Nostalgia

When I was a nerdy teenager (as opposed to a nerdy adult), I spent far too much time listening to shortwave radio. Pre-internet, to hear distant radio stations, ...

Low-fi is code for "nostalgia", which itself is code for "alternative futures" - in other words - longing or wishing that things were different - and perhaps better. It's possible to create some of the most powerful feelings of nostalgia by selectively and carefully adding imperfections. Before the wall came down, I took the camera with me as a student to Berlin and shot black and white photos of my friends in front of famous landmarks, which I then printed with the enlarger. Playing a piano through a wonky cassette tape simulator perhaps makes us think of the sixties or seventies (I apologise to any readers younger than 45!), and adding EQ to give a "mellow" sound makes us think of old radios. Does the nostalgia come from the content of the scene? What I find fascinating is that the experience of nostalgia is most readily evoked with the simplest of techniques. I wrote in this article that what we think is the intrinsic quality of a vinyl recording is, in reality, just an "effect" that can be perfectly reproduced digitally. Taken in context, some of the photos I shot with my now 18-year-old Canon EOS 300D - a 5-megapixel DSLR - were remarkably good (technically, if not artistically). In fact, there's more to it than that, as we'll see in a minute. As the size of the earth-to-sky hops changes, you get interference between them, causing a "phasing" sound familiar to guitarists and Fender Rhodes players from their effects pedals. Radio doesn't bend around the globe's surface, but signals bounce between the ground and the electrically charged ionosphere at the right frequencies in a gigantic series of zig-zags. When I was a nerdy teenager (as opposed to a nerdy adult), I spent far too much time listening to shortwave radio.