Time Travel

After yesterday evening's mammoth vinyl listening session, I decided to digitise my Lem Chaheb album and burn it onto a CD for the car. Unfortunately with the benefit of fifteen-odd years of improvement in audio technology - and specifically, the amazing Harman/Kardon speakers on my PC - I realised exactly how much I must have played my favourite track over the years. Vinyl definitely does have a warmer sound than digital media, but it certainly doesn't endure the ravages of time.

I decided to see whether the album was ever released on CD. Sometimes the internet is just too easy. Amazon didn't have it, but one Google search later I was at the virtual doorstep of thePhatPlanet.

Click... oh look, there it is. Click... there's even a sound sample. Click... oh, online ordering, in Sterling too. Click... credit card details? Sure, no problem. Tap, tap, tap, tap... click. It was as though the spirit of the music was calling to me via a ouija board - my hand moved involuntarily and my brain watched in calm amazement. The whole process was completed in less than a minute, with a Blood and Fire compilation also casually tossed into my shopping basket.

I remember when I first heard John Peel play Lem Chaheb on BBC Radio 1 in 1985. It probably took me three or four weeks to buy the album, as I sent up for mail order catalogues, waited for them to be sent to me, sent my order back by post and waited for my delivery.

Here I am again, almost exactly twice the age I was when I first bought it. The title track still sounds like the very essence of happiness distilled into eleven and a half minutes. It's a credit to my teenage self that I was listening to this at the same time as some rather gloomy, histrionic Sex Gang Children records, which have definitely not stood the test of time at all. But, hey, that was me - squirming and struggling to resist the predictable at all costs. "Destroy the tyranny of the pigeonhole!" would have been my motto, or something similar. Thankfully this rather tiresome "look at me! I'm different!" attitude has mellowed into a more self-assured eclecticism.

A few years ago, Coil had some theories about music enabling time travel. They even released a series of tracks on an album called Time Machines to support their ideas. They were approaching it from the angle of naturally-invoked, hallucinogenic states. The simpler version of this theory is the instant hit of nostalgia that music can provide. When I listen to Sahara Elektrik, for eleven and a half minutes I'm seventeen again. Life was smaller and simpler, but more complicated. Now it has the richness of complexity, which is a different thing entirely.

This brings me onto a subject that's crossed my mind (and that of others) recently, which I'll explore in a further post...

Posted by Hg on Thursday 06 June 2002 at 21:51.
Received 2 comments so far.

Please tell me how to digitalise vinyl. You may solve one of my little problems in life...creeping obsolescence.

Comment by Gert on Saturday 08 June 2002 at 12:44.

It's fairly simple if you've got the basic infrastructure in place. Having a PC that handles sound is a good place to start :-)

Get a cable that connects your hi-fi to your PC's 'line in' socket. Then get some software that will create an audio file from this (Windows' Sound Recorder is not really up to the job, I'm trying out some shareware from www.polderbits.com).

Generally the software will create a WAV file, which, in Windows XP at least, you can then open in Windows Media Player and burn to an audio CD.

My snag is that I also want to do MP3s, which the PolderbitS software doesn't do. I downloaded a copy of the mkw Audio Compression Tool, which is supposed to convert WAVs to MP3s, but it says that my WAV files are invalid.

That's where I ground to a halt the other night. I haven't had time to research any alternatives yet, but I'll let you know when I find something I'm happy with.

Anyone got any recommendations? I want something reliable, preferably freeware (no cracks) for Windows 2000/XP. Alternatively a good quality Linux utility could be interesting.

Comment by Stuart on Saturday 08 June 2002 at 13:23.

http://www.hydragenic.com/cgi-sys/cgiwrap/hydragen/mt/mt-tb.cgi/156

The previous post was I almost forgot: an important.

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