When people who like to talk about how they listen to music describe vinyl records and tape, they use the word “warmth” a lot

I’ve been thinking today about what we mean when we say that

There are a few places that “warmth” could be coming from—with sound printed to magnetic tape, if the source is too loud going to tape, you get saturation, a fuzziness, an overdriven sound...

Whereas with digital recording, the same thing would result in unpleasant clipping

On a record, that “warmth” may be from that same phenomena of saturation, esp if the recording medium was tape (not often the case with contemporary recordings)...

...or in the pops and cracks of the actual needle in the groove, similar to the pops and hiss of a campfire or something

The thing about “warmth” that is interesting is that it’s used to describe imperfection

I recently watched a video by this musician Benn Jordan who talked about how if you want music represented as accurately as a musician intended, digital is the way to go because you can have lossless files that give you 100% of the aural information the person recorded

And I actually agree, digital music—either on CD or with wav files off Bandcamp—sound technically superior. And digital recording software has advanced a lot in the last decade and much of the analog, tube-driven tools that we use to impart that “warmth” can be accurately modeled

And so Jordan was wondering why, with all that tech, people are still addicted to vinyl

But again, warmth is about imperfection. It’s as much a feeling as a sound

I’ve spent a lot of time today listening to another musician, William Basinski

He’s most well-known for his work Disintegration Loops. The story behind it is fascinating and if you don’t know about it, he gave a great interview about it to NPR https://www.npr.org/sections/therecord/2012/11/12/164978574/divinity-from-dust-the-healing-power-of-the-disintegration-loops

But in short, he found a bunch of tape loops he’d made and stowed and forgotten and tried to digitize them

But when he put them on the tape player, the tapes themselves began to break down...

...ferrite flaking off the tape, audio information literally turning to dust as it moved across the tape head

He realized this was creating slight variations in the otherwise static repeating sounds and let the loops run until they were unplayable

So as he’s completing this epic five hour work and releasing it, the terrorist attack on the WTC happens. Basinski watches it happen from his rooftop in Brooklyn

His photos of the aftermath become the album covers for the four volumes of The Disintegration Loops

And people really connect with the work in the wake of this unspeakable tragedy. I imagine some people who may never have listened to experimental music might have heard it and found some solace in its haunting, crackling repetition. Like a wordless chant

But really at its core, they’re just cruddy tape loops of sounds from like shortwave radios and stuff

But context transforms everything. And again, with the idea of imperfection, the literal decaying of the sound carried weight. The imperfections gave the work meaning

When you put on a record, the music is present in the room with you. It is physicalized in imperceptible bumps inside the groove in the vinyl. When you drop the needle, there is surface noise, there are pops, it is not perfect, but it is present

And we feel a closeness there. The imperfection speaks to us and feels warm because imperfection is a very human quality. It’s maybe the most human quality

So when it occurs in our art, we can feel it, even if we don’t understand it fully. Even if we struggle to describe what we’re experiencing. We use words like “warm” and “rounded” and “lively”

We’re so close to saying “it feels like a person” but we stop just short