All the Memory in the World, All the Music in the World: Mediating Musical Patrimony in the Digital Age

Abstract

In this article, I will examine the internet through the lens of consumption and waste studies. The internet will be conceived of as the place where the cultural waste of music – in the form of marginal artefacts and obsolete media (such as vinyl records, tapes, and ephemera) – can effectively be excavated, recirculated and re-mediated by means of systematic digitisation and uploading. The redemptive role of popular and spontaneous digital archives (such as the video platform YouTube or dedicated audio blogs) will be critically examined. Complementarily, I will underline the idea that the internet also encourages a paradoxical return of tangible artefacts, as the work of digital music collectors may prompt the actual reissue of previously lost music objects (a tendency that is exemplified in the UK by the work of British contemporary reissue record labels such as Trunk Records or Finders Keepers). The internet will be discussed as an ambiguous site of redemption, forming the basis for a nostalgic retro-consumption of music. As such, it will be conceived of as a site of memory and as a possible archive, though the ambiguity of such a term will be discussed. I will reflect upon the cultural meaning of digital archives that, as they are ceaselessly renewed, continue to erase themselves. Lastly, I will suggest that the forms of redemption that are enabled by the internet are strictly inseparable from the production of further layers of cultural waste. Departing from Straw's assertion that the internet ‘has strengthened the cultural weight of the past, increasing its intelligibility and accessibility’ (2007, 4), I will point out that the internet may accelerate the processes of cultural obsolescence and oblivion that it seeks to suspend.

:Music and Digital Media: A Planetary Anthropology

“…In the context of the relentless churn of internet technologies, we traced the coevolution of the five genres and the particular cultures of internet use associated with them, pointing to a growing reflexivity towards the internet's history and aesthetic propensities among musicians, fans and critics. If the identities of the nostalgia genres have been taken by commentators to be a response to an internet-based cultural archive (Fisher 2013;Reynolds 2011;Roy 2014) or 'digital afterlife' (Wright 2014), then vaporwave -given its reflexive and parodic engagement with earlier internet practices, platforms and interface aesthetics -plunders the historicity of the internet itself, now rendered a historical medium or cultural form like any other. All five genres therefore evidence intensely reflexive engagements with concepts of historical time -'concepts that form part of the calculative agency of [musicians and] artists and that supervise the creation of any cultural object' (Born 2010b, 196).…”

Retromedia-in-practice: A practice theory approach for rethinking old and new media technologies

“…Within the academia, the re-emergence of what could be generally labelled as retromedia (Roy, 2014) or retrotechnologies (Sarpong et al, 2016) has had the potential to refashion discourses on novelty, innovation and sociotechnical change, raising issues that relate to media change itself, rather than the life cycles of specific technologies. In media literature, questions concerning how to define the complementary notions of ‘oldness’ and ‘newness’, and its implications for how we conceive both change and continuity across media history, have been addressed from several perspectives and discussed in a huge number of publications, whose examination is beyond the scope of this limited contribution (to mention just a few notable examples: Acland, 2007; Coopersmith, 2010; Gitelman 2006; Huhtamo and Parikka, 2011; Kittler, 1999; Marvin, 1988; Peters, 2009; Thorburn and Jenkins, 2003; Zielinski, 2006).…”

Decomposed: a political ecology of music

“…Sterne (2008, p. 64) puts this into historical perspective: ‘If early recordings were destined to become lost recordings’, he says, ‘digital recordings move in the same direction, but they do so more quickly and more fitfully.’ Ultimately, then, the future of digital music will be governed by a logic of the trace; it will be ‘a future where most digital recordings will be lost, damaged, unplayable, or separated from their metadata, hopelessly swimming in a potentially infinite universe of meaning’ (Sterne 2008, p. 65; cf. Roy 2014).…”