You can spend a while digging through Auris Apothecary and find yourself constantly amused at the creativity (if not insanity) in what they’re selling. They are a micro-label who sell limited edition records in very elaborate packaging, to the point where the packaging is the product. Release AAX-007, for example, is an “unspooled ¼” reel tape” packaged in “recycled brown-paper grocery bag scroll with silver silk-screened skeleton print”. Release AAX-012 is “Black opium-scented cassette with vertically-aligned full color artwork labelling, housed inside of a black/clear hardshell norelco case with high-resolution, full color plotter-printed artwork. Serial information printed on white adhesive paper with hand-stamped numbering in sky blue ink”. But the most interesting one is AAX-013, which consists of “a maelstrom of wood, glass and metal mastered through the process of octillion grains of sand malevolently grinding across tape-heads, producing an immediate and relentless destruction of the listener’s equipment, eardrums and rational thinking”. In other words, a tape full of sand that completely wrecks the tape player you choose to use to “listen” to “it”. In terms of noise, this seems less like a surreal and offensive gimmick and more like the only logical extension of the music.

The nice thing about these recordings is they’re not expensive; most of the tapes are around six dollars; only the unspooled tape gets pricey at twenty-five, though with the amount of effort the idea took, it’s probably a fair price.

I find the whole idea of people returning to outdated forms of media distribution as response to modern advances to be fascinating. The whole vinyl movement is similar, though that’s already well-established and it’s hardly controversial for people to buy LPs. I’m amused by that, since the impression I get from my parents and other older people is that vinyl was horrible and unwieldy, and they never looked back after cassettes and especially CDs.

Digital has changed things because, within it, music is nothing. There is no physicality to it, no ownership. Digital songs files are worthless. You can download them, delete them, download them again, delete them again, and so on with no particular effect. I’ve ‘lost’ my digital music collection a few times already, and it never really feels like a loss. I can simply recover what I want and let the rest be lost to time. Often I lose memory of what the artist or album was even called, and even if I do remember, sometimes they are so obscure as to be unretrievable.

On the other hand, I can open my closet and find a battered (probably unplayable) copy of To The Faithful Departed, a copy that’s survived a few moves, has had plenty of time to disappear, and yet stays there, resillient. I can sit down and listen to these songs, which I haven’t really paid much attention to since around 1997, but they are not lost to me, and neither is the object itself. I’m not sure if it was my first CD; probably. It doesn’t have a booklet, but some sort of giant poster that you open up. The cover shows the band in a yellow room, but if you open the whole poster up the yellow room is in the middle of a forest. I would have to open this thing to get a peak at the lyrics, since my english listening wasn’t good enough to understand them properly.

There used to be an effort associated with finding music. Not that there isn’t anymore, but it’s considerably simpler. As a child, you didn’t really have disposable income. You didn’t really have access to many record stores. You didn’t really have options. You had to navigate through racks of shit records and see if something decent had been imported. If you had access to music communities, it wasn’t necessarily easy to enter them. Your ten-year-old self had to ask some quasi-cool record store clerk if he could get you a copy of X album, which no matter the album, was likely out of your league. The music itself could be less than great, but the process had a certain excitement.

With real independent music, these are real problems, issues that arise from the way the scenes work/worked. You have kids starting record labels run out of their bedroom, bands that barely lasted a few months releasing recordings done in 24 hours in someone’s basement, budgets that could allow a tour with incredible difficulty. These type of things became a badge of honor, partly because they merit some praise, partly because when you’re in shit conditions, you may as well convince yourself they’re actually good. The whole thing becomes a dare. You, as a listener, are dared to seek these bands, they are not going to be fed to you or come to you, you have to put some effort into getting involved, and then it becomes a little club.

Now, you may argue that  insular music communities have their problems, but is it worse than no community? I would think not, for as much as music itself is meaningful, everything that surrounds it has its own worth too. Your memories of music are often the memory of who you were listening with, who introduced you to, who you went to a concert with. You may also argue that these increasingly gimmicky tapes, or floppy discs, or whatever delivery method is used, don’t really build any meaningful sense of discovery or inclusion. But what I’d say is, in 5 years, you could find one of those hidden in a box you left on your basement, and even if you might not be able to play it immediately, it will bring back memories.

So I guess the question is, what will music communities and the industry evolve into? There is a spirit against simple digital consumption, so what shape will it take? Is it an actual phenomenon, or is it just the nostalgia of a bunch of twentysomethings who managed to buy CDs and tapes before the whole thing collapsed? It could just be that I’m getting old.