The words “digital” and “analog” are used so often, we’ve stopped asking what they mean. From the shift to streaming media to the retro resurgence of the vinyl LP, “digital” typically stands in for “the future” while “analog” is seen as a relic of the past. But perhaps there is more to these concepts than our snap judgements. And maybe, if we think about these things deeply enough, we can imagine a future that leverages technological advances for more human-centered aims. This is the premise of Damon Krukowski’s wonderful new book The New Analog, which uses the history of sound to explore the more personal side of our current technological rupture.

Krukowski comes at this material from the perspective of both a record-maker and consumer. He started his career as the drummer for the dream pop trio Galaxie 500 and following the dissolution of the group in the early ’90s, he and G500 bassist (and wife) Naomi Yang formed Damon & Naomi. In addition to his career in music, Krukowski writes about art and technology. Some ideas in *The New Analog *(including the title) can be traced to pieces he wrote for Pitchfork, including his early expose on the economy of streaming music from a musician’s perspective, “Making Cents.”

Krukowski writes about how we experience music on headphones, the nature of deep bass, the history of the microphone in telephones, and much more. Though it draws from academic sound studies, the book is conversational and accessible. Krukowski’s ultimate aim is to encourage people to think about how we are situated in the digital present, and to look for moments when we’re allowing others—corporations, software designers—to make decisions about our information for us. We spoke about *The New Analog *in the Listening Room at Pitchfork’s New York office.

Pitchfork: Everything in your book leads back to sound, but it’s not all just about sound. You talk about GPS, for example. What is the main thread through the book?

Damon Krukowski: The sea change to digital. Not just in music, but as a culture. All of our communications have shifted, and we’re living through this period of great confusion. I thought, “What do I have to offer?” Because of my age and my particular history, I lived through this change in music. The first records [we recorded] were all analog, then we switched. I am the guy who rode into town on the horse and then opened the car garage. That’s not going to happen again—that’s it, it’ll only happen once. To live through this switch is just an accident of history. So, I thought, “Okay, I think I could leave something meaningful if I could just testify.” To what that change feels like, because I lived through it firsthand. And to try and step away from it being just about pro or con.

That’s so important to this discussion—you can learn more by not initially attaching value to one or the other, by thinking about differences, rather than good and bad.

Precisely. Our ideas of good and bad are in flux, and they’re going to change again and again and again. That conversation just stops so quickly: “Which is better: vinyl or CD?” That’s an old, boring conversation.

If you get rid of pro and con, you can also try and get rid of “new” and “old.” New things come up all the time, of course, and they make the old things look old. But then they can get old too. All you have to do is look at a mobile phone from a few years ago. All our gadgets are going to age fast, obviously. So, that distinction too seems really not so helpful right now, for coping with what’s going on. There’s always going to be another “new.”

Then I started thinking about new and old and analog and digital. Analog is not just old. We still live with it in the present, very specifically, in our bodies. Our senses are analog. Until we become cyborgs, we are analog beings. Our eyesight is analog, our sense of touch, our hearing. We’re bringing analog into the present, no matter how our media changes.

And digital is not only “new.” If you go back to my early education, where the one computer in my school was in this room where you punched the punch cards, it’s like, “Sure, that was digital.” But it’s very directly related to the history of computing, which is punch cards in a loom. That goes back to the 18th century. Then when you start looking into it, digital is a mode of human thinking and human communication that has always been there. Counting is really a digital system. We count on our fingers and it’s on, off, one, two.

So, humans have had digital forever. And we’re taking analog into the future. So let me try and really testify and examine my own experience and think, “What have I really felt has changed that’s meaningful?”

There’s a chapter in The New Analog about the telephone. Your book explores the idea of “noise” as a transmitter of crucial information, and that builds throughout to the conclusion. Was there a point in writing it where you came to that idea?

I pretty much had worked through the whole book and was really questioning myself: “What is the fundamental idea here? What does all of this sum to for me?” I realized that noise was underlying every example I had been looking at in the book. Then I had to go back and rewrite the book with that in mind.

But noise is used to describe lots of things, especially in music. There’s music made out of what we typically refer to as noise, like Keiji Haino. But to an engineer, noise means of something very specific, which is whatever is not signal. Signal and noise are always shifting according to what use you have out of them. So, the signal is the message that you are trying to get. Noise is whatever isn’t that message. This has always been true. So, when you’re shouting at someone across the room, you’re trying to get your message heard. Everything that’s in the way is the noise around that. In analog technology, signal and noise are both always there and they’re always paired. You can maximize signal by having beautiful hi-fi equipment, which has low noise, but you cannot eliminate it. It is an impossibility because it’s part of the medium.

Digital technology—and this is where I think I may have gotten to something fundamental that’s worth spreading the news about—doesn’t have that conjoining of signal and noise. It can draw a line and say, “Everything on this side is signal; everything on this side is noise,” and then highlight and delete the noise, and it’s gone. Digital engineers are doing this all the time, and that’s how they’re making our communications so efficient, so cheap, and so global, because they’re cutting out the noise. Your cellphone is designed to take the words that you’re trying to say over that phone. It deconstructs your voice, takes just the parts that can make it the words, reconstructs just the part that has the words in it at the other end, and delivers your message. Meanwhile, it has eliminated anything that wasn’t a part of that signal. That includes a lot of your tone of voice, whether you sound annoyed, pleased, angry, seductive, or you’re intimate or public. We communicate through noise as well as signal.

In the conclusion [of the book] I argue that we might, more than we realize, be assigning to others the decision of what is “signal” and what is “noise”—through software, through platforms. We may not be making those decisions ourselves as much as we really should be, or even think we are. It’s an open question, but that’s something I really want people to think about.

What about you, as a musician. How are you using various platforms?

Now I’m using all formats simultaneously for different things. I feel very pro-Bandcamp because I love the way that Bandcamp has managed, in a digital space, to allow a band to define their own digital space.

On Bandcamp, artists can include their own contextual information with their releases, which you also talk about in the book—how context disappears and could even be considered “noise.”

Yes. Actually, context is a great way to get back to this thing about what is being assigned to us, that we’re not choosing. These presets, like a Facebook page, always looks a certain way and you only can post certain things. It’s a control of context. You can put just your individual thing into this, but it’s going to still be in this context. Spotify, Apple, what they’ve all done that’s brilliant for them as companies is they’ve created the context that all the content has to flow into. So, you cannot change the context. That, to me, is kind of scary because things get very corporate and very samey.

Bandcamp, I really find it a very nice digital space because the band chooses, or the label chooses, what to share and how to share it. Doesn’t even have to all be streaming for free if they don’t want. Then the other thing I love about it is the democratic nature of it, that everything is equal. You have just as much weight and chance of finding a cassette label as you do something that’s got a lot of cache and can get into any record store. Even though bigger labels and bigger artists are coming into it, it hasn’t lost that equality. That, to me, is very healthy. You can’t alter Apple Music. I feel like, digitally, all the spaces are equally at risk of very rapid absorption and dissolution. You really have to fight to keep those alive. The only way to keep them alive is by using them. We have to honor and work for the digital spaces that function like that, and preserve them.

My personal pleasure of Bandcamp is buying downloads of cassettes and putting them on my phone. A phone is shaped exactly like a cassette, and the sound I expect out of it is no better than I expect out of a cassette. I feel it’s like a perfect marriage of analog/digital to me. I just love it. Also, my cassette deck broke, and the price I got quoted for repairing it was like, “No, I’m done. I’m just going to listen to cassettes on my phone. I’m happy with it.”

Originally posted on PITCHFORK.COM