created, & modified, =this.modified
tags:y2025decayaginganalogconcept
rel: Giving Up Bug on Sensor
NOTE
Sorting out thoughts on what I’ll temporary call “de-glamour”.
Glamour in the original sense of the word was a spell, which turned into a bit of enchantment which affected the appearance of the affected. Now we have an alternative common use of “glamorous.”
In this sense I’ll use the de-glamour as a type of artifice that superficially decays the wearer.
Texture and atmosphere are such a critical part of the musical sounds I love.
I was making a track and I looked at my effects chain and it was ran through this decay sequence: the reverb with the impulse response of a cathedral, being recorded to wobbly tape etc. In reality, my music workspace is reasonably modern and fully digital. I’m using a fully updated DAW, a modern synth and tons of other tech that wouldn’t exist even a few months ago.
With this in my mind was this group watch that I did with a few friends. We watched “Borderlands,” which was predictably horrible (this was done in a kind of “share the pain” watch with the hopes that jokes arise that augment it.)
What I noticed was the artificiality of the wear in the film. Everything was made to appear to have been worn, as expected on an outlaw planet, but it felt like a sticker or de-glamour. Even physically, scars on the flesh of the protagonists were false. But they were also aestheticized. The cuts were the result of aesthetics and not the seeking, cruel slashes of an actual blade.
Contrast this to the canonical example authentically weathered set design in Lord of the Rings. The Shire, though seeded as an artificial set, grew as result of deliberate weathering prior to filming. Beyond set design, relating to costuming, Viggo Mortensen where he adventured around NZ with his fantastical gear to get into the role and feel authentically weatherworn.
But in this sense what is authentic? The Shire itself was a fantastical place, but it was the result of a human mind that lived on earth. There are a number of elements in history of the Shire which point to direct translation to Tolkien’s England (the movement of the people, the original tribes, the geography and key historical details). I’m not a Tolkien expert but as an outsider, in some sense the Shire itself began as an analog for England.