Liner Notes: In Defense of the Skip Button
Labels watch skip rates the way hospitals watch infection rates. But skipping takes attention, and forty minutes was a manufacturing limit, not a covenant.
Dario Fontaine
Posts
What We Lose When the Venue Becomes a Condo
A 300-capacity room is not a small arena. It is the only place a band learns to hold a room, and the arithmetic keeping it open is thinner than anyone building flats next door has ever been told.
The Sound Design of Silence in This Year's Best Films
Three of this year's best films spend most of their running time near silence. That is not restraint, it is a mix decision, and it comes straight out of forty years of ambient records.
Liner Notes: Your Favorite Song Is a Room
Ask anyone about a song they love and watch how fast they start describing a kitchen. Reverb is the one part of a record that gives it an address.
Moth Choir's 'Cathedral of Small Sounds' Is the Quietest Loud Album of the Year
Twelve people, one deconsecrated chapel and about forty contact mics. Moth Choir have made an album whose loudest event is a chair leg, and turned dynamic range into an argument about who gets to decide how loud your life is.
Liner Notes: The Encore Is a Lie
The two songs after the encore are written on the set list before the doors open. It is four minutes of theatre, and it costs the audience the last train.
Liner Notes: Nostalgia Is a Compression Artifact
The 128 kbps rip sounds right and the lossless copy sounds like an impostor. What we miss about old formats is precisely what they could not carry.
Club Flyers Were the Internet Before the Internet
Before a link could travel, a rectangle of paper had to. The club flyer was a routing protocol with a typeface, and it encoded who was invited far more precisely than anything that replaced it.
A Brief History of the Bassline That Won't Die
Four notes, played wrong on a borrowed bass synth in 1983, have since carried electro-funk, house, jungle, garage, grime and one very good synth-pop record. A biography of a figure that refuses to be retired.
Game Audio Is Eating the Avant-Garde (and That's Fine)
Indeterminacy, generative form, scores that never play the same way twice. Concert programmers largely stopped paying for that. A twelve-person studio making a diving game is paying for it now.
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