Using wood instead of vinyl for a record
Hear what a wooden record sounds like: http://io9.com/what-does-a-record-made-out-of-wood-sound-like-501974403
Radu Lupu and artificial scarcity
A nice New Yorker post on pianist Radu Lupu that contains this gem, an example of a deliberate aesthetic/political choice not to record (which naturally drives up the value of seeing him perform in person):
There’s another facet to the excitement of a Lupu concert: he no longer records. You know that when you hear him play, you will never hear the piece like this again, especially as Lupu, of late, seems to play a lot of repertoire that he has never recorded—Janáček, Debussy, Franck.
He [Godard] understood that the modernism of the cinema was based in the archeology of its history—and that devotion to the history of the cinema was a blend of passive rapture and actively audacious manipulation. One of his great insights—dating from the nineteen-seventies—is that home video would be the basis for a newly analytical understanding of film history, because it would allow for the easy copying of clips and their manipulation via video editing with such techniques as slow motion, freeze-frame, and superimpositions of other images and text); he made the work, “Histoire(s) du Cinéma,” that proved the point. Every video essay that turns up online owes him a debt of gratitude.
Glenn Gould orchestrates a soundscape within a take. Wonderful vision of the recording process at work, providing the listener with a sense of some of the aspects they never realize are ever-present in today’s recordings (if one thinks of microphones like ears, Gould slowly adds and changes several ears to completely shift the soundscape within this piece).
Mr. Friedlander’s aesthetic is a reminder of something that is often misunderstood: Live stand-up is its own form, as distinct from televised stand-up as a play is from its film adaptation. Crowd work is only the most obvious difference. Live comedy has an energy, tension and charisma that simply cannot be reproduced.
