Claire from the band Yacht sends us their newest project, Where Does This Disco?: "Among other things, it's a clear unplayable CD (without foil) containing our entire musical catalogue. It's also a microsite built to explain what it's like to be a band trying to design and sell physical media in an age where compact discs are both obsolete and still somehow ubiquitous."
On our 2014 "Where Does This Disco?" tour, we made fans believe that the "Where Does This Disco" CD package, which we produced in an edition of 500, was the only medium in which the songs could be experienced. Of course, this was ultimately a losing battle, but the game is in the experience: so we created a run of carbonless copy non-disclosure agreements, which demanded that merch-buying concert attendees promise, under penalty of law, to "keep a secret" before they could purchase the CD itself. The effect was completed by a dummy CCTV camera and signs, pasted all around the venue, expressing that a secret was being disseminated on the premises and that attendees' presence bound them to a legal agreement to share in the keeping of this secret.
Admittedly, this is an extreme (and largely symbolic) way of countering the growing obsolescence of physical media in our industry. But the question which became interesting to us, over the course of this project, was: could we use this song, and its accompanying multimedia treatment, to suggest pre-emptive nostalgia for the compact disc? And by suggesting this nostalgia, could we modify people's perceptions of where these objects—and their makers—live in the continuum of technological history?
Thing is, we have a lot in common with the compact disc. After all, where does our music live? Does it live in an encoded file of a song, or in the performance of those songs in a live setting? Perhaps it's somewhere else, in between, in the ineffable space where "music," as an idea, exists. In any case, we're just a couple of physical containers that serve to transmit ideas from creator to consumer, from cloud to cloud. As artists and as people, we're no more future-proof than a foil-plated plastic disc.
YACHT — Where Does This Disco?
(Thanks, Claire!)
