John Vanderslice Quotes
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One day, digital will be it. Analog will just be another oddity, and that's fine, too. I have no great misgivings about it, but there will always be something to analog. It's the smell of the tape and all that visceral, physical stuff.
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There is definitely a nostalgia, and I am very sentimental, so I don't begrudge people for having sentimental feelings towards vinyl.
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I'm a collector, a tinkerer, and a tweaker, like a lot of people, and recording equipment is really easy to fetishize.
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If you'd asked me what I'd wanted to do five years ago, I'd have told you I wanted to be Viktor Vaughn or The Game - I would want to be a rapper with an eight ball of coke in my pocket and a wad of hundreds. Because that kind of freedom - well, perceived freedom - is where I want to be.
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Caffeine gives me hope. Sometimes, when I brew my wicked strong Irish black tea just perfect, about halfway through the mug I feel a clear and overwhelming feeling of optimism. It didn't surprise me when a study a few years ago implied that suicide was much less likely among coffee and tea drinkers.
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The world is just going to continue to fragment, and that's a great thing.
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Analog was perfected over 70 years, though. Digital will one day be fantastic. I'm sure of it.
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Ultimately, the question, "does it really matter?" is a question of humanity. If you're into the pursuit of fidelity, it's a really interesting question. Personally, I don't think digital sounds good, but that's just my own feeling.
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Usually I'm trying to get away from my discography. I don't think I could tear down everything I've done, the structures I've created - you know, like what Miles Davis did eight times in a row, which was destroy every kind of crutch or system he had for making music. That's very, very difficult. When I reflect on my catalog, I'm very proud of it, and I love it, but what I want to do now is completely different. When I don't do something different, I feel like I'm cheating - consciously or unconsciously stealing from myself.
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Making love to robots will probably be great one day. It's just not a viable option right now.
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When I tour with a band, things get more unconscious and more automatic as the tour goes on. Music has to be like natural speech. It's probably like learning a foreign language. Thinking about the use of pronouns is not the passionate part of communicating with people.
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In fact, it's in my interest to love digital recording, and I just spent a ton on a new digital recording system, so I speak from a place of heavy investment in both sides.
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To make a live record - something that has a lot of life in it - is difficult. After slaving away for years in the studio, when I hear a No Age record or when I hear Yeah Yeah Yeahs' first EP or when I hear DRI or really early punk stuff, it's just so powerful, so raw - and I know how hard that is to create. It's very deceptive. It's like a Dardenne brothers film - it seems like just a handheld camera following some people around in a trailer park, but it's incredibly difficult to do that.
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The funny thing is that even engineers and techs don't know what a tiny telephone connector is - people call them TT connectors. Engineers used to come by all the time and say, "Why are you called Tiny Telephone?"
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Bands will always need studios. The more people there are recording at home, the more people there will be who are going to need a studio.
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I wish I could go out farther from my musical history. I didn't realize how hard it was until I tried to do it. All the basic tracks on Romanian Names were done in my basement, alone, without any of the self-consciousness that comes with being in the studio. It was a completely different process. And those two things definitely made the record sound different. But you want this quantum leap from record to record, and maybe if I did make a quantum leap I'd make an unlistenable album. So maybe I'm lucky that I can't pull it off.
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One thing that has happened is a revolution in digital consumer recording, and overall, that's a great thing for art, but parallel to that there's been a revolution in boutique audio companies making excellent gear.
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There's nothing like space and the ability to make unlimited amounts of noise at any time, especially in San Francisco.
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I like vinyl because it's not quite random access. You have to pick up the needle, flip the record. I do think that an 18-20 minute block of music is sacred, and I can see why it's catching on. I really don't know if it will stay, but it's such a bizarre world, I think it's possible.
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I was living in Gainesville, Florida, and our babysitter brought over the soundtrack to The Who's "Tommy" - not the actual record "Tommy", but the soundtrack to the movie with Elton John and Aretha Franklin. I remember hearing it for the first time and it was so confusing. It was like waves and waves of unknowable and indescribable sound coming out of the stereo.
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As a studio, you have to have a niche. You have to provide a service and there has to be a reason for your being around.
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