The Clash at the grocery store and the indelible stain.
I was at the grocery store and I had with me the Ilford Sprite II plastic camera. I took this picture. The film I used is the dubble film daily 35mm color film. I like this film and camera combination. The film is a cool tone and the camera makes grainy snaps. The film is sent off to Reformed Film Lab in Florida. They develop and scan your film and email to the scans. They will also send you the negatives if you pay shipping. Otherwise they will dispose of them for you.
So why am I writing about this camera and film on a blog about sound? I will tell you.
The camera and film are analog and the picture files are digital. There is something lost in the process of what I see and what the camera sees and what the film is exposed to. The result is a copy. A moment in time. A indelible stain. The indelible stain is a punctum (look it up if you don’t know what a punctum is). I am treating recorded sound in the same way. The copy onto the tape from the microphone is not what I heard or what the microphone is translating to the magnetized metal particles on the plastic tape surface. Then the copy of the tape to another tape or to a computer harddrive is an act of obfuscation. Things are lost and digital nosie is added to the analog tape noise. Then shit gets edited and sent out into the digital world of streaming or as a file to purchase on bandcamp.
The sound file can also be dubbed to tape or pressed to a record. The tape or vinyl recoding has its other noise problems. The indelible stain.
Also there are some many kinds of recording technologies out there not to mention the ways of mastering the recording for duplication that I didn’t go into so don’t @ me with whataboutisms of whatever. Ok so what does this all mean? I don’t know but the picture for this post was taken with the camera and film I wrote about above while ‘stand by me’ by the clash was playing over the grocery store speakers. The clash is another punctum in my life and I never thought the 13 year old me would be able to hear that song in the grocery store.
That’s all for now.