Hi-Res Audio

"Every year, around my birthday, I usually get just-drunk-enough & sit in the studio-lair & conjure up some sort of tangible edition & distribute them covertly without too much noise and/or promotion. These “Easter Egg” releases have always been extremely fun & rewarding to produce & I love how the person-to-person awareness of them steadily creeps out into the void over a few weeks; I crave the resultant slow steady rush of (adrenalized) pavlovian responses once I start getting orders from familiar names & addresses. Feels great to confirm that the bread-crumb trails of underground music are very much intact, even if corporate forces are working around the clock (with just absurd resources at their disposal) to lead you to believe otherwise. This year, leading into the day (another significant prime-number; don’t ask) I finally charged up the Recordex Soundmaster IV Stereo I had acquired in the Fall between trips to Europe. A series of long, impassioned conversations about this current, third-wave of interest in cassettes as a medium/force in the weeks prior had me scouring the secondary retail lanes, and I was extremely lucky to find a stereo model via the music director/electrician of a Korean Baptist Church in California. I committed to designing-and-duplicating a 48-copy edition of “To (a) Certain Extent” this year, which was intended as a cassette release from day-one. Once I got into the swing of the whole scouring-the-internet-for-supplies process (my entire cache of blanks, J-cards, labels, Norelcos, sleeves, stickers, etc. had to be rebuilt from scratch) and began rekindling those decades-old relationships with my reps at Amtech, Bags, NAC, NRS, etc. it was clear that I still had the after-hours patience/energy/time for this particular sub-set of manual labor, and I laid out a plan to start a program of small-run issues of the otherwise digital-only releases I had been sharing on Bandcamp (all of which, of course, I would have loved to have made on LP/CD/tape to begin with). A sheet of tiny, gold-foil-stamped “Hi-Res Audio” stickers that came with a pair of balanced headphones from Ali Express had me thinking around what constituted significance in the fidelity of audio itself; the mid-speed dubs were coming back with gorgeous, individualized patterns of low-grade wow & flutter, inter-channel abnormalities, and, to my ears, an appropriate level of gain-staged emphasis on the low-low-end frequencies. There’s something so perversely attractive about sending, say, a high-spec, 24/96 recording made at the GRM through the preamps & A/D of a Prism Sound Lyra through a +6dB boosted 1:1 CrO2 pass, then dubbing said at 16x speed (further boosting & adjusting the L/R balance VCAs on each channel on each side, individually & simultaneously) & placing the A-side labels on warm shells as they spin-out, causing further, albeit subtle inter-copy personality-traits."