This artwork, entitled Missing You, emerges from the conception of musical recordings as documents that encode time, place, and spirit (aura?) – if we can call it that – within a certain physical substrate. From wax recordings to vinyl recordings to magnetic tape to today’s digital environment, musicians have long engaged in a Faustian bargain in which certain compromises are accepted in order to render music not only tangible but temporally fixed. If musical recordings are archives – collections of certain moments, tonalities, notes, timbres – then to what extent do these substrates influence and color our perceptions of this musical memory? In other words – how do the mediums in which music is recorded (en-registered) color this memory?

This project emerged from the convergence of multiple of my pet interests, including but not limited to:
-Magnetic tape recordings and tape hiss
-Chuck Pearson’s EccoJams album and Oneohtrix Point Never’s Tranquilizer , both albums that distort 1980s to 2000s audio recordings to invoke bygone futures
-Simon Reynolds’ writings on hauntology and retrofuturism
-A genuine love of the wistfulness of pop music
-A period in college in which I methodically digitzed random tapes bought at thrift stores

The term hauntology dates back to Derrida but was taken up by theorists like Simon Reynolds to describe music that samples older sound sources in order to evoke “cultural memory”. Narrowing this in a bit, I would argue that my version of hauntology attempts to mine recordings of the past for hidden meanings through restructuring the sounds and words and twisting them into new forms. An upbeat song by While I don’t claim to have completely reinvented the wheel by doing this, I am proud of the interesting shape that each of these songs came to take on.

Each one of these recordings was done live through using VirtualDJ to warp and loop various pieces of the original recordings. All of these recordings come from a cassette tape purchased at a Goodwill in Portland, Oregon in 2017. These recordings are in a way always-already archives – even my reimaginings of the songs rely on the curatorial choice of an unknown person who illegally ripped them all from local Portland radio station KINK, as was labeled on the cassette tape when I purchased it.



While these recordings are quite obviously digitally manipulated, the chain of command of medium-specificity goes something like this:
Studio recording => CD or vinyl pressed for radio distribution => Radio broadcast => Magnetic tape => Tape player audio output => USB audio digitizer => Recording from digital software

In this way, these recordings have picked up bits and pieces of noise, fuzz, and distortion through every transfer and re-transfer, losing fragments of themselves as they hop from substrate to substrate, past to future. They are inspired by William Basinski’s The Disintegration Tapes , a series of tape loops that the artist played over and over until they literally wore down from passing through the player head. They are the sound of memory itself breaking down, wearing itself out.

One inevitable aspect of working with pop music recordings, however grainy and gritty they might be, is that I was limited to the lexical field already present in each song. I made the conscious choice to attempt to respect typical 4/4 time signatures as well, so as to render the listening experience slightly less jarring. I also chose to limit the distortion to what I perceive to be close to the limit of incomprehensibility – the words should be broken down but still audible. Why? Because I put specific attention into treating the original words of each song as raw material to search for new meanings and combinations.

Thus the project can be seen as arguing for musical recordings themselves as a form of archive in and of themselves – and sampling and remixing as ways of making these archives sing in ways they were not originally intended to. I don’t want to spoil all of the best lyrical flips that feature in the recordings, some solid examples might be the transformation of N*SYNC’s Sailing into a strangely poetic reflection on finding peace by living in a fantasy world of reverie and memory. Or the endlessly looping couplet from Hall and Oates' Everything Your Heart Desires – “If you have everything your heart desires, would you still want more?” As these song fragments play on endlessly (squirming, squeezed, squeaking) they not only instill a sense of nostalgia, but also invoke the endless march of time that is destined to retake all of these fallible storage mediums. John Waitse’s howl of “And there’s a message that I’m sending out” goes from break-up song to a funeral march for transmission itself – transmission = signal + noise.

Everything in the project is made by hand without the use of AI tools. The code for the website is written in HTML and CSS. The song-poems were retranscribed onto paper and then scanned into my computer, giving a written trace and certain textual legitimacy to the recordings.

The project is best experienced with headphones and on a desktop computer. Clicking on the on-screen elements is necessary to navigate throughout the project.

Missing You originally recorded by John Waite in 1984
Sailing covered by N*SYNC in 1997
You Love the Thunder originally recorded by Jackson Browne in 1977
Everything Your Heart Desires originally recorded by Hall and Oates in 1988
Dance Hall Days originally recorded by Wang Chung in 1984