When
· Naughties
· · 2007
· · · January
· · · · 08 (2 entries)
Byrne on Music · Almost everything David Byrne writes is interesting, but when the subject is music and you’re someone who cares about it, you really want to read it. While he falls for the “an LP has more information than a CD” canard, and that in an essay where he has earlier considered the effects of CD’s vastly-superior handling of the high and low ends of the frequency range, it doesn’t really weaken the force of his argument. Many will probably be too young to spot that his title Crappy Sound Forever! is a reference to the initial 1983 CD marketing pitch “Perfect sound forever”. This pitch was widely derided by audiophiles, who justly criticized the bleed-from-the-ears effect resulting from playing quite a few of the early CDs on quite a few of the early players. Byrne speculates about the kind of music that might start to be written under the influence of the ubiquitous MP3 players’ private listening experience, and says he doesn’t know of any examples. My own private-listening-experience music includes pretty well every kind of music imaginable, so the new medium doesn’t seem to rule anything out. Having said that, Lola Dutronic (@ MySpace) has been in heavy rotation on my iPod and matches Byrne’s criteria well. Mind you, it also sounds great on the home stereo and in the car.
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