I can't mentally place the songs on an album in their correct order, let alone remember all the titles, as I once was able to do listening to the same few CDs in my mum's car over and over again. Instead, I just add artists to my library faster than I can listen to all their tracks. When I joined a streaming service, I stopped buying albums. It's that physical experience of using a turntable the sensation of the soft crackle before a track begins along with finding, curating, and seeing a stack of records grow in my media console that's made the most dramatic impact. But music quality isn't why I've been so enamored by this new hobby. The RT80 is $250, which is affordable as far as turntables go, but it's not the turntable audiophiles will recommend if you're chasing music fidelity. The Klipsch speakers are largely to blame for the high price. That's without factoring in the cost of records, which often sell for about $20 each. The equipment I was loaned amount to a total of $1,050. The last thing I'm going to tell you to do is to buy a turntable and a pair of powered speakers, especially in the middle of a pandemic and an economic crisis when millions of Americans are facing eviction at the start of the new year. I always had this idea that turntables had a complicated and involved setup process, but I had it up and running in 10 minutes. I had just finished setting up the Fluance RT80, which, by the way, was very easy. I don't think I can forget the day I finally peeled the shrink-wrap from the Ray Charles album, choking from the mist of dust that sloughed off it. And just like that, four months later, my once pathetic record collection has swiftly grown to 16 pieces. My colleague and WIRED audio nerd extraordinaire, Parker Hall, recoiling after hearing I use a pair of decade-old, $30 computer speakers for my TV's audio output, loaned me a pair of Klipsch speakers and a Fluance turntable. But then, in mid-August, a turntable arrived at my doorstep. I figured I'd find a way to play it at some point. ![]() I picked it up at an event I attended a little more than a year ago, in the Before Times. It sat atop my red Ikea bookshelf, collecting dust. Antipodean antics of the highest and driest order.Before the pandemic began, I had one record. It’s not so much canned music for office, hotel and bar environments but soundtracks for the in-house TV commercials that celebrate these sanitized franchise chains. The utter lack of a knowing wink and slavish fidelity to the tritest sound of the eighties is the twist, filtering out any hint of personality to the beat of those the ever-present, hexagonal electronic drum pads. There are a number of artists pursuing this tack at the moment, but few with the plastered-on “What, Me Worry?” smile and consistency of Eyeliner’s High Fashion Mood Music. A hobby project by Luke Rowell (Disasteradio), Eyeliner replicates familiar, mainstream synth-pop stamped with the Stock Aitken Waterman seal of approval (but without the lyrics) for a pretend audience of PR consultants, advertising copywriters, and high-frequency stock traders, piped into the lobbies and elevators of their gleaming, branded boutique hotels and head offices, music gazing a full fiscal quarter into the future. ![]() Eyeliner’s High Fashion Mood Music looks and sounds like its most easy, breezy, beautiful product line extension.Ī counter-revolution to the lo-fi nostalgia for cassette wobble and vinyl crackle, vaporwave, as this burgeoning genre has been dubbed, celebrates the state-of-the-art, the hi-def, multi-media virtual reality of glossy superficiality. New Zealand’s Crystal Magic Records celebrates this buffered ambiguity – who is sending, who is receiving? – with perfect pitch for the perfect pitch. A label luxuriating in the hitherto copyright-befuddled realm of uncleared samples, warez and digital delivery. A generation raised on air-brushed cover girls and corporate team-building exercises, living and working in climate-controlled, olfactory-designed mall and office complexes. A counter-revolution to the lo-fi nostalgia for cassette wobble and vinyl crackle, vaporwave, as this burgeoning genre has been dubbed, celebrates the state-of-the-art, the hi-def, multi-media virtual reality of glossy superficiality.
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