We all like to listen to music and we love certain music albums for a certain period of time. Once we stop loving it, the album needs to be destroyed and wiped out from our memory. But how is it done? It’s a music fan’s nightmare and the music industry’s everyday problem: how to disassemble a recorded album when its existence is no longer necessary. Whether the medium is a vinyl record, compact disc or a collection of digital files in a system folder, the album is sent to the Music Disassembly Plant. However, it must first be collected from those colourful, special bins in your area or special Internet Music Scrap Collection Points. At the incoming inspection point, the staff checks if the album is at least one year old. If so, it can be safely scrapped and forgotten; special scanners connected to a data base do the trick quite quickly. A very simple machine, called ‘the hangman’, strips the music data from vinyl records and other physical media. Bare data is then sent as digital files to the collection pool, where all digital albums are sent from Internet Music Scrap Collection Points. The physical media is then recycled. Dance, dance, dance, sha-la-lah. Dance, baby, dance, sha-la-lah. Dance, sucker, dance, dance, sha-la-lah. Dance, my young Padawan, sha-la-leah. Now that all files are digital files in different popular formats, they need to be decompressed and converted into their original, raw ‘wave’ format. Older and vintage albums created without the use of digital equipment, are now temporarily stored on master tapes, just like when they came out of the studio. Sound engineers receive mastered albums, reverse the mastering process and send the raw mixed material to the disassembly area. This is where music is split into separate tracks of instruments, synthetic elements and vocals. The solo tracks are then sorted by a software algorithm into recyclable ideas that may be re-used by the industry and alternative non-mainstream concepts. These, on the other hand, are ground into musical sawdust and sold as single-note re-fills for synthesizers and virtual instruments. Now that the old albums have been disassembled and destroyed, they can be easily forgotten and replaced by next generations of their kind.
credits
from 'Aina Makua,
released October 7, 2013
All music by Szymon Danis, Kuba Mitoraj, Maciek Zakrzewski and Grzegorz Posłuszny; lyrics by Szymon Danis.
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