The New Analog: Listening and Reconnecting in a Digital World

Having made his name in the late 1980s as a founding member of the indie band Galaxie 500, Damon Krukowski has watched cultural life lurch from analog to digital. As an artist who has weathered the transition, he has challenging, urgent questions for both creators and consumers about what we have thrown away in the shift to a digital society: Are our new streaming services undermining our ability to incubate new talent? Are our digital devices turning us into zombies who are lost in our own headspace even as they put whole catalogues at our fingertips? When we can speak to anyone, anywhere, can there be such a thing as an intimate digital conversation?

Rather than rejecting the digital disruption of cultural life, however, Krukowski wants to reexamine what we have lost as a technological culture, looking carefully at what was so valuable in the analog realm so we don’t destroy it. Using a series of processes from the recording studio that have changed since the analog era—headspace, proximity effect, real time, noise, and distortion—as a basis for a broader exploration of contemporary culture, Krukowski gives us a brilliant meditation and guide to keeping our heads amid the digital flux, for plugging in without tuning out.