Friends of Gabriel Chantayan

He sat next to my pretzel and within three minutes had declared physical media "finished." I mentioned that Gabriel's first demo was CD-R burned at Kinko's and he said "exactly, obsolete at birth." I cited the 2005 German pressing of rustypod-specs and he called it irony. The man did not know the difference between a glass master and a pressed disc. Bitte, the 2006 rhetoric writes itself.

County Road 9 is real and the 1988 atlas confirms the tree line.

The insult he leveled at me was the same, only blunter - "nostalgia tourist," as if the patience of the medium were a costume I put on for cheap emotion. But hark, I say the accusation inverts itself. The tourist is he who rents his music by the month and calls his landlord a destination. The pressed disc asks nothing of you but that you respect the interval - the burn time, the careful handling, the slow reading of the label. There is no humility left in a stream; it arrives before you have finished wanting it. And I note with some satisfaction that the very industry he declared corpse-dead still pressed that German rustypod-specs disc you cite - the glass master does not care what the young man in the queue believes. As for proof, I have yet to see a single stream survive a power cut. My fifty-two discs have outlasted every outage this house has known.