Disquiet

So, 8-track retro-fetishism gave way to 7″ retro-fetishism gave way to vinyl-LP retro-fetishism gave way to cassette-tape retro-fetishism, with sidelines into Walkman retro-fetishism and the unique subculture of cassingle retro-fetishism. Throughout, there have been occasions of reel-to-reel retro-fetishism. Generally speaking, culture anoints technology as a retro fetish object just around the time the Amish begin to consider adopting it (at least based on the depiction of Amish hacker culture in Kevin Kelly’s recent book, What Technology Wants).

And yet the further ahead we proceed, the further back we look. Which brings us to the cutting edge of ancient: wax-cylinder retro-fetishism.

The wax cylinder was developed as a medium for recorded sound by Thomas Edison in the mid-to-late 1870s. By the time the Depression came around, Edison had stopped producing them.

And then, as 2010 was coming to a close, the duo of Carl Michael von Hausswolff and Michael Esposito released a brand new wax cylinder, titled The Ghosts of Effingham (shown above). And it glows in the dark. And it is purported to contain the voices of the dead.

That’s the subject of my latest guestblog entry at boingboong.net: “Wax Cylinder: Occult Sonic Technology of a Bygone Age, Good as New.”

(Above image is a detail of a shot displayed at the touchmusic.org.uk website. It accompanies an extended article by Ken Hollings on Effingham and the occult origins of recorded sound in the January 2011 issue of The Wire. More from Hollings at kenhollings.blogspot.com.)

Over at the Buddha Machine discussion at my recent boingboing.net post on the latest generation of the device (“If You Meet a Buddha Machine on the Road, Hack It”), FM3 member Christiaan Virant responded to something I’d mentioned at the close of my piece. After three sequential versions of the Buddha Machine containing FM3’s loops, I’d requested that a future edition allow for a user’s own audio. Virant and his FM3 partner, Zhang Jian, are the developers of the Buddha Machine series of small, portable, ambient looping devices.

Virant wrote the following:

Regarding Marc’s wish for a 4G buddha with upload capability… not likely in the Buddha Machine series, but am currently onworking a new device which might possibly allow user loops. its a different form factor than the buddha, but still a hand-held, self-contained music playback unit. in a retro-vibe… also, have been working for at least 3 years on a solar-powered buddha, but thwarted by high cost and low power output of smaller solar panels. recently solved the power problem however, so next gen buddha likely sun powered.

For more information on the machines, here are two interviews I’ve done previously with Virant: back in 2005, regarding their initial device (“Buddha in the Machine”), and in 2008, for the launch of the second edition (“Buddha Machine, Reloaded”).

In my fourth guestblog entry at boingboing.net, today I introduce the third generation of the Buddha Machine, which swaps out the ambient tones of the first two generations in favor of those from the most ancient of Chinese stringed instruments, the qin, or guqin, or 古琴. The new device is called Chan Fang, which translates as Zen Room.

Read the full piece: “If You Meet the Buddha Machine on the Road, Hack It.”

There was a Chinese movie about 10 years ago, maybe 15, in which a composer refused to write music for the emperor. I think the two men were estranged childhood friends. In the subtitles, every time someone said the word “qin” it would appear as “qin (zither),” as if after two hours of repetition we hadn’t quite caught on yet. People just started laughing in the audience every time it happened. (This was at the 4 Star movie theater in San Francisco’s Outer Richmond.) If anyone knows the name of this movie, I’d appreciate it. I think the plot is similar to that of the Tan Dun opera, The First Emperor.