Materiality

Yesterday I tested the Dictaphone I bought second-hand by recording a bit of zither on it (a zither I really need to have recorded and tuned). Listening to those few minutes again was enchanting. The dirty, trembling sound of the zither accompanied by the gentle hum of the Dictaphone's motor, picked up by its own microphone, had something primitive, ancestral about it, like an ethnographic recording from the early 20th century; or simply like a cassette from my own past, like those babblings of my sister and me as babies that Mum had put on cassette. The murmur and all the sound defects of cassettes are for me the sound of the past, the sound that brings the past to life.

There's also something magical about having your music in a box – whether it's a dictaphone, a cassette recorder or a digital recorder – and being able to say to yourself "my music's in there". This gives a materiality to the music that doesn't exist when you work on a computer (even though there's no huge difference in nature between a digital Tascam and a PC). And it also brings back memories of my youth, of the working conditions of my youth.

What I compose is ever dirtier, ever more primitive, ever more autistic. I'm mentally progressing towards the idea of composing for myself alone, that is, composing things that will have no public release, no public existence – except perhaps in the form of items hosted by Archive.org, put online without any ceremony, no announcement, anonymously.