Digital technology’s quickness and convenience ought to have buried its analogue counterparts. Yet vinyl records and film photography endure. Why do people continue to use it?
I finally locate the legendary Schneiders Buero, a shop selling analogue synthesizers in Berlin’s Kotti neighbourhood. Up two flights of stairs, the music machinery on offer includes brands such as Moog and Buchla, as well as modern euro-racks. Each set-up contains headphones and boxes of patch cables. There are no instructions and the machines, while alluring, are also somewhat imposing. (From Michael’s fieldnotes)
As academics who rarely go a day without playing or making music, we have spent the past decade examining the extraordinary revival of analogue technology. From vinyl records to film cameras, all manner of apparently written-off technologies have been making a comeback, including modular synthesizers – one of the earliest types of this now-ubiquitous electronic instrument.
In the UK, some six million vinyl LPs were bought in 2023, an 11.7% rise on the previous year’s sales and the 16th straight year of increase. The vinyl revival is also fuelling a resurgence of independent record shops, with UK high streets now having a third more (around 461 stores) than a decade ago.
Certainly,
the stereotype of vinyl listeners being older men no longer holds water. Taylor Swift now accounts for one in every 15 vinyl albums sold in the US – and was a reason for some of the Record Store Day queues in the UK in 2023. Contemporary musicians such as Lana Del Ray, Tyler, The Creator, Olivia Rodrigo and Kendrick Lamar also out-vinyl the likes of Metallica, who themselves sell so much of their music on vinyl that they bought their own vinyl pressing plant to ensure supply.
Such has been the revival in analogue synthesizers that venerable brands including Korg and Moog have relaunched lower-priced modules aimed at novices, while also reviving older classics for the pros. This means there are now more analogue options available than at any time since the 1970s, the heyday of the modular format.
Synthesizer-based music events by new brands such as Teenage Engineering are packed with young and middle-aged enthusiasts eager to play with Kraftwerk-inspired pocket calculator synths that can produce a surprising array of sounds.