What’s with the desire to make music sound old?

Slush

Lofi dub production techniques with lots of noise, the hallmark of Basic Channel.

JeffChasteen

Man, I’m so dedicated to the aesthetic
I only power my effects pedals with Volta piles!

jk

Gavinski

@richardyot said:
@Gavinski funnily enough I always think of Destroyer's Kaputt as being kinda nostalgic. It's the references to Sounds, Smash Hits, Melody Maker and NME I guess.

Definitely! But it is nostalgic for an era of very high fidelity recording - Sade etc. What an album, either way!

yowza

@looperboy said:
I’m not sure it actually IS a desire to make music sound OLD, per se. It’s just a desire to make it sound GOOD. Contemporary recording technologies are inferior to recording technologies from other points in history. Sometimes people think NOW is the ultimate moment, whenever NOW might be, but think of something like literature; it was objectively better before TV than it is now, because it was the vital form of communication. And film is objectively better than video. So although the contemporary machines might be more CONVENIENT to use, and more affordable, they just don’t sound as good as they did when music was a vital force in society, rather than playing second fiddle to more immediate forms of communication, like it does in the contemporary moment.

If you weren’t around in the 70s and 80s it’s really impossible to imagine the context the music from then existed in. It was much more like the position Twitter, or even the internet in general holds now. It was how subcultural information was communicated. Now you can find alternative voices to the mainstream narrative very easily. Back then, you really had to go to music.

So- because music was such a vital force in society, there was a huge focus on how it sounded. In subsequent decades, as it’s importance declined, so did the quality of the machines manufactured to produce it, since there just wasn’t the return on investment to be made, studios closed down etc. Til you reach the contemporary moment, and there are no valves, no tape, no preamps. These are the things people want to emulate. Because they are just objectively superior to what we have now.

Objectively superior? Really? While I agree with some of what you said about societal and cultural angles surely some of this is purely your opinion regarding contemporary recording techniques being so much better than modern ones. You are certainly entitled to your opinion but out of curiosity I just went looking for proof of what you said and there are many opinions going both ways but nothing really definitive. People use whatever tools are available at the time. I grew up in the 60’s and loved a lot of that music but have no desire to go back to using tape. I always had a love hate relationship with vinyl records where randomly one day a favorite record would get a pop or crackle that was going to be there forever. Many recording engineers hated vinyl because they had to change their recordings to fit the album format. The only thing I miss from vinyl is the album artwork.

Many audio folks who think older recordings may have sounded better was because it was more about capturing live performances and committing things to tape and MIDI and audio plugins didn’t exist so any processing was done with external hardware. You can still record this way right now, no one is stopping you. If your idea of “good” is warm and fuzzy lofi then you’re not going to like something recorded cleanly anyway but this doesn’t mean it’s objectively better since everything is subjective and we all have different opinions. Respectfully this is my subjective opinion only, not trying to stir up anything.