“Right now, we’re in the midst of an attention crisis, individually and collectively snared in an infinite scroll of disruption and distraction. Berger saw this crisis coming and foresaw its consequences. In 1978, writing about photography and its impact on the modern world, he argued that the dominance of images ‘creates an eternal present of immediate expectation: Memory ceases to be necessary or desirable. With the loss of memory, the continuities of meaning and judgment are also lost to us.’ That diagnosis seems even truer today, as the functions of remembering, judging and interpreting are increasingly offloaded from human minds and communities into the ether of social media feeds and artificial intelligence. We’re in danger of forgetting how to look.”
“‘Art,’ he wrote, ‘supposes that beauty is not an exception—is not in despite of—but is the basis for an order.’”
• An interview with producer and writer Joe Boyd.
“One of the things that I discovered as I was writing, I mean, it sort of came to me at a certain point, I realized that my process in writing the book [The Roots of Rhythm Remain] reminded me a lot of mixing because I’d digest a bunch of research and then I’d write a few pages of text and it would be very rough and very raw and full of things that didn’t sound very good and sentences that were too long and too many adjectives. And then I would sit there and start pruning, taking words out, taking sentences out, finding a better way to describe something, tweaking it at the edges and slowly getting it into a shape where I could actually enjoy reading it back to myself. It felt very much like mixing, like taking a track that had been recorded in the studio and moving the guitar around until it sounded in the right position and tweaking with the EQ until the drum sound fit with the rest of the music and the attention to detail that helped bring it into form where you could sit back and say, yeah, OK, that sounds pretty good. I felt that the process of writing touched the same parts of my brain that mixing a record did.”
• A tutorial by Dan Worrall on EQing vocals.
“The best way to EQ a vocal is not to EQ it at all.”
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