Drop the needle and play. Press record and watch the reels dance. Write a letter and be ink stained for the rest of the day. Tune the radio until you find the sweet spot. Hold the photograph by the edges.
The list goes on but each of these things is passing into obsolescence as everything we do is on a screen. Even our keyboards have been replaced by screens. There’s something intangible being lost. There’s less feeling of a human being operating some machinery (a typewriter, a tape recorder, or, hell, a pen) and more of a disembodied mind doing abstract things. While all of this progress can be amazingly beneficial, I don’t think you can distil the human essence out of the human body.
Our first EP was recorded to a tape machine (as were some later singles) and it was a joy to work with it and push its limitations. We only stopped using it when it, humanly, broke down (and alas, remains unfixed at time of writing). As a result, all of the live video recordings that we’ve been putting out this year have been recorded digitally; syncing tape to video is something of a lost art. We still mixed them largely the same way: by hand on an analogue mixing desk. That way, we applied the lessons from our earlier recordings.
Technology can insidiously creep into our lives if we let it. It promises convenience, haste, and, with the advent of personalized services, satiation of any of our personal fancies. We simply need to hook ourselves up to the machine, switch it on and it’ll proceed to shovel in whatever we desire, barely pausing to allow us to breathe. Entertainment has become consumption; we eat our performers while software eats the world.
This isn’t some lament for puritan notions of hard-work, however. This is an observation that our leisure time is becoming less of an activity, in which we are the objects in control of our destiny, and more of a procedure to which we are subjected passively so that “value” may be extracted from us. Others, be they human or machine, decide for us to what music we should listen, what films to watch, what items to buy, which people to seduce. They then observe us exercising what limited choice they give us and use that knowledge to sell the next, limited, choice to the highest bidder. They constantly feed us the lie that we are “in control”. People know, instinctively, that they are not in control. This is at the root of much of the psycho-malaise spreading throughout “high-tech” societies. Comprehension of the world is beginning to fade away faster than ever and we can but grasp at the shadows. In those shadows, of course, only lie beasts.
In the midst of this thoughtlessness, we would like to stand firm for humane values. We don’t want to bait you in to “like and subscribe”, nor do we promise to keep to a schedule of carbon-copied “content”. The songwriter Tom Adams calls his mailing list “slow social media” (you might call it “slowcial media”). Once you can prise yourself away from pixels, you can see them for the ephemeral snowflakes they really are. The warmth of sunlight can easily thaw their icy glare. We can do wonderful things with the tools we have invented but the worst thing we could do with them is to become tools like them.