I've played music, toured, and put out records for the past fifteen years. Last week, I received a copy of my own band's new LP in the mail, something that is always a delight and has lost none of its novelty over the years. But this time around, there was a crucial difference: this was not a vinyl release, it was a vinyl reissue, its reprint date falling approximately 13 years after the record's initial pressing. The album artwork had been cleaned up, new photos had been added, the vinyl was a brilliant electric blue, the package included a free digital download of the album, and it felt like getting my first record in the mail all over again - which, in a very literal sense, it was.

In 2012, it's easy to think of music as a purely digital phenomenon; the audio equivalent of a PDF, a file that can be sent and received quickly with minimal degradation, working well enough on various devices, possessing compression rates that are adequate if not ideal. Like the printed word, music is all too frequently reduced to something that sleeps, genie-like, on a hard drive or digital cloud until summoned with a few idle clicks. When the aforementioned record first came out in 1999, vinyl was a secondary, subservient format: CDs were bought and sold by the case, while LPs were just for collectors, generally sold in ones and twos. By 2012, the digital/analog poles had moved even further apart: now, because the reissue came with a free download, a CD wasn't even necessary, and LPs had received a strange, posthumous promotion from secondary format to only format.

In addition to being a musician, I'm also a letterpress printer. From a purely industrial perspective, vinyl records and letterpress printing have rise/fall/rise histories that follow similar timelines: to put it in flatly economic terms, both were once-massive industrial processes rendered almost entirely obsolete as they were replaced by late-20th century digital technologies. But in the early years of the 21st century, both have experienced a small but steady resurgence, particularly among younger generations. Even if this hasn't exactly happened at a level that would ruffle the respective music and print industries, it's nonetheless enough to have assisted not just in the survival, but in some particularly hip/hipster areas (Oakland/SF, Portland, Brooklyn, and as of recently, apparently the entire South), an increase in the number of independent music stores and print shops.

I'm not a luddite and I'm certainly not an analog purist. I have an intimate understanding of the ways in which analog music and print cultures are dependent on digital means for their production and propagation. But I also believe that the sound of a vinyl record and the feel of handmade prints are beautiful and irreplaceable things, and should not be filed away in dead archives, but kept alive, and made new in a way that fully embraces modernity, an ongoing flow in the shadows of the digital peaks far above.

--John Peck