The Waveform #024: Quiet Wars, Loud Vans

Five months, three writers, and more arguments about the word loud than any of us expected to have in a lifetime. This issue leads with the biggest thing Wire has published, and I would rather tell you how long it took than pretend it arrived fully formed. Two of the interviews in it were recorded twice, because the first versions were too polite to be useful.

The Loudness Wars Are Over. The Quiet Wars Have Begun.

Mara Voss, Theo Anand and June Okafor on what replaced the loudness war: streaming normalisation flattened the peaks, so the fight now is over whether a record survives a phone speaker in a busy bar at eight on a Friday night. They spoke to mastering engineers who are routinely asked for two masters, a playlist editor who is candid about what gets skipped inside five seconds, and a bar owner who has to live with the results of both. It is the piece the whole desk has been circling all year.

Also this week

• Tbilisi's Substation Club Reopens After Two-Year Silence. There is finally a date, a confirmed capacity and a first bill, and the news lands later today.
• Building a Studio in a Van, One Rattle at a Time. Petra Lindqvist's build diary from December, which reads very differently once you accept that most people will hear your record in traffic; for paying members.

One more thing

Not a recommendation so much as an experiment worth stealing. Iron Fern released their album twice this month: the same twelve songs in a normal master, and a second version mixed for a single phone speaker, mono and mid-heavy, given away free with the first. The phone version is worse by every measurement available and better on a kitchen counter. Somebody was always going to do this, and I did not expect to enjoy it.

That is the lot. Back Friday. Ada