Streaming normalisation ended the fight over volume. It did not end the fight. Three Wire writers spent a month with the mastering engineers, playlist editors and bar owners now deciding what a record has to survive.
One person, a spare room and a thermal label printer can now move a record from master to doormat in eleven days. Major labels need fourteen weeks. That gap is where the last five years of interesting music happened.
Three men who should be retired, one press built in 1971, and a nine-week order book. A week inside the only plant still cutting records on this stretch of coast, and the arithmetic of what happens when it stops.
Street width, render, tram rails and the local noise floor decide what a city sounds like long before anyone plays a note. A field guide to why Berlin rings for two and a half seconds and Lagos does not ring at all.
Recommendation systems are extremely good at telling you what you already like. They have no way to model forty people in a back room deciding, together and in public, that a record is worth caring about.
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.
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