" What is important, Richards declares, is “being able to replay something immediately without all that terrible stricture of written music, the prison of those bars, those five lines. Before 1900, you’ve got Mozart, Beethoven, Bach, Chopin, the cancan. With recording, it was emancipation for the people. “It surely can’t be any coincidence that jazz and the blues started to take over the world the minute recording started, within a few years, just like that.” (...) “I’d discovered a new sound I could get out of acoustic guitar,” he writes. “That grinding dirty sound came out of these crummy little motels where the only thing you had to record with was this new invention called the cassette recorder....Suddenly you had a very mini studio. Playing acoustic, you'd overload the Philips cassette player to the point of distortion so that when it played back it was effectively an electric guitar. You were using the cassette player as pick up and amplifier at the same time. We were forcing acoustic guitars through a cassette player, and what came out the other end was electric as hell.” "

Why do I blog this? An inspiring quote from a practitioner (!), to be re-used in my course about the evolution of technical objects. It leads to an interesting discussion about how to go beyond technological determinism.