Damon Krukowski

What John Berger did to ways of seeing, well-known indie musician Damon Krukowski does to ways of listening in this lively guide to the transition from analog to digital culture 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. And 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? Rather than rejecting the digital disruption of cultural life, however, Krukowski wants instead to reexamine what we have lost as a technological culture, looking carefully at what was valuable in the analog realm so we can hold onto 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, and for plugging in without tuning out.

Listening and Reconnecting in a Digital World

The New Analog

A writer-musician examines how the switch from analog to digital audio is changing our perceptions of time, space, love, money, and power. Our voices carry farther than ever before, thanks to digital media. But how are they being heard? In this book, Damon Krukowski examines how the switch from analog to digital audio is changing our perceptions of time, space, love, money, and power. In Ways of Hearing—modeled on Ways ofSeeing, John Berger's influential 1972 book on visual culture—Krukowski offers readers a set of tools for critical listening in the digital age. Just as Waysof Seeing began as a BBC television series, Ways of Hearing is based on a six-part podcast produced for the groundbreaking public radio podcast network Radiotopia. Inventive uses of text and design help bring the message beyond the range of earbuds. Each chapter of Ways of Hearing explores a different aspect of listening in the digital age: time, space, love, money, and power. Digital time, for example, is designed for machines. When we trade broadcast for podcast, or analog for digital in the recording studio, we give up the opportunity to perceive time together through our media. On the street, we experience public space privately, as our headphones allow us to avoid “ear contact” with the city. Heard on a cell phone, our loved ones' voices are compressed, stripped of context by digital technology. Music has been dematerialized, no longer an object to be bought and sold. With recommendation algorithms and playlists, digital corporations have created a media universe that adapts to us, eliminating the pleasures of brick-and-mortar browsing. Krukowski lays out a choice: do we want a world enriched by the messiness of noise, or one that strives toward the purity of signal only?

Ways of Hearing

Poetry. Illustrated with photographs by Naomi Yang. AFTERIMAGE is the testimonial of a survivor's son. A hybrid work—part treatise, part memoir, part lyric—the text thinks through a problem prompted by confusions between the author's imagination and his father's history: "Do we only tell each other's stories? Ask others to tell our own? Can we tell our own? Or is that what stories are for—to tell someone else's, and allow another to tell yours?"

Damon Krukowski

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