In Practice I: Curation in the Analogue Era

The 'click click' of the tape recorder, the slight static hum before the gramophone comes to life, the whirring of the CPU as it 'burns' your compilation onto a floppy disk or CD.

Those were the sounds of the 'Golden Era' of music.

I remember being in bed one summer, having come down with chickenpox and isolated from the rest of the world - not unlike the isolation we feel today.

My only solace during those lonely moments was my trusted Sony Walkman FX-33 Cassette Player and a small box of my favourite tapes (My family had a large collection and I had to leave the rest behind for my dad!).

One of my favourite things to listen to on it was a mixtape I had made of all my favourite Dad and Daughter jams (remember the Sunday Morning Playlist I had mentioned previously?)

While I won't dig deep into the hows of it all - you can watch the video below for a quick tutorial; what we will focus on is the affordance it allows.

What do you mean by affordances?

It essentially refers to what the medium allows us to do and what its limitations are. Basically, the 'pros' and 'cons' if you will. So, let's break this down in relation to Cassettes:

Affordances:

• It allowed you to create something highly personal as a gift for someone else that also helped get the creative juices flowing and left your self-expression untethered!

• The end result was a relatively portable piece of music to carry around.

• They helped you create lasting memories, something that Lavina Greenlaw touches upon in her recollection of making mixtapes.

Limitations:

• Making a cassette mixtape before the digital era required a multitude of equipment in order to make just one copy, this included the multiple cassette tapes containing the original sound (alternately, the radio or TV from which you were recording the sound).

• It required a Tape Recorder/Player with double decks in order to be able to play from one and record on the other.

• Time-consuming - making a mixtape was definitely an ultimate expression of love because of the sheer time and effort that went into making one. Think of hours of listening to tapes and condensing them to your top picks, then individually recording each track onto your blank tape, clicking pause and record at every turn, making sure your recording is uniform on Side A and Side B!

• Finicky - This may be a bit of a subjective one, but for most mixtape enthusiasts, being an amateur meant hours of fiddling with the tapes and the recorder in order to get the flow from one track to the other to be smooth. Barring highly skilled curators, these tapes often had odd transitions, static hums and glitchy sound due to the manner of recording.

• Limited Space - There is only so much room on the small device, so a 60-minute tape provided you with 30 minutes per side.

When it came to Vinyl, curation was less about the actual process of recording and more about the way that people, archives, and stores organised their respective collections.

The nuances of such curation spoke highly to individual taste, the context in which the collection was created. and the purpose for which it was/is being used or distributed.

To understand more on the thought process behind collecting and organising a vinyl collection, check out the videos below:

The Affordances then, of this medium is:

• The aesthetics of owning both the Vinyl and the record player, the beautiful artwork on display on the record sleeves and the handcrafted uniqueness of the record players of yesteryear.

• It also relied on the sonic qualities, the way the music sounded on the medium, and how the minute distortions, interruptions, and hums lent themselves to the novelty of the object.

Whereas, the Limitations are:

• Time-consuming in terms of sourcing and organising collections - sometimes hard to find what you're looking for.

• Takes up a lot of shelf space as the collection grows.

• A more expensive hobby in terms of curation and collection.

While these are two distinct, yet defining tools of analogue music curation, the quality that ties them together is their function as 'objects of memory' (Jansen, 2009, p. 52). These are nostalgic not only because of your role in its authorship but also because they form the:

"building blocks of what it is like to be this person and to exist in connection to music, technology, people, and ideas in a certain place and time." - Jansen (2009)

Word Count: 753

References:

Jansen, B. (2009). 'Tape Cassettes and Former Selves', in Sound Souvenirs. [Online]. Amsterdam University Press. p. 43-54