The Observer And The Observed

Part of the Uncertainty Principle in Physics (yes, I hear "blah, blah, blah..." after the word Physics now too, even after 6 years of UCLA science courses, but stay with me) says that whenever a subject observes an object, the act of observing changes the object, making the observation always slightly different than the reality a moment before. In a way, listening to vinyl is like that: each time an album is played, the record is worn a bit. I know it's very slight, but sometimes I hesitate to play albums because of it. That's one reason why I'm so thrilled to be able to archive my records with the iRecord.

Some of my records were recorded from "reference discs", not master recordings, so they already bear the artifacts of repeated play. That was the case with the third album I recorded, "Strawberry Fields Forever" by The Beatles, another fan club release. It's got some great rare stuff on it, but the recording noise and extremely short track breaks led to both sides being recorded as one long track each. Oh well, so I got to try out Audacity, a free audio file editting program, to split the tracks. It worked like it was supposed to, even though it took awhile to load in the original uncut file. So, I think I can use the iRecord succesfully for all my records! I could've tried increasing the silence sensitivity setting to split the tracks, but I didn't want to have to play the whole record again. There already was a small skip from when I bought it. So, woohoo!

Oh, yeah, art...

I painted Stevie Ray Vaughan for Wild About Music in addition to the Dylan in my previous post. Today I'm going to frame, box and send those. Next I'm painting The Flaming Lips. The record is a dark, clear, red vinyl. This is the first time I'm using colored and clear vinyl. I'll see how it looks. I might end up spraying the backside with black to make the portraits show up more if the album cover is too distracting behind it. Or I could just create a backing out of black construction paper... I'll show ya both ways before deciding.

Peace.