Aural Aggravation

Room40 – 13th December 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

Nostalgia is a subject I’ve touched on on a number of occasions in recent pieces, because it’s become something of a preoccupation in contemporary culture. Arguably, this is the natural evolution of the postmodern, an epoch in which the new was primarily a fresh – or not so fresh – permutation of the old. The culture of the twenty-first century has been marked by an ever-increasing acceleration of more of less everything: the accelerated communications and technological innovations and ensuing blizzard of media Frederic Jameson wrote of when defining postmodernism has gone into overdrive, and we’re now moving at a pace whereby we’re nostalgic for breakfast by lunchtime.

Nostalgia is big, big business, and this has been no more evident than in the response to ABBA’s hologram shows and the Oasis reunion. This isn’t to overlook other huge musical events – Taylor Swift’s Eras tour, for example – but it’s fair to note that she’s been established for over a decade and a half now, and can’t be viewed as representing ‘newness’ in any way – especially given that four of her last six albums were rerecordings of previous albums. This encapsulates the way in which culture laps up endless recycling on account of its familiarity.

Comfort culture is rather like comfort food: you know what you’re going to get, there are no unpleasant surprises, there’s probably not a great deal of chewing involved, and it’s less scary than the unknown. The world’s gone to shit, and people feel a real and quite desperate need for that blanket of safety and reassurance that there are still at least some things you can rely on. The good old days have happened, they’re fixed and can’t be taken away. And nostalgia has a universal appeal, because it’s something we all feel for certain things at certain times. We tend to feel – and I accept this is a colossal generalisation – that our childhoods and teenage years took place in simpler, better times. They didn’t, but because we didn’t have the burden of adult responsibility, and were discovering things for the first time, they’re coloured with brighter hues.

This latest offering from Glim – a project by Vienna based musician and composer Andreas Berger – is steeped in nostalgia. Berger outlines the inspiration and creative methodology with enthusiasm:

I have a particular love for cassette tapes and how they can influence the character of sound – even just by the simple fact of being played on different quality sources. I like the way they can color audio material, especially when using lower-quality gear. It adds modulation, sometimes (a long time unwanted) degradation of sound, but also gives a certain nostalgic touch – at least for me.

I recorded (and played) most of the material on an old Walkman cassette player, and what I got in return were some faded sonic Polaroids which might trigger a hidden memory or at least evoke a vague feeling of nostalgia.

Perhaps somewhat ironically, Tape I is only available as a download, or to stream online. The tape revival remains some way behind vinyl, despite the format being considerably cheaper to produce. Perhaps it’s because tapes just don’t have the same effect on Instagram, or hung on your wall.

Having grown up in the cassette / tape era myself, I can vouch for the unique nature of the format. When I started making music, I would sketch stuff out with a condenser mic on a portable tape deck, later progressing to a four0-track portastudio, bouncing tracks down to create additional tracks. Each stage would erode the quality of the audio by some incremental degree, but what it lost in fidelity it would gain in character. You just don’t get those happy accidents with infinite digital tracks, just as you don’t get the same sense of the personal with a link to a playlist as one-off compilation tape with handwritten track-listing, smudges and misspellings and all. Don’t get me wrong: tapes were a massive pain in the arse, difficult to skip tracks, easily chewed, easily overrecorded – and for these and other reasons, I have not leaped aboard the tape renaissance train. I’m happy with my memories, thank you, and don’t feel the need to start spooling reels with a biro to remember the good old days of recording songs off the radio.

It’s the happy accidents, the whorling analogue fogs, the fuzzy edges and softened-off corners which define the eight pieces on Tape I, unnamed beyond sequential number. But while I feel richly textured, immersive atmosphere, and the pull of strains of sonic palimpsests filtering through the recordings like ghostly whispers, vague, elusory, like memories which linger in the hard-to-reach recesses of the mind, and with a somewhat grainy texture like an old photograph or a photocopy of a photocopy, akin to the kind of fanzines which used to circulate in the eighties, I don’t feel as if I am truly connected to Berger’s sense of nostalgia.

Herein lies the paradox of memory, and of nostalgia: as much as there is a unification to be experienced from reminiscing with friends about those good old days, we each harbour subtly different recollections of those experiences, and as such, our experiences all differ. It also highlights the scope for the disparity between intent and end product. ‘1_4’ is incredibly haunting, eerie, and a quite magnificent exercise in ethereal dissonance, and ‘1_6’ is at times barely there, thin streaks of aural contrails drifting through a big and darkening sky. I feel a certain melancholy, a creeping chill, perhaps, but not any real sense of nostalgia. And yet it’s apparent that his creative process has involved a quite intense and personal engagement with the source materials and the tools necessary to create this diaphanous gauze of slow-drifting ambience. This simply highlights, however, the way in which, while large social brackets have a collective appreciation and nostalgia for one thing or another, the detail, when boiled down to an individual level, looks very different when viewed from that specific individual perspective. It’s here where you realise that you are completely alone: not even your partner or your best friend sees that shade of green or purple the same as you do. No-one else’s perception is entirely aligned to yours, and no-one sees, or hears, the world in exactly the same way.

AA