votel [left] (Twisted Nerve/B-Music/Finders Keepers) take sides in the DJ booth digitisation debate

Richie Hawtin:

I don’t remember the exact time I made the switch from vinyl but I remember it was a hard road to cross. It’s strange getting used to looking at a computer screen and not going through your records. But it interested me because records are a linear way of thinking - you mix from record A to record B successively - whereas in the digital realm you can jump forward, backwards and sideways. There’s so much more freedom. There are so many gains in performance within the digital domain, from size and weight, to the sheer amount of information that can be used. For the DJ I don’t see a way back.

Digitisation has already opened up the culture of DJing to a wider audience. Music goes around the world much quicker, and ease of distribution is a huge advantage. At the height of vinyl, you might have to go to a record label and get an acetate plate of a song knocked up before you could use it in a set, whereas now you can be sent a track via email five minutes before you’re on, and remix it or alter it as suits your set. I’ve found this incredibly liberating.

As I’ve become more in tune with technology I’ve been more interested in the way that it lets us rethink how we can approach something. It’s a bit like what Andy Warhol was doing in the 70s – taking an image and repeating it to create something very different.

Transitions [the final chapter of Hawtin’s experimental DE9 mix project] is an extreme example of what you can do with digital performance. Mixing tools like Ableton Live and Final Scratch allow producers and DJs to create a multilayered sound, involving hundreds of simultaneously mixed instruments, beats and songs. For me personally, Transitions was not just entertainment but was meant to push people to think about how much more open and sharing the creative process can be. It’s not looking at the mix from the point of view of song structure, but as a digital jigsaw made up of many bits and pieces. The result is more richly textured than when you’re using vinyl.

Technology can also close the gap between DJ and audience. As with a live band, who might improvise a different version of a familiar track, Ableton allows the DJ to alter a song on the fly - to get carried away, or even to mess up. In effect, digital music has bought the excitement of spontaneity back to dance and it’s those small moments, when the DJ surprises the audience, that are remembered and cherished.

Digital music has wider implications for clubbing. More and more, all our media and hardware is becoming digitised, and this has meant that the formerly disparate spheres of lighting, AV and music have been bought into the same arena. Inevitably they will become synchronised to the point of becoming one singular performance.

The displacement of vinyl by MP3 is a step along this path.

Andy Votel:

The first record I bought was the Rocksteady Crew’s Hey You in 1988, and I remember saying to my dad, who I was with that day, I’m going to start collecting records. I’m going to buy two every week.

I don’t buy records off the internet. I collect records in person and my main skill, if you want to call it that, is buying records from the most obscure parts of the world: finding old music that no-one has ever heard before and played before. It’s about going to extremes - I’ve got Brazilian 78RPM records from as late as the 60s in my collection that have been made to be played on gramophones, because that’s how advanced the technology over there was when they were created. You won’t find MP3s of the music I’ve got available to download off Napster because these tracks have never seen the light of day. They’re private presses that have been stuck in a family’s photo album for 40 years.

What I’m most passionate about is the unison between the record and the artwork: its physicality, the label, the size, the weight of the sleeve. The transition to digital breaks my heart - it takes the physicality and humanity out of things. Kids used to get records for their birthdays, but an MP3, a piece of digital information - how do you wrap it up? You see the same mentality across a lot of areas in technology and society. Digitisation threatens the unison between art and music, which is really important. The unison needs to be nurtured, not destroyed.

There’s an Austrian architect called Hundertwasser who designed stamps, and in the 80s people were going mad about his designs, wanting mint condition stamps for their collections. But he said, they’re not stamps unless they’ve felt the moisture of someone’s tongue, been stamped, passed through a post box travelling from one person to another. If it hasn’t made that transition, it hasn’t got soul. If I track down a record to America and end up sitting with a family into the middle of the night talking about their lives, and walk away in the end with an incredibly rare psychedelic record – then that’s the beauty if it. People want to make things quick and easy, they want the quickest routes from A to B, whereas I want to enjoy the process. It takes more than an instant drum break to make me happy – it’s the artwork, the paper, where a record’s from, who it belonged to, what it’s about. When it comes to playing the music, this adds to the set. You can disregard the boundaries that usually define where and when things can be played. But with MP3s the person playing them doesn’t necessarily know anything about the track. It doesn’t make any sense to me.

Is that trainspottery? No. Anyone who’s been to our nights knows there’s a real rock and roll attitude to what we do – there’s nothing geeky about the music we play. The internet has made people more discerning. At first people were like kids in a candy store, but now they’re more identity conscious. Everything is so disposable now that people who care about identity and individuality will hunt harder. People who come to our nights know that they’ll hear music there that they wont hear anywhere else, and that’s a kind of privilege. I feel privileged to hear the records of the people I play alongside.
The latest B-Music compilation, featuring tracks chosen by Andy Votel, David Holmes and Gruff Rhys (SFA), is available from Finders Keepers Records now.

From: September 2006 Issue

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