Review by New York Times Review
If you're a devoted music fan who's dubious about both rosy nostalgia and futuristic utopianism, Damon Krukowski's "The New Analog" is for you. Krukowski, a founding member of the short-lived but influential indie-rock band Galaxie 500, takes us from headphones to stadium amps to address what we've gained and lost in the move to a primarily digital world. He writes that he sees widespread digital disruption as "an opportunity to rethink the analog/digital divide and reexamine what we've discarded - not in order to clean it up and put it back to use exactly as it was, but to understand what was thrown away that we still need."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [May 5, 2017]
Review by Booklist Review
Musician and poet Krukowski, a founding member of indie rock band Galaxie 500 and now part of folk-rock duo Damon & Naomi, is a frequent contributor to Artforum, frieze, Pitchfork, and The Wire. Here, he writes about technological transitions from analog to digital devices and what is lost for creators and consumers in this process. Krukowski explores the analog/digital divide and emphasizes the important role that analog can play in this turbulent digital era. From telephones to Napster to the iPod to Pandora, Krukowski covers the history of the devices that have generated audio, music, and noise and how these products have changed cultural communications and receptions of sound in society. Readers who are interested in the history of technology, acoustics, and sound, and how digitization affects audio and music will be engaged by Krukowski's nostalgic, quick-reading, persuasive work, as he touches on the changing process of our consumption of music in the digital age.--Pun, Raymond Copyright 2017 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Wry exploration of the social meanings behind vintage and modern audio technologies.Krukowski, a founding member of Galaxie 500 and recipient of fellowships from the Creative Capital/Andy Warhol Foundation and Harvard University's Berkman-Klein Center for Internet and Society, comfortably discusses both rarefied aesthetic theories and gritty rocker realities. Arguing that the promise of constant digital progress as represented by Moore's law has promoted acceptance of mediocrity, he notes, "you needn't be an audiophile snob to conclude that today's MP3 downloads, or their streaming counterparts, sound worse than 1965's LPsMP3s are designed to sound worse." The book is less a study of older formats' current popularity and more a survey of the struggles between permanence and ephemera, as well as artists' visions and the consumer marketplace, playing out over decades of technological and industry changes. Krukowski turns the basic dichotomy of audio engineering, the ratio of signal to noise, into a complex metaphor for the loss of history and ingenuity represented by the replacement of analog recording and culture with digital media. He makes this argument via a discursive, in-depth structure in seven chapters labeled after phenomena obsessed over by audiophiles. In "Headspace," he links so-called headphone records like Pink Floyd's "Dark Side of the Moon" (and our current plugged-in public lives) to the disdain initially directed toward stereo recording: "stereo limits the perfect place for listening to a space big enough for only one at a time." In "Proximity Effect," Krukowski considers the vanished world of POTS, or "plain old telephone service." By replacing a massive yet technologically simple network with smartphones, the nature of audible communication is changed, and "communicating distance itself becomes a challenge." Elsewhere, the author considers the unintended consequences of digital innovation, from the "loudness wars" in studio engineering to the controversies around downloading: "is music free? That simple question provoked by Napster still seems unanswered." Krukowski's writing is witty and generally accessible, though his detours into recording minutiae and avant-garde ideas about sound and art may lose some readers. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
