Liner Notes: Nostalgia Is a Compression Artifact

Last month I found a folder of 128 kbps rips I made in 2003 and played them out of the loyalty you extend to old shoes. The cymbals swam. The hi-hats sounded like rain on a car roof. And it was right. Not nostalgic-right. Right, as in: this is the version of this album that exists in my head, and the lossless copy I bought later is the impostor.

That ought to be embarrassing, and it is not, because what I was recognising was never the music. It was the damage.

Every format is defined by what it throws away

Cassette rolled off almost everything above 14 kHz and handed you hiss as change. MP3 discarded what a psychoacoustic model from the early nineties believed you could not hear, and it was wrong about cymbals in a way that has since become a genre. FM flattened a mix, pushed it into the middle and lit it from underneath with noise. Vinyl cannot hold much stereo information below 100 Hz, which is why so many basslines from forty years ago sit dead centre and sound enormous.

None of that was designed. Each one was a limit, and limits leave fingerprints. When we call a format warm we are describing a subtraction and thanking it for an addition. The warmth is missing information, and the ear is generous enough to fill the hole with something flattering.

You cannot buy the damage back

This is where I part company with the revival. There is a plugin for everything now: saturation, dropout, wow and flutter, a bit crusher with a preset named after a machine nobody in the room has touched. They are fun, and they are lying, because they sell you the artifact without the constraint. Hiss meant you committed. Four tracks meant you bounced and lost the ability to change your mind. The sound is downstream of the decision, and the decision is the part that hurt. Ferric's own engineers made a whole album out of that argument and still could not settle whether tape is a sound or an alibi.

The honest version of nostalgia is to take on a limit that costs you something and then live inside it. One take. Eight seconds of sample memory. The cheap synth you cannot talk your way out of. Do that and you will generate your own artifacts, which somebody will be sentimental about in twenty years, and they will be just as wrong as I am about the cymbals.

We are not nostalgic for the music. We are nostalgic for the parts of it we never heard.