It was illuminating to read an article about the first blues recordings, drowned in hiss, and the tendency, on the contrary, of the triumphant rock, to eliminate the sound imperfections and the very sound traces of the recording (such as hiss, therefore) in favor of an illusion of real presence of the musicians during the listening. If we place these two things on a line to make a paradigm of them, there is nowadays a phenomenon still external to this paradigm, and which is an additional devolution: it is the export.

We have moved, imperceptibly, from recorded music to exported music, for pieces that come directly out of VST and a DAW, to a WAV file, regardless of their musical genre.

This is not necessarily the best calculation from a technical point of view, but from a moral point of view one can support the idea that it is necessary to record what one has done, strictly speaking, instead of simply exporting it. Each technical choice carries its own "ethic".

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I think I'll use my Grundig tape recorder to record my next little pieces. It's so simple, so straightforward; it has the added advantage of being absolutely and authentically lo-fi from a sonic point of view, but that's not even the primary reason.

Even in digital on a multitrack, the mere fact of playing one's music from the PC or an instrument and recording it, in real time, on a medium, is something else than exporting – even if the difference is null from a technical point of view it is real psychologically. Recording = performance, export = simple calculation.

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It's funny that I bought back the exact same tape recorder I had as a child, after finding its brand and reference in an electronics store. And that Xavier buys back by chance exactly the 4-track I had (Yamaha Mt-400). I sometimes think that these are signs that we didn't complete our mission twenty years ago.