For me at least, very hi res anything (photo, video, audio) tends to be most useful as a document of specific tangible happenings. This is an approach that works very well if that kind of documentation is very important to you.
Lower res media tends to elicit more in the way of feeling for me. In terms of what I’m looking for when I make music, feeling is the most important thing for me which is part of why I have gone down the route I have. For example I got the Beastie Boys album “License To Ill” on cassette when I was 6. If I play a song from that album on CD or streaming, the ensuing 34 years I spent listening to it takes over and I just hear the music. If I put that cassette in, I get a feeling in my chest that reminds me directly of being a kid.
And it’s not just nostalgia for me. The very first times I heard Basic Channel’s early material which was covered in hiss static and grime, it immediately gave me mental images of fantastic places and events I’d never actually experienced. And while I like both of their more recent material as well, it definitely doesn’t transport me in quite the same manner.
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I didn’t realize there was some limit on consecutive replies so here I am replying to eblomqvist’s last post:
I think you’re right on the money here. It can definitely start sounding hocus pocus when you speak about it, but there really is some kind of strange physical alchemy at work when you utilize a number of different real world items in order to make something that sounds barely able to be conceived much less accurately captured.
I recently did a track that featured a drum break sample from a live recording which was made into a bootleg record. The recording style and low quality record were already feeling lush and alien, pop that in a mid 80s sampler and pitch it down and it starts to sound like some kind of demented machinery. Throw some tape echo over it, and record it to 8 track cassette and now it sounds like machinery pulsing away in the bowels of hell.
Could you use plugins and try to recreate that feeling? Sure. But this simple interaction of different physical items that impart their grime onto the sound was very much in the moment and took less direct intent than it did trying to corral these unpredictable forces into something that sounds awesome.
It reminds me of DJing old mid 90s jungle with the mashed up breaks. It’s impossible to be perfect, you just try to mix it with as much energy and style as you can while flying by the seat of your pants. Compare that to having it auto beatmatched by a computer.
