Prepping For The Apocalypse at 33rpm
"CDs, cassettes, the cloud, hell even 8 tracks would have been unlikely to survive the radiation and EMPs of a true nuclear holocaust! Everything... Except Vinyl."
COVID was a surreal and very strange time for almost all of us wasn’t it? Depending on where you lived the effects could have been pretty dramatic. The sudden isolation did weird things to some people. A sort of forced introspection that led people down some fairly unusual rabbit holes.
I have always been an aficionado of all things horror and dystopian. Movies like The Matrix, Equilibrium, and Mad Max (original), or video games like Fallout and Metro 2033 all deeply resonated with me. Something about how they existed part ways between potential and nostalgia, and monsters aside the possibility of their realization hinged largely on choices we as a people have yet to make.
When the quarantines came down, I remember sitting in my living room, thinking specifically on how much of the music in Fallout was created between the 1940s and 1950s, before the creation of magnetic and optical based mediums. Which given the post nuclear apocalypse setting made sense.
CDs, cassettes, the cloud, hell even 8 tracks would have been unlikely to survive the radiation and EMPs of a true nuclear holocaust! Everything...
Except Vinyl.
Vinyl enthusiasts often claim that modern technology is simply unable to reproduce the truly “authentic” sound of a fully analog recording. That MP3s and MP4s lack the warmth that records provide. Then there’s the ritual of it all. Unsheathing the record, placing the record, flipping the record, and taking a few moments to appreciate the artwork.
The world was shut down, I had plenty of time to try and incorporate a new ritual into my life!
I didn’t know if their claims were true, but the idea was intoxicating.
So I began collecting. Amazon, Ebay, local record stores and Discogs became my friends. I set out to gather my essential music collection, assembling all the albums that if the world as we knew it came to an end, I would have my tunes intact.
I hit every genre, discovering along the way that vinyl was expensive as hell! Who knew that some pressings of Alice in Chains or Groove Armada could fetch hundreds of dollars, whereas I could snag Throwing Copper for thirty bucks!
What had started as an arguably reasonable reaction to the rampant uncertainty of the time began to twist into an obsession. “What if I get bored and need something different?” “What if someone comes by scavenging, and after finding my record collection next to my skeleton, there’s nothing they’d like?” “I will not be posthumously judged for being a poor host!”
So I broadened my collection further, while still being representative to my eclectic tastes of course. A little German symphonic metal and Jazz appropriate for Sunday morning brunch found its way into the fold. This would continue until my hundred record capacity rack had reached its fill, drawing my temporary dopamine starved madness to a close.
I have no idea if vinyl sounds better than digital, and I can’t tell you with any degree of certainty if I even care. I do enjoy the ritual of it though.
It feels nice sitting on the porch with a cup of tea while a record plays in the living room.
I enjoy getting up to flip it and setting the needle precisely down again.
There’s a thoughtful slowness to perusing the rack to decide what is next on the list.
Was it all worth it? Meh, I don’t know, ask me again on Sunday.
I found this cool French toast recipe I want to try.
-KC
I don’t know how much of this piece is fiction, but it reads with the texture of someone going through those days for real. There’s a strong piece of fiction taking shape here too, and I’d be very curious to see where it could go if you ever decided to push it further. I hope that lands the way I mean it: as genuine appreciation.
This is a beautiful piece. It has a centering quality to it. Sometimes the simple rituals are more healing than we give them credit.