So two things, reiterated for emphasis: your hack right here is not a musician, and not a gear head. When musician friends or various other similarly-bent nerds start drooling on about picking techniques or ProTools patches or Lansky’s composition techniques, he kind of yawns a little and wonders what’s on the Discovery Channel. Maybe the indifference is born from technical ignorance, perhaps it’s the other way around. And yes, I listen to, and appreciate, lots of technical-minded arcana and sundry geekery, but despite my long-winded rationalizations, my honest reactions pretty much begin and end with “ooooh, shiny.” Same goes—secretly, I suspect—for the real geeks.

It’s sensible that musicians or wanna-be musicians would focus on the technical aspects of playing; there will always be your Zappas and Malmsteens and Trey “Duuuude” Anastasios, as there will always be Guitar Center employees to fawn over them. But the nerds for electronics, and analog electronics in particular, are a whole different breed from most other instrument nerds. The obsession isn’t with manual dexterity or even, often, structural concerns, but the actual qualities of individual sounds; and, more pertinently the obsession revolves around objects that, unlike, say, a Stratocaster, many of them will never even see, let alone use. Case in point: when Kid A came out, I had a friend and fellow ‘Head head—he’s probably reading this, so, like, ’sup, and he’ll remain anonymous—who really intensely focused on the Ondes-Martinot used by Johnny Greenwood. I don’t know if he’d ever heard of it before, but by the time the record dropped, he was all about it, and could even explain how to play it (accurately, I think). Thing is, there’s only maybe two of them in the world, and only three people who can actually play it. Once upon a time, after it was invented by an acolyte of Leon Termen, it was a preeminent electronic instrument—composers like Varese and Messiaen composed for it. But by 2000, it was an obsessive’s rarity, just waiting for the right person to use it and send word to all the nerds. And when, at a Radiohead show, I asked my friend which of the huge pile of ancient electronic equipment was the Ondes, and he pointed the keyboard with the ring-on-a-string on it. “God, that’s so awesome,” he said.

Today’s analog nerds might have nothing to nerd out to if it weren’t for Richard D. James. Now, of course, he’s all digital and who cares, but when he started (and again most recently on his Analord discs), he was building his own analog gear because the freely available stuff just didn’t suit his needs. So not only were his early AFX tracks a shock to the system for ravers, but the deep tones and skittery beats got the nerds in a big old tizzy. This was obviously a guy who not only wanted to move the sound of a distinct genre forward, but sound in general, and if he didn’t do it immediately, he certainly did it eventually. Eventually he founded a label, Rephlex, on this sound, and released a compilation of tracks from a few composers from the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. It was founded in the late-’50s to supply experimental music both as interstitial or background music, but also for sound effects and discreet “sound-poems” to be aired in their own show, as a kind of technical demo-slash-lab experiment. This early stuff is acknowledged as a great early influence on James, and it shows. One composer in particular, Delia Darbyshire, immediately thought to tie these strange new sounds to the oldest melodies there are, and the push-pull of the alien and the traditional is still quite powerful. Around that same time, in Red Russia, inventor Eugeniy Murzhin developed the ANS synthesizer, which made music out of diagrams on a glass plate and photo-optic generators. There’s only one in the world, still alive and skree-ing in Moscow, and composers from all over have been invited to work on it. Sometime in the ’70s, Edward Artemiev, best known for his film scores for Tarkovsky, showed up to draw something on a screen and it sounds just like something from Stalker, only darker and weirder, and therefore better.

So now digital production has opened up a whole new world for composers. Literally, anything is possible. But perhaps that’s part of the appeal for the old-schoolers. If anything is possible, then nothing matters, and there’s a certain point, as digital producers just take individual parts of their music—the rhythms, the tonalities—ever farther and farther into unlistenable realms, you could be excused for wondering what the point of all that might be. But these enormous, unwieldy old machines come with built-in rules; they’ll only make so many sounds, but those sounds are as perfect as they will be. No tinkering with them, so, one assumes, that art can just be made without all the worry about imperfect or infinitely malleable materials.

It might also just be simple nostalgia for the imagery of a supposedly better time. But my guess is way cooler.

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