The Beauty of Degraded Media

this video is sponsored by Skillshare head on over to sk l dot s h slash polyphonic 22 to get two months free and to start learning today the story of recording technology is a story of quality it's the story of low fidelity recordings on paper being thrown aside in favor of wax cylinders which are then thrown aside in favor of vinyl records it's the story of condenser microphones getting increasingly complex able to record a wider and fuller sound it's the story of AM radio being traded up for FM so that amplitude doesn't mean static and it's even the story of vinyl resurgence people foregoing the convenience of small digital files in favour of superior fidelity of analog media it's a story full of innovation format Wars and countless esoteric arguments as to how you should best listen to music so then why is it that Alan Lomax's grainy field recordings are why did the mountain goats become a cult band through cassette tape recordings and why are their entire subgenres of YouTube videos made of vinyl crackle infused chill hop or old Alan Watts for things over ambient news investigate your self-love to find out why you love yourself in other words why do we gravitate to the flaws that we've spent more than a century trying to remove from our media I think the answer to this question can help us better understand what it means to be human and what it means to create art in the digital age let's take a closer [Music] audio isn't the only medium in which we pursue the flaws and imperfections of the past just look at Instagram one of the most popular apps in the world the entire app is built around artificially adding in the blemishes and discolorations that disappeared with the switch to digital photography and then there's video you regularly see music videos that add filters to create the war VHS effect and of course video essays all over YouTube are regularly putting scratched filters grainy paper texture and VHS glitches into their aesthetic hell I'm probably the worst culprit of this even my intro is a callback to the glitches that came with VHS in the digital age where media has become increasingly flawless we've started to appreciate the aesthetic value of those flaws we once had there's a Japanese form of art called Kentucky which consists of filling broken pottery with beautiful lacquers it shows that this degradation these flaws are part of the story of an object and perhaps more importantly it plays with our expectations of art's temporality art doesn't need to be static in time it doesn't need to be preserved behind glass Greek statues were originally painted with bold bright colors but as the paint's faded the art took a new meaning the pure white seems to carry an immaculate Beauty to mint that speaks to our perception of Greek philosophies and myths centuries later and part of the wonder of the Venus de Milo is her lack of arms they reduced her humanity yet seemed to increase her beauty and her divinity they tell a story of a great civilization that has faded to memory and this is true of music to the scratches and bumps in my vinyl copy of Carole King's tapestry tell their own story last year I moved from my home in Ottawa across the country to Vancouver on the way I stopped by my aunts place where I picked up a number of Records owned by my uncle who had just recently passed away tapestry was among them and it was in rough shape but when I arrived in Vancouver listen to that crackling record and stared out at the city lights the record seemed more present more real because of these flaws the record carry with it a story it was a well-loved record one that had been played on many turntables before mine each leaving their own little marks and intricacies and I'm sure there's to countless copies of tapestry full of people's stories of love and loss and humanity it's this idea that drives Rutherford Chang's collection of more than 2,000 copies of the beatles self-titled album best known as the white album the blank canvas of that album's artwork serves as a physical means of telling these stories rutherford posts every album on his instagram scrolling through you can see the wear and tear in different covers and the new can see notes written on them names dedications phone numbers and doodles some people have even used it as a canvas for their own artwork on Chang's website you can hear a recording of a hundred different copies of the album's first side being played at once it starts out normal enough with a crackle 'back in the USSR but by the time you've gotten to oh bloody habla its echoey and distorted by the end of the first side it's just pure No this is a reflection of the fact that each of those hundred copies plays slightly differently each has its own skips its own jumps each of its own unique artifact and that's a quality that's been lost individually digital objects are exact copies of each other so they sound the exact same you can't write a message to your buddy on the cover of Spotify his white album wear and tear is part of each of these objects unique stories and I think that's part of the reason we've seen a surge in artificial wear and tear we want our media to feel lived in it's like a reverse kansui instead of filling in flaws in imperfect objects we're creating artificial flaws imperfect objects and this is used to a number of enemies I think the first and most basic thing that these flaws accomplish is a feeling of nostalgia at my parents cottage we've got a beat-up old VHS tape of The Princess Bride it's my favorite movie ever and whenever I'm at the cottage I watch that tape and watching it on an old TV with all of its glitches its impure picture quality its distorted sound it makes me feel like a kid again and as my generation the generation that grew up on VHS tapes comes of age VHS aesthetics have creeped their way into music videos look at many of the videos of Mack DeMarco which capture the beauty of home movies and then there's on Rizvi per wave and outrun which are built on the cornerstone of VHS distortion the same nostalgic effect can be captured orally too this is something that hip-hop producers started to notice as early as the 1990s the wu-tang clan's debut album enter the wu-tang tapped into their upbringing with Warren samples of old kungfu movies time to die and NASA's the world as yours is soaked in vinyl hiss fitting for a song on an album that features a childhood pictured nas on the cover and this warm nostalgia is something that's led to the rise of lo-fi hip-hop if you've spent any time on YouTube you've probably had lo-fi beats to study to recommend it to you these videos calm you with the feelings of nostalgia there's a warm aesthetic quality to tape hiss and audio artifacts that we tap clearly into in the modern age but just like any sound vinyl crackle and tape hiss can be used to convey other emotions to a lot of loafie music uses these sounds to create intimacy a polished production can sound phenomenal but can also make an artist feel distant musicians like daniel johnston realized how flaws can bring the audience closer to the musician in the early 90s low-five recordings can make it feel like you're sitting next to an artist in their living room the amateur sound makes them more approachable more real this is something the mountain goats have used to great effect throughout their career John Danielle's personal stories lend themselves to a kind of raw flawed sound I think it might be most powerful in the 2001 song the best ever death metal band [Music] loaf i recording of this track brings the listener closer to the characters it highlights the humanity of the song this kind of human story drives an empty bliss beyond this world by the caretaker that ambient album uses degraded ballroom jazz records to tell a story of Alzheimer's disease the flaws in the music emulate the struggle of watching your memories slip away there's a warm nostalgia to the album but also a kind of lingering horror brought on by the disintegration of these records pitchfork even compared an empty bliss beyond this world to the Ballroom in the shiny degraded media is frequently used to create horror a part of this is probably because so many people grew up watching old horror flicks on VHS but there's a deeper level beyond that this is something that clipping have leaned into on there exists an addiction to plot the aesthetic theme that guides that album is 80s horror and is created through degraded media la mala ordina uses degradation in both the music and the video to create this horror atmosphere the distortion and both increases as the song goes on growing a latent horror until the song descends into the corridor it's a terrifying effect and it shows us the power that noise can have as an artistic medium noise music often uses degraded media to challenge our ideas of what music can be just look at how visual and auditory noise are used in deaf groups but I think one of the strongest uses of this kind of degrading sound comes in William Basinski is the disintegration loops paczynski is an ambient and avant-garde composer inspired by the likes of Brian Eno he started recording various everyday things found sound to be used in his music two decades later he decided to transfer these old recordings from tape to digital when he started transferring the loops to digital he realized that the tape was in such poor condition that the ferrite powder was starting to fall off during the transfer and so he recorded the sound as it was slowly dying the result is the disintegration loops a hauntingly beautiful piece of ambient music Basinski finished the loops on September 11th 2001 from the roof of his apartment paczynski filmed the collapsing towers and used a frame for the artwork of his loops when he released the recordings he dedicated them to the victims saying the events gave new meaning to the musical pieces created by catastrophic decay in my studio a few weeks before listening to the disintegration loops is a hypnotic experience as you slowly hear these sounds fall apart it's like listening to the world falling apart around you and that's a raw power that can only come from flaws from degraded decaying sound the world is imperfect and I think that's why we love imperfect media imperfections allow our to evolve allow it to take on new meanings whether that's in our memory or in our current interpretations of the world as the world increasingly shifts towards digital there will always be pushback there will be people collecting audio and visual artifacts of old collecting flaws of a bygone era and shoving them into a supposedly flawless existence because at the end of the day there's something special about imperfect media there's something special about audio artifacts and video trailing there's something unique about listening to sound decaying even as you hear it there's something beautiful about degraded movie making this video took a lot of thinking and analysis of a lot of different forms of media and that's why I really enjoyed how to talk about art on Skillshare in just half an hour that course provided me with the framework that helped me better understand and discuss a medium that I don't have a ton of background with they used real examples of visual and performance art to teach you how to talk about the topic if you want to check it out you can go over to SK l dot s h slash polyphonic 22 and get two months of unlimited access to thousands of courses today that means you can try out graphic design basics core principles for graphic design by Ellen Lupton and Jennifer Cole Phillips that class will walk you through the five basic principles of graphic design principles that can be applied to all kinds of different projects or you could get meta and take Mike Boyd's how to learn which will teach you strategies to approach learning any new skill you want if you sign up with the link in the description you can 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Channel: Polyphonic

Views: 168,845

Rating: 4.9758806 out of 5

Keywords: polyphonic, music, video essay

Id: gEygho_j5j0

Length: 14min 36sec (876 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 24 2019