The Same Argument

Cameras. Turntables. Synthesizers. Microphones. For thirty years at least, we’ve been fighting the same fight—digital or analog, and both sides convinced they’re right. Photography went digital and never looked back, except the people who insisted film would never die turned out to be right about something. Music production is mostly software now, but you still hear about the warmth of analog tape like it’s a myth you have to protect.

I’ve worked across both enough to know there’s no honest answer. Digital is precise and reproducible and sometimes soulless. Analog is full of character and also full of limitations you don’t miss when you’re not fighting them anymore. The real answer—which nobody wants to hear—is that they’re different and you pick one based on what you’re trying to do, not based on ideology.

When a party in Berlin leaned into this whole tension as its theme, called it Mix Fusion, got DJs like Columbus, Greg Wilson, and xXxXx in the room—people who actually live inside this problem and figured out their own answer—it was interesting not because it settled anything but because it refused to. The event itself became the point. You show up, the music plays, some of it comes from machines and some of it came from older machines that worked differently, and none of it matters the moment you feel it move you.

I think about the work I do. Sketch by hand first, always. Then straight into software. I can’t pick a side either. The sketch has something the software kills; the software can do things the sketch never could. I’m not interested in the purity argument anymore. Just the work.